Summer 2011 Blog

by Sanjena Sathian

I left Ilam last week for a quick jaunt to India. This is the seventh time I’ve been to India. It’s the first time I’ve been alone in the country of my ancestry. Even though I planned just a week here, I was excited to set foot in this country by myself for the first time.

What would it look like, just over the Nepali border?— I wondered if it would seem strange to me after I’d spent time in a place that seems strangely similar, yet just a shade off. So much of Nepal was familiar to me from my time spent in India – the Nepali language is not far off from Hindi; the women wear the same clothes, and even the time zone difference is just 15 minutes – yet it was all completely different in many ways, with different traditions, customs, quirks, and a million other details you can only notice after fully immersing yourself into a place.

I sat in a hired car and eagerly looked out the window as we crossed over a small bridge that took us over the India border. We’d get to the border post and then I’d cross on foot. My heart rate was climbing. Entering India on foot! How romantic!

Darjeeling's architecture is characterized by old British colonial buildings and tea houses. (Sathian/TYG)

It was a little anticlimactic.

Everything just looked the same. I had no indication that I was in the India I grew up knowing… it might as well have still been Nepal. We’d crossed from the Nepali terai, the flat agricultural part of the country, into a flat agricultural part of West Bengal, in northeast India. There seemed to be more cows in the street on the Indian side. Or was I making that up? Even the men working at the immigration office looked more Nepali than Indian, with their Gurkha-Mongolite features, and upon a closer listen I realized they were speaking in about 70% Nepali and 30% Hindi.

My driver, an Indian man who lives on the Nepali side of the border and runs a border-crossing taxi service, gave me my only indication that we had come to a new country.

“These roads are very bad,” he complained.

I was startled, and looked again. They were flat, and paved. A few potholes and puddles were scattered around, but other than that the main problem with the roads seemed to be the cows. These were beautiful, delightful roads (and my rear end was very happy for them) that Nepal would have been happy to have. But in India, they were less than tolerable. And then I started looking a little more closely. Everything looked pretty much the same: the people, the greenery… but I was seeing things I hadn’t seen in Nepal. Bridges, everywhere, so many bridges! Steel bridges, industrially built bridges! As we began climbing back into the hills, I did a double take at the sight of power lines. So many power lines. Electricity, everywhere! And road signs, full of glorious English. Even the man sitting next to me in the jeep as we climbed up through the mountains – who told me he was from a “very remote” part of Darjeeling district – spoke to me in perfect English (finding an English speaker in a local jeep in Nepal happened zero out of the probably twenty times I took one).

And then as I climbed into Darjeeling itself, there were more differences. The mountainside itself seemed exactly the same as its twin in Nepal, but littered in the trees were tudor-style cottages, white and pastel colored colonial homes, the occasional church spire. This is, of course, the charm of Darjeeling: you can taste the exoticism of the eastern mountains from the comfort of your converted colonial mansion hotel. You can send your children to English-speaking Christian boarding schools here (one of which I accidentally wandered into, and found myself in a mist-drenched Hogwarts-style compound). And as you sit in a perfectly tended Sound of Music-style garden, sipping famous Darjeeling tea and looking out at the hillside, you might be struck by how much you feel like a colonizer.

Darjeeling wears a kind of cloak of remoteness and the exotic. It’s inaccessible, compared to many parts of India; to get here from Bombay, my friend had to take two flights and a jeep ride, or a flight, a train and a jeep. Travelers arrive here and smile at themselves for their hardiness. They have made it to the mountains, out of the rest of smog-covered, body-dense India. Café and hotel owners complain to me, the westerner, about the have-nots of this place; West Bengal had its problems with political unrest and, certainly, is nowhere near as rich as the foreigners who traipse through here with ease. But little things stand out to my eyes, still covered in the film of Nepal.

India, which I’d never have considered rich before, is comparatively so. Despite the trash heaps, the tin slum-roofs, the wonderfully cheap food all around Darjeeling district; and despite the fact that this Nepali-speaking, cool and misty tea-region seems nothing like the India of my family, it’s clear to me that I’m in a more privileged part of the world.
Nepal is proud of its legacy of having never been colonized. Not by the Mughals, not by the British. But the British legacy here is precisely what gives India an edge. They speak English. Foreigners can come here; locals can leave. And though Ilam is just over the border, it’s a long way in for tourists to make it.

On my way out of Nepal, I stopped in for some local hospitality at a friend’s family home, where I was asked, as usual, about my American citizenship, and what I knew about getting an American visa or green card. I had responded with my usual firmness that I could do nothing to help, and quickly changed the subject. Getting an American visa is a popular subject which Nepali people love to rant at me about. But once I’ve established that I have no connections to an embassy to help them, they begin anew, attacking my other country: “Well, we will just go to India, then.” For the latter, they do not need my help, but it offers a more attainable promise. A stronger currency, a more functioning government, English medium education, fewer blackouts, and… better roads.

The West, I realized as I crossed back into Nepal, has stopped being my barometer for measuring comfort and development. The longer I’ve spent here, the more my scale has turned into a sliding one. From outside, we can easily understand it all as “the developing world,” but from the inside, the measurement is not so simple.

by Eric Gresham:

The only constant company in my hostel is the owner’s 120-pound mastiff “Butch,” as winter is the slow season for travel in Puerto Varas, Chile.  But a couple weeks ago two college girls arrived for the weekend, taking a break from their summer non-profit work in Santiago, Chile.  Caroline, from Maryland, and Angela, who grew up in Colombia, were going hiking at the Volcano Osorno the next day, and I agreed to join.

Early the next morning, we boarded the bus, and I met Angela’s sister, Natalia, who was also in town.  Natalia, 25, has lived in Chile for a year now, first moving to Santiago after meeting a Chilean pop singer, Maria Colores.  After spending some time back home in Colombia, she decided she wanted to return to Chile to record a solo album, and has been working on that album ever since.  While Caroline, Angela, and I exchanged college stories on the otherwise empty bus, Natalia kept the driver company.

Soon after arriving and optimistic for adventure, we decided to follow a dried up riverbed as a trail. If only at this moment we knew what we were in for. (Gresham/TYG)

We had to endure three hours of thick Patagonian forest with nothing but our sense of direction as our guide when our improvised trail ended in a 50-ft drop —but we survived, and the experience helped form a friendship.  I made plans to meet them in Santiago, as a trip I was planning for my magazine would lead me there.  Staying at Nat and Ang’s apartment two weeks later, I learned that our romp in the riverbed was barely a tick on Nat’s register of adventures since graduating from the University of Illinois at Chicago in 2008.

A small, fair-skinned girl with an unassuming smile and glasses, always accompanied by her guitar, Nat credits her appearance as why she has never run into trouble adventuring around the world.  And she has had plenty of opportunity.

A year after graduating college, Natalia joined the organization No More Deaths, a group which aids immigrants crossing the Mexican-US border by placing water jugs in the Arizona desert.  But eager for a more visceral experience, she decided to try the traverse herself.  Joining a group of Mexican teenagers hitching rides on freight trains, Natalia successfully made the journey in two weeks.  This and other experiences have left her with enough stories to write three autobiographies, but she chooses to pen her thoughts and memories with voice and guitar rather than on paper.

The night I arrived Natalia was playing at the Restaurant Aymara, a bar close to her apartment, and I witnessed an artist in love with her craft.  As she crooned softly in Spanish and English, in appropriate moments revealing her powerful voice, the audience of the small bar slowly quieted.

Natalia’s voice and guitar filled the dimly lit restaurant. (Gresham/TYG)

In addition to playing songs off her upcoming album, she performed a duet with Christian Muamba, a political refugee from the Congo who recently moved to Chile. As Nat sang a refrain with Christian rapping and singing over in his native Congolese, I looked on in disbelief.  Half an hour before I had witnessed their first rehearsal in Nat’s apartment: after an exasperating 10 minutes of communicating in French, Spanish, and English, they had agreed they would just improvise their performance.

After the show, she thanked the crowd and came to our table, collapsing in a chair with a tired but satisfied smile on her face.  Congratulating her, I fought the urge to ask, “So what’s next? When do you think you’ll get signed?”  While telling me about her time in Mexico, she mentioned that she had never been sure when her next meal would be and she did not think more than five minutes ahead.  Currently, her life is more stable than living on a boxcar, but for the moment she is content finishing her album and working at Amnesty International, a non-profit initiative, and tutoring English to help pay the bills.  She is experiencing life, and happy to share it with anyone who stops by.  A beneficiary of her and her sister Angela’s generous hospitality, I count myself lucky to have crossed her path.  But I still can’t help but wonder where Natalia’s talents will lead her next.  I do not believe the walls of Santiago’s bars and clubs can contain her much longer.

For music videos and recordings, visit Natalia’s artist site:   http://natasongs.com/wp/music/ or her Facebook page, La Muna, at: https://www.facebook.com/natasongs

by Isabel Ortiz

Coming to Buenos Aires, I never fail to be surprised at how a country in economic collapse nevertheless prioritizes the arts, maintaining a flourishing permanent ballet company, orchestra and opera troupe. The celebrated Teatro Colon is lauded worldwide for its unrivalled acoustics and lavish construction and remains the pride of the Argentine arts scene. Built in the early 1900s by three different architects (the first two Francesco Tamburini and Vittorio Meano, both died in the process, the latter of old age and the former murdered by an angry ex-girlfriend, leaving the task of completion to Julio Dormal in 1908), the Colon was a love letter to the European opera houses of the Golden Age, a monument to all things elegant and luxurious.

Though the the theatre has undergone renovations, the quality of its performances has remained the same. (Ortiz/TYG)

As one of the city’s greatest treasures, the Colon has also been surrounded by its own political controversy within the city and national government. For the past four years the Colon was closed for a restoration, and the city government was heavily criticized for the preposterous delay of its renovation, which was meant to be completed in one year. In previous years, I remember seeing the Colon orchestra protesting by playing in the park outside while the sounds of drills and jackhammers rattled on. In events associated with the Colon, the orchestra refused to dress up, wearing t-shirts and jeans instead. It is said that the president of Argentina, Cristina Kirchner, refuses to come to the Colon in protest of the Buenos Aires city government’s policies. Governor Mauricio Macri finally accelerated construction last year, and it has now been returned to its prior state. I took a tour of the Colon a couple weeks back and it seemed more or less restored to its former glory, though little things like extraneous holes in the ceilings and slightly different shades of paint seemed to hint at a rushed reopening.

Despite a floundering economy, the Argentinean arts scene has flourished in the Teatro. (Ortiz/TYG)

However, despite the chaos surrounding the Colon’s reopening, my visits to it have proven that as far as the quality of the productions, nothing has changed. The Argentine people remain just as passionate about opera as they are about soccer, jumping out of balconies during incredible arias and not shy about expressing their distaste over the less compelling aspects of a performance. When I went to see Verdi’s Simon Boccanegra, the audience responded to lackluster stage direction by booing the set and costume designers when they came out for their final bows. During a particularly beautifully executed pirouette in the Colon Ballet’s production of The Sleeping Beauty, the crowd went wild, with one audience member screaming “Diosa!” (“Goddess!”) from the uppermost balcony in the back row. At every performance, the amount of people in cheap standing room seating is immense, indicating a greater interest in the arts among the middle/lower classes. This passion and fervor for artistic culture is manifest in the top dancers, singers and musicians that the country still manages to attract, no matter its economic struggles. Though the Colon has undergone its period of turmoil, it seems it might be headed back to its prime, with the support of a devoted public behind it.

by Isabel Ortiz

The Recoleta Cemetery, even on the sunniest days, has its own particular climate. One of the most famous cemeteries in the world, the icy beauty of its ornate graves and statues gives it its own air, an air steeped with the whisperings of a different time, the voices of a lost epoch. Though the graveyard has always been reserved exclusively for the burial of those wealthy enough to buy their own family plots, it still remains one of the more important representations of the particularities and quirks of Argentine culture as a whole.

The graves in the Recoleta Cemetary are each connected with a story. (Ortiz/TYG)

Political figure Evita Peron, one of the notable exceptions to the cemetery’s class-based exclusivity, lies in a corner of the graveyard, personal notes and heartfelt scrawlings tied to the bars and fresh flowers always scattered by her ardent admirers. Her grave holds special importance to the Argentine people not just because of her significance as a political icon, but for the presence of the cadaver itself. In the famous “Battle of the Cadaver,” Evita’s embalmed body was stolen by military dictators after the overthrow of President Juan Peron to discourage the support of the Peronist political movement. For 16 years her cadaver remained missing, and the public continued to demand its return, rallying and protesting for her corpse. After various shifts in power and movements of the body, General Aramburu finally negotiated the cadaver’s return. Brutally maimed and disfigured upon its return, it was nonetheless Evita’s body and was placed in its rightful place in the Recolata cemetery.

This macabre story demonstrates the Argentine public’s eternal fascination with the dead and the importance placed on bodies. Indeed, few tombs in the Recoleta Cemetery place the body underground, rather, the coffin is placed in full view through windows on the tomb’s doors, and air conditioning is often installed to preserve the cadavers just so that passerby can make sure that they’re there, safe, and well ventilated.

The Recoleta Cemetary is one of the most famous in the world. (Ortiz/TYG)

Stories of other tombs in the cemetery are no less colorful. For example, Rufina Cambaceres, buried in 1902, suffered from catalepsies, which caused her to faint for long periods of time. While her parents were on vacation she suffered a particularly long fainting spell and was declared dead, buried shortly after in her family plot. Legend has it that upon returning, her parents to see that the coffin had been shifted in the tomb, and upon ordering it opened saw scratches all along the inside, proving she’d been buried alive. Since that episode, city law now states that one must have been dead for at least 24 hours before being buried in the cemetery.

And of course, one of the most beautiful tombs is one of Liliana Crociati, daughter of celebrity hairdresser Joseph Crociati, who did my grandmother’s hair in the 60s and 70s. During her honeymoon in Switzerland, Liliana was swept away by an avalanche while skiing. Her father commissioned a hauntingly beautiful bronze statue of her with her dog, frozen in eternal youth with her long hair cascading down her back and her hand placed mid-pat on the dog’s head.

But the country’s enduring fascination with death extends beyond cemetery walls. With its tragic past  centering mainly around the famous Desaparecidos or the Disappeared, in which an estimated 13,000 political protesters were kidnapped without warning, placed in concentration camps and killed during the military dictatorship from 1976 to 1983, death remains a crucial political and social issue to this day, and the focus on cadavers, bodies, and burial is constantly in the public consciousness. Indeed, walking through Buenos Aires is sometimes not unlike strolling through a graveyard, for due to recent initiatives by social advocacy groups, tiles with names and dates now mark the places on each street where people were kidnapped, placed in trucks or airplanes never to be seen again. Opening the newspaper or turning on the news it’s common to hear about a new trial or recently uncovered evidence against military officials, and graffiti on the walls and sidewalks still call for the persecution of government officials or list the names of those still missing or the numbers of people unaccounted for.

Despite its heavy brick walls and iron gates keeping the dead firmly inside, the Recoleta Cemetery’s aura of death and memory extends beyond its walls, and the eternal fascination with the deceased remains a cornerstone of Argentine culture. In many ways, Buenos Aires’ dark political history keeps it caught between two worlds, a city where the dead are never forgotten and ghosts roam the streets.

by Anna Kellar:

“Oh, no! We’re in *gasp* *shudder * Eastern Europe.”

In the film Eurotrip, the heroes arrive, accidentally, in Bratislava. As the quote above indicates, the city is depicted as a dystopian wasteland of cement-block Soviet apartment buildings, a place so empoverished that the American tourists’ left-over chang can buy a 5-star dinner and a night of absinthe-fueled revelry. For many Americans, these stereotypes is all that they know about Slovakia, and Eastern Europe beyond Prague remains a blank.

I am interning for the summer for Transparency International Slovakia, an NGO that fights corruption in politics, business and the media. While I am living in Slovakia, I am trying to capture the real images of Bratislava and Eastern Europe – the communist kitch and the capitalist excesses, the traditional beauty and the Euro-hipster new arrivals.

Oil refineries on the outskirts of the city. Its true that you don’t have to go far to see the legacy of the old regime: concrete-block apartment buildings, creaking trams and giant highways that seem to go nowhere. But most of the smoke stacks have been banished to the outskirts of the city as property prices have soared in the center (Kellar/TYG)

3. Hapsburg-style elegance in the Old Town. The center city is another world entirely. Here you might as well be in Vienna, as tourists and locals stroll through the well-preserved streets, stopping at outdoor cafes and beer gardens that start to get busy early in the afternoon. (Kellar/TYG)

by Sanjena Sathian

Travelers, no matter who we are, relish independence. Traveling writers and journalists even more so. Our tales have a much greater dramatic effect when we return if we are solitary characters; our adventures seem magnified. It’s something inherent in Americanism – we prize the individual, the rugged explorer, the lone ranger.

As many bloggers have already pointed out this summer, myself included, this individualism is not so cherished in the east. It’s instead wondered at. “You’re here alone?” I’m always asked. “All by yourself?” And the look on the question asker’s face is not of awe but rather of confusion. What is the pleasure in being by oneself?

The view of the Ilam mountainside reminds me why I travel.

But the obvious truth, which anyone who travels knows, is that it’s impossible to be alone as a traveler. We fall into step with others along the way; other expats, locals, different versions of ourselves. Traveling is a careful dance with your surroundings, and being alone ironically pushes you even deeper into the arms of the place you are in.
Pico Iyer, a writer of Indian descent (like me) whose family moved abroad (like me) and who studied in America (like me), catalogued his travels through Asia in the 1980s, carefully noting the dance between East and West: “When Westerner meets Easterner, each finds himself often drawn to the other, yet mystified; each projects his designs; and each pursues both his illusions and his vested interest with a curious mix of innocence and calculation that shifts with every step.”

It is a kind of romance Iyer detects; a kind of dance. I’ve worn several skins in Nepal so far: the tourist and the traveler (which are two very different feelings – the latter only slips on, silently, once you have been in a place long enough to stop taking pictures of, and being surprised by, the obvious); the student researcher, the NGO activist, the journalist. Each one requires a dependency on the hospitality of locals, and thusly the dance begins. There is a kind of pleasure in that dance: a mutual learning and growth, a curiosity without danger. But the dance of the journalist with the local is something altogether different, and when it becomes an embrace – when you become too close, too dependent, something seems wrong.

I spent my last few weeks in Ilam desperately trying to do some reporting for a piece I’d been planning in my head for months. Mere days before I was leaving, it seemed I’d had a breakthrough, but when my two Nepali friends and I arrived in Birtamode after a four-hour long jeep ride, the man sent to meet us had no idea what I wanted. I sat in silent frustration as they begged and pleaded with him to help us, but it was no use. I couldn’t even come up with the Nepali to explain my research; all the arrangements had been done by locals because I was helpless even in this basic regard. I had made myself dependent, and nothing is worse for a journalist than feeling like a situation is out of their control. We left empty-handed to come back to Ilam, and I cursed my choice of coming to a country where I’d overestimated my language abilities and lost control of my situation.

This is the danger of attempting reporting in a place where you are wholly dependent on another. As journalists, we expect ourselves to stand outside of a place, to watch it from on high and gather our understandings all alone, and dependence seems to threaten that both crucial American individualism that we as travelers seek and the detached, observant objectivity that we as journalists seek. But isn’t that kind of standard… well, a little silly, in some cases?
When we sat in the van on the way back to Ilam, winding our way through the hilly tea gardens, hurtling through the most star-speckled night sky I’ve ever seen, I couldn’t help but feel my frustration soften.

Journalists have paradoxical ideas sometimes. I’ve been told to be detached from the world about which I’m reporting, to turn on it with fresh eyes and be objective. But journalists, like travelers, really just want to tell a good story when we return. And no matter how much like the lone ranger we’ll make ourselves sound when we tell it, the reality is that as it was all happening, we were probably holding on tightly to the arm of another, limping our way cluelessly through a foreign land. We – journalists and travelers alike – want to tell stories that show how intimately we came to know a place. We can only get so deep, though, with the help of whomever we stumble into along the way.

So this is the dance of East and West; it is a careful, calculated dance at first, but inevitably, it tumbles into a headlong embrace. And as I leave Ilam, abandoning the skin of a journalist (slash researcher slash NGO activist), and slip into the skin of a traveler, the dance will begin again. I’ll hope to be embraced by each new place I step into, but even if I don’t, I can still feel the warmth of Ilam’s arms around me.

By Mitchell Murdock:

Last week, I toured Umbria with an Italian family. My vacation was much more than sightseeing, however, because the family was its own show. Example: one time when we ate at a restaurant, one of the boys set the tablecloth on fire.

We stayed in a hostel in Foligno, and from there we branched out: we rafted down Corno River, went spelunking in Mount Cucco, and sampled salami from Brancaleon. I learned some excellent swear words and received some much-needed definitions of the hand gestures used by all Italians.

An obvious highlight of touring with Italians was that we were given access to personal tour guides. When we went rafting, they pointed out remnants of Roman bridges. When we visited Assasi and saw St. Clare’s hair collected at her death, we decided the hair was fake. I learned that the residents of Spello have balcony garden contests.

Spello was built with pink stones from the mountains nearby. (Murdock/TYG)

The family also explained how Umbria highlights some of Italy’s historic North-South differences. Since I am quasi-familiar with Naples, I had a point of reference; most Italian’s seem aware of Naples’ garbage crisis, but are also quick to admit that Naples has the best pizza and mozzarella. Unlike Naples, Umbria is clean, and tourist-friendly. The towns in Umbria are historical and aesthetic, but have a rural, rustic feel that makes them distinct from the cities characterized by artistic extravagance farther north.

Saint Patrick's Well is 174 feet deep. (Murdock/TYG)

by Micah Hendler:

Traditionally, Arabic classical music is a heterophonic tradition, meaning that it revolves around a single melodic line which is shared by all the instruments/voices, yet ornamented slightly differently by each one in idiomatic ways. Western choral music is a homophonic / polyphonic tradition, meaning that harmony and independently-moving melodic lines are the basis for its structure. So the idea of a Jordanian choir is one which is fraught with many choices and blessed/cursed with a fundamental tension between traditional heterophonic Arabic aesthetics and homophonic/polyphonic European ones. It is a challenge which is embraced by Dozan wa Awtar.

Above, the Whiffenpoofs and Dozan wa Awtar perform together in Jordan, blending musical cultures. (Hendler/TYG)

Meaning “tuning and strings” in Arabic, Dozan wa Awtar was founded in 2002, and according to their website, “caters to promoting Arabic Choral Music and the creation of unique performing arts projects through teaching, composing/arranging, recording and publishing and producing theatre productions in collaboration with professional local and international artists as well as talented youth”. Arabic choral music is an experimental field and therefore Dozan wa Awtar has taken it as a priority to explore and promote new works and composers. Our mission is to become worldwide leaders in this field.” The choir was founded by Shireen Abu Khader, an amazing Jordanian woman who studied music education at Oberlin and choral conducting at USC. Most of the members of the choir are Jordanian.

The 2010 Whiffenpoofs contacted Dozan last year through one of their expatriate members, an American who had been in Amman on a Fulbright. We sought to continue the tradition this year, and, ironically enough, I had my own contact through Zach Ruchman, a friend from Seeds of Peace who spent this year in Amman on a Fulbright and also sang with Dozan. Through him, we were able to set up a concert.

When we arrived in Amman on July 5, we were welcomed graciously by the members of the choir, and we shared our traditions with one another in a joint workshop. We taught a couple warm-ups, and I also taught Dozan a fun little chord progression that the Whiffenpoofs sing when we’re given a cup at Mory’s, changing the words from “FULL CUP!” to “DOZAN WA AWTAR!” (That was fun.) Shireen taught us two songs in Arabic, “Lamma Bada Yatathanna”—a traditional muwashhah, or Andalusi art song in classical Arabic—and “Adinu,” a Sufi chant. Both were her arrangements, and, like most of Dozan’s repertoire, were impressive in their ability to straddle the gap between the traditional Arabic and modern choral aesthetics with creative innovations.

01 Lamma Bada Yatathanna

“Lamma Bada,” the audio clip uploaded (from Dozan’s album “Introducing Dozan”), talks of an enchanting lover, as most classical Arabic poems do, and is in a traditional samai rhythm, a 10/8 pattern with bass hits on 1, 6 and 7, and higher-pitched hits on 4 and 8. This is an irregular rhythm which is very difficult for Westerners to get their ears around. Usually, this rhythm would be played by a percussionist, but Shireen put it in the basses, on the traditional Arabic rhythmic solfege syllables “doom” (on the tonic) and “tak” (on the fifth). The melody, in the Arabic mode maqam nahawand (with the same pitch set, ascending, as harmonic minor in the Western idiom), entered over this ostinato, and eventually develops as drones, harmonic, and ultimately polyphonic lines are added. The arrangement eventually dwindles and closes with a final melodic phrase and cycle of the samai in the basses.

“Adinu” is a Sufi chant whose words mean, “I believe in the religion of love.” Shireen set the melody over a drone and then told us to improvise harmonies to it. In between the chorus, Shireen welcomed us to choose any note we wanted on a vowel of our choice, and allowed for moments for melodic improvisation over the ensuing mostly-diatonic wash. It was a beautiful effect, as members of Dozan and Whiffenpoofs improvised in Arabic and English on the theme of love (I improvised in Arabic, and one of the members of Dozan sang a section of an aria in English, so both languages were represented by both groups).

The concert was a great success – Dozan wa Awtar gave a phenomenal set, accompanied by a modified Arabic takht (an instrumental ensemble composed of an ‘oud, ‘qanun, violin, cello, and two percussionists.) Our set was also well received, from our upbeat numbers to our ballads and even our humor. We closed the concert with joint performances of “Lamma Bada” and “Adinu” to a standing ovation.

Afterwards, we went to a local outdoor restaurant, ordered nargileh (hookahs, for the unenlightened among you) and relaxed and met the members of Dozan. One member had actually participated in some Seeds of Peace local programming, and expressed some open-minded views about Israel which she said she got a lot of flak for on a regular basis in Jordan. A pretty cold peace. I spoke with Shireen who told me about her artistic vision for the group as she negotiates between Arabic and European aesthetics. She said that she felt pressure at times to make her choral work more “modern” and complicated to keep up with the standards of the international choral community, but that she wanted to make sure it remained grounded in the Arabic musical tradition. Of all of the hybrid choral traditions we have encountered so far in our tour, I think Shireen’s position at the helm of the developing Arabic choral idiom is more powerful and sophisticated than most, and it was a great honor to get to meet her and sing with her choir. Hopefully we have helped foster what will be a long tradition of collaboration between Dozan wa Awtar and the Whiffenpoofs.

by Sanjena Sathian

In farming communities like this one in Nepal, you might never hear about the outside world beyond the next village over. (Sathian/TYG)

The slogan “think globally, act locally” started getting plastered onto the bumper stickers of hippies’ cars sometime in the 1970s. It was part of the first wave of awareness about “globalization,” and the early bearers of the catchphrase were for the most part supporters of an environmental movement that supported individual activism. The theory behind the saying was that in order to make large-scale global movements stick, the responsibility lay on individuals to carry out progressive practices – like environmental stewardship – in their own homes. The globe had become the new frame of reference for some far-thinking activists.

Our generation of American teenagers has grown up with an intuitive understanding of this: the world has never seemed so knowable or attainable as it is to us today (case in point: this blog, cataloguing 18 to 22 year olds’ adventures across the globe, from Patagonia to Liberia to Thailand). Hand in hand with this understanding of the globe being ours to traverse, we have an implicit assumption that equates globalization with development.

“Developed” countries are easier to be American in. They have McDonald’s and if your Nikon DSLR camera breaks, you can easily get it fixed there. Most people will understand your English, and plenty will be able to respond in some permutation of the language, even if we laugh at its strange Oxford-like crispness or formality. They have been included in the waves of globalization; they are, in Thomas Friedman’s words, a little bit flatter.

“Developing” countries are harder to be American in. The aspirational people – the ones who might speak Oxford English and maybe even do so well enough to understand English puns or sarcasm – have, too often, already fled to America, the UK, Australia, or at least the biggest city in close proximity (see “Over the River and Through the Woods”). That leaves behind people whose awareness and understanding of a world outside their own seems minimal at best.

Here in Nepal, things are not flat. Literally, the terrain of the country makes it so not-flat that accessibility issues plague the rural areas. But globalization has touched the country in strange ways. As I hiked through a local village last weekend, I stopped to stare at a woman coming out of the rice paddy fields; she had her baby strapped to her back, a woven basket full of plants slung around her neck, and she was chattering animatedly on her cell phone. The week before, I was surprised to find a poster of Avril Lavigne staring at me from a storefront in a village which it had taken me 5 hours to hike to. They didn’t have a doctor for miles, but they had “Sk8erboi.”

Globalization doesn’t equate to development – and it doesn’t necessarily mean the world is flattening. Friedman writes of flattening that an advantage for cities like Bangalore is that Indians can now sound American on the phones in call centers or with their MBAs; they can access the global economy, even control it, all without giving up their idli-sambar (a south Indian dish). The world is coming to them, and now they don’t have to flee their countries – like my parents’ generation did – for opportunities.

While India has the world at its doorstep, jostling to get in, the world is trickling into Nepal… slowly. Foreigners have brought a few things, including a thriving marijuana trade and old t-shirts (it’s not uncommon to see a village boy wearing a shirt that says “I know HTML: How to Meet Ladies” with no idea what his clothing says). Meanwhile, in Delhi, Mumbai, Bangalore, Kolkata… those who want America can have it in whatever dose pleases them. Maybe a college education or an MBA, but then they can come home and run a Fortune 500 company from the comfort of their motherland.

So though the slogan to think globally and act locally might work well for Infosys in Bangalore, it doesn’t quite hold up in the hills of Nepal. It’s actually kind of the opposite: you learn to think locally, think small, think within the borders of the place you’re in.

Development projects require working like this. Thinking globally and acting locally only works when the place you’re in fits easily into a wider global context. Here, what matters isn’t the ideals you’ve stored up, the theories of fitting the underdeveloped world into the developed world’s economy. Here, not everyone wants the rest of the world to be their frame of reference. Though the introduction I’m given when I enter a new village – “she’s from America” – certainly stirs up my mystique and brings stares and whispers, they’re not all the hungry whispers of wanting to grab my coattails and ride back to the US with me. Sometimes, they’re just whispers of curiosity; I come from off the map.

The last few weeks, as I’ve spent time in smaller and smaller villages, trying to plan my gender equity project, I’ve learned one thing quickly: it doesn’t do to use words like “development policy” or “gender equity.” We talk simply (me, especially, in my limited Nepali) – not because the people we are talking to are simple, but because the world we’re operating in is one limited by the mountains surrounding us. We can’t make a plan for an entrepreneur in a village to sell his wares in the next village over if he can’t cross the river. We can’t tell women of a higher caste to include the untouchable women in their plans if the untouchable women live too far up the mountain to make it to meetings. My limitations become their limitations – and they are deeply, viscerally local in nature.

Thinking locally trains development workers more than the global thinking they sweep in with. This is how it works, I’m told: you learn from living small, and then as you slowly ease yourself back into the wider world – as I’ll be doing in a week’s time –  you begin to act globally once more.