Roth on being gone

Hermione Lee talks to Philip Roth in this week's New Yorker, and says something that, applied to the global soul, has particular resonance.

People go in search of ghosts whenever they return, after a long absence, to a place where they once lived. Who of us has returned to a childhood home or a city that may have figured prominently in his biography without knowing full well that seeing it again was bound to be an experience at once exciting and sad? "Haunted by the past" is a commonplace phrase because it's a commonplace experience. Even if one is not, strictly speaking, "haunted," the past is perpetually with one in the present, and the longer it grows and the further it recedes the stronger its presence seems to become. I agree with the Chekhov character who, when, in a crisis, he is reminded that "this, too, shall pass," responds, "Nothing passes."

Later in the interview, Roth reminds us that his character Zuckerman had "adventures as a writer" in Czechoslovakia, the U.K. and Israel. His imaginative landscape has that particular global reach. In the new novel, "Exit, Ghost," Zuckerman may finally be "gone for good," as the last words read, but the fact is he had been gone before, and not for bad.

Narco-gallina

Colombia's "El Tiempo" daily reports today on the capture and confinement of a drug smuggler near the Venezuelan border. Police report that the suspect, discovered hiding in a large agricultural sack on a bus, had several bags of coca paste, the basis for cocaine, tied to his legs and wings. The police further note that the suspect was a chicken. The chicken, reports Colonel Richard Portilla, director of operations for regional law enforcement, is being held at the local prosecutors office until further soup ingredients become necessary.

In the last year, several ducks and at least one turkey have also played mule.

Khmer Food

Why can't I order out for some good kuy thiew in New York City, supposed food capital of the world? My answer (and some of my nostalgia) at Salon.

From Neiva to New York

Read my piece on Colombian adoptee Jen Cerami in this month's Inthefray.org.

The Romance of Civilizations

View from Hunter College, 8th floor


Pico Iyer, in conversation with Hal Wake, at the PEN World Voices festival. The "faculty dining room" looks out over what you see above (roughly), and Pico recognizes right away that the audience is made of global souls like himself, to whom he is able to speak without too much explanation. People, that is, with some firsthand understanding of the difference between expat, exile, tourist, traveler, refugee and overseas worker. It may have to do with the fact that this event is one of the few PEN discussions to be admission-free.

On Sri Lanka: "Much more deeply wounded than I first expected."

On Japan: "The most science fictive of places."
"A place where they speak silence."

On Santa Barbara, California: "Comfortable, sure, but it might be that those in the developing world are spiritual millionaires in comparison."

On the next great travel writing: "It's going to places like the Port Authority, to Jackson Heights," recognizing the foreign on your doorstep. Travel writing as pure futurism, trying to anticipate the rapidly arriving. The dance of multicultural being with the multicultural world. "People talk about the clash of civilizations. I like to think of the romance of civilizations." The meeting of two cultures is more like the meeting of two people, not two armies, especially if (as Iyer says he does) cultures can be viewed as characters. They might hit it off in ways just as mysterious as two people will when they meet at a cocktail party. The power relationship in a true multicultural meeting will be that of an affair, not a war: shifting, elusive, power here on some things some times and power there for others -- the goal isn't annihilation but union.

"I compare myself to someone like V.S. Naipaul, who found despair wherever he went, where I see with an optimist's view. He feels alienated everywhere, at home nowhere; and I feel quite the opposite: at home everywhere I go, connecting with whatever part of myself fits."

We seek the vibrancy and dynamism of the cultures of the developing world.

We travel not knowing who is going to come back.

Wherein I join Mr. Beller's Neighborhood

Wat Bronx (my photo)

At the northern tip of Mr. Beller's Neighborhood is what passes for New York's Little Cambodia.

Find out Wat is the Wat.

The looming wordearth is about to fall on your head

It must be spring: the writers are aswarm.

The PEN World Voices festival runs April 24-29, with topics close to OPP's heart. Wednesday's program:

Writers explore what binds us to home and what holds us apart from it, and why home, or the idea of it, is or isn’t worth dying and killing for. How do we find home, and, when we lose it, how do we make a new one? Why do we leave home and why do we long to return? We’ll visit the domestic, the exiled, the global, and the imagined in search of a place we can call our own.

Which is what OPP has been trying to explore himself, see.

Not to be outdone by the non-print set, PEN (last bastion of that thing called book) has gone interactive this year:
-- In Home & Away, laypeople like you and me can give our 2 cents on the topic.
-- In the postcard series, you can, well, send a postcard.

Note that of the 166 participant writers listed in "World Voices," only 9 hail from South America, with half of these currently living in the US (*) :

Daniel Alarcon* (Peru)
Mariela Dreyfus* (Peru)
Guillermo Arriaga (Mexico)
Carlos Maria Dominguez (Argentina/Uruguay)
Jorge Franco (Colombia)
Laura Restrepo (Colombia)
Jaime Manrique* (Colombia)
Cecilia Vicuna* (Chile)
Patricia Melo (Brazil)

Same strange idea of "world" (as in baseball's "world" series) when it comes to Asia: sole non-Chinese, non-Indian Asian Tinling Choon of Malaysia, currently at Yale, must stand in for the rest.

There might be something to be learned from former imperial power U.K., which lists only one bona fide 100% U.K. participant, Jo Tatchell, who... oops! ... writes on Middle Eastern culture. The other 9 U.K. participants are slash-U.K. participants, as in "Zanzibar/U.K.", "China/U.K." and even "U.S./U.K.", in that order. Well, what's home, but a place we can call our own, eh?

Wherein the Twin Towers appear on a graph of aid to Latin America

Ever wonder where the focus is for US foreign policy in Latin America? The CIP has compiled some truly eloquent graphs.

For a clearer view, the original post from Adam Isacson, here. Note that the scales are the same for each pair of charts, in case you thought there was distortion.

Military and Police Aid to Latin America, by Program, 1997-2006:


Military and Police Aid to Latin America by Program, Minus Colombia, 1997- 2008:


--------------------------------------------------

Aid to Latin America, 1997-2006:


Aid to Latin America, Minus Colombia,1997-2006:

"Non-traditional" -- is that like innovative?

(photo: USSOUTHCOM)

The Center for International Policy's Adam Isacson, back from a two-day conference at Southern Command, describes in today's Plan Colombia and Beyond post bravely standing before a room full of Latin American military brass, and telling them that Costa Rica, which renounced its standing army in 1948, has got it right.

He deserves some kind of NGO Purple Heart -- the Purple Barbed-wire-wrapped Candle?

As usual, a thoughtful presentation of a serious, and overlooked, problem in South America: cash-strapped governments sending their militaries out to do traditionally civilian duties, anything from heavy-gunned police and anti-narcotics work to environmental protection in understaffed parks to Chavez's outright use of military for "teaching in schools, building housing, and running neighborhood food kitchens ."

The lines too easily blur, Isacson says, when the military, whose exceptional and definitive task is the obliteration of an enemy, takes over the role of civilian police.

A number of realities are at play:

-- the threat of foreign aggression has all but disappeared, making armies irrelevant, as Costa Rica eloquently demonstrates,
-- internal insecurity and civil disorder make police, on the other hand, supremely relevant,
-- the civil societies in question (for a variety of reasons) are not meeting other civil needs (besides security) through civil government,
-- the easy and short-sighted solution is to fuse all of these, dumping civil jobs on a military that can't say no, and police jobs on a military that doesn't have to answer to civil judges.

Sound like a familiar Latin American two-step toward military rule? Isacson concludes:

The Costa Rican delegation to the conference was clearly proud of, and satisfied with, the choice their country had made back in 1948. As governments throughout the region become ever more worried about internal crime, and defense from foreign aggression becomes ever less a compelling mission, the Costa Rican model seems to make more and more sense. Why not focus all security resources on improving the police - the institution designed to deal with the crime threat that worries citizens the most?

Needless to say, none of the other militaries present, much less Southern Command, voiced enthusiasm for the Costa Rican model. As far as possible alternatives go, it's still a bit too “non-traditional.”

Making it clear to the world the kind of people you are

The caption from iJET's website: "iJET's Intelligence Operations and Response Center provides clients with 24x7 threat assessments and intelligence for more than 180 countries and 280 cities worldwide."


Most people don't know that three Americans have been held hostage in Colombia for over four years. Here's how the AP reminded us of the contract workers' existence prior to Bush's trip south. The article quotes Bush:

"I'm deeply concerned about their fate," President Bush said in an interview with RCN TV of Colombia on Wednesday, before leaving on a five-nation trip to Latin America.

Addressing FARC, Bush said: "Give up these hostages. You're making it clear to the world the kind of people you are when you take innocent life and hold them hostage. And it's very sad for the families here in America."

You may understand then, perhaps, the existence of such firms as iJET: Intelligent Risk Systems.

iJET is the intelligence wing of the modern mercenary industry. Got big-wigs (or even just "assets" like employees) to send overseas to places like Colombia? iJET will help you keep track of them, warn them about when and where to go, tell them what to do when they get stuck. iJET markets this as MONITOR, PROTECT and RESPOND. (Another "security firm," Osen-Hunter, prefers ACCOUNTABILITY, INTEGRITY, DISCRETION.)

We are truly a commercial intelligence agency supporting you and your employees – "Watching the World, Anticipating the Future".

Sign up for the WPM (right), a Daily Intelligence Briefing, and a Monthly Intelligence Forecast. Save money by consolidating your security. As the website puts it:

The escalation of terrorism, infectious diseases, and unforeseen natural disasters has forced multinational organizations and their employees to re-evaluate their perception of risk.

Want to work for them? Some "Desired Attributes:"

• International travel and expatriate living experience with an understanding of how world events affect international organizations and businesses
• Knowledge of business continuity, emergency management, incident support or corporate security programs
• Familiarity with transportation systems

It's hardly a new idea. One of my favorite used-book finds in Colombia was a little white handbook, one of several in a series called "Executive Crisis Management," written by former British Police from Northern Ireland. This one was called, "Kidnap!" and it had several no-nonsense bullet point lists of things to do and not to do when, as the executive that you are, you are being taken hostage. Suggestion: keep track of your time by making marks on anything you have handy, but not on the wall -- you might be moved at any time.

Together with Osen-Hunter, iJET runs something they call the Alert Traveler Program:

The Alert Traveler Program (ATP) educates individuals through comprehensive and experiential exercises regarding the risks associated with foreign and domestic travel, and provide the knowledge, skills and abilities to reduce these risks.

One of their suggested targets is "Individuals traveling on vacation that seek to increase their travel confidence" -- and I truly wonder: What does the world look like to a person like that?

Bush in Bogota III

So, how did the visit go?


Photo: Héctor Fabio Zamora, El Tiempo

And another summing up, from the voice of the president himself.

See that sharp drop?

click to enlarge

Adam Isacson, of the Center for International Policy, reminds us today in his truly wonderful Plan Colombia and Beyond blog, not to believe reports that US aid to Latin America has doubled under Dubya.

Bush in Bogota II

click on the image while you still can.

Meanwhile, the Colombian foreign office has its knickers all in a twist about a caricature Amnesty International put out just ahead of Bush's visit.

Watch it, and see for yourself if it warrants this response from Minister of Foreign Relations, Fernando Araujo Perdomo:

Deseo expresar mi más profundo rechazo y enérgica protesta por el contenido y publicación de ese video clip, toda vez que constituye un irrespeto a los esfuerzos, sufrimiento y lucha del Gobierno y del pueblo colombianos en su aspiración legítima de alcanzar la paz.

I wish to express my deepest rejection and most energetic protest for the contents and publication of this video clip, which is disrespectful of the efforts, suffering and struggle of our Government and the Colombian people in their legitimate desire for peace.

Amnesty's response a day later.

Bush in Bogota

The sign top right says "Welcome to Bogota"

Dubya is headed south, and Colombian counterpart Uribe does not want anything bad to happen to the man who signs $4 billion cheques each year. Hence the tank roll out, swinging two elite troops up from the guerrilla-controlled southern plains, and preparing 22,000 military police to patrol not just the caravan route, but every corner of this city of 8 million.

Man is this embarrassing.

Leaving nothing to chance (after, say, yesterday's rock-throwing party at the National University: bring a balaklava and some spray paint and a few anti-imperialist slogans), Bogota's government has also decreed several other measures:

• "dry law," usually reserved for election weekends, is already in effect: no alcohol for sale until after W is gone -- then you can celebrate. The supermarkets tend to stretch ticker-tape across the refrigerator with "ley seca" scribbled on it to keep from having to restock. Wouldn't want anyone to be so drunk they accidentally let a bomb go, now would we?
• no back-seat motorcycle driving. Yes, this caught on first in Cali, where assassins were riding so often on the back of motorcycles (in the parrillero position) that a law was passed limiting two-wheeled machines to only one person. (Originally, the law said no two men on the motorcycles, but assassins started to wear wigs and dresses -- nothing better than a skirt for hiding a submachine gun.)
• no ciclovia. Bogota's famed 121 km of closed roadways, celebrated every Sunday and holiday, will not be open this weekend, because America is coming to visit. As a lot of comments on El Tiempo's website point out: what a shame that "Mr. Bush" won't get to be pleasantly surprised by a peaceful city free of car traffic, with hundreds of thousands of people riding their bikes.
• interrupted cell phone service. Some of the 1,086 gringos who requested visas for this trip have been down in Bogota already for several weeks, checking the sewer grates along the airport road (and installing satellite surveillance devices on each), hanging FBI cameras on light posts all along the caravan route, and spotting sniper positions. They are also bringing cell phone jamming technology, which, the government has warned Colombians, is going to make phone calls spotty on Sunday -- too bad for you! Bombers can't just phone it in.
  

National police have confirmed tapping alleged guerrilla communications with "orders for acts that alter the order." A number of workers syndicates are calling for demonstrations on Sunday morning to oppose Bush's presence in Colombia. As long as they aren't riding a bicycle, drinking, trying to call or sitting shotgun on a motorcycle, they don't see why not.

Jamming the shipment

I suppose by now drug seizures in Colombia are so routine they don't even warrant a wire report. After all, yesterday's was a good 500 lbs. short of a ton, and, being camouflaged in a boxes of jam jars, was hardly the world-class deception that resourceful Colombians have dreamed up in the past: a submarine in the Andes, pure-bred puppies, specially-welded steel coils, to name just a few.

Ever since Escobar "crowned" his first trip to the U.S. in the tiny plane he promptly placed over the entrance to his 7,000 acre estate, Hacienda Napoles, it has been catch-as-catch-can on both sides of the misnamed drug war.

What I like about the report in El Tiempo is that the irony spreading thick, if you will, is not lost on the comment-writers.

Hola hola si Amsterdam?? imaginense que tenemos un retardito con la entrega, nos cojieron un cuarto de la merca en puerto pero ya negociamos re-comprar la mitad y lo que falte se lo metemos en el de la proxima semana! PD; gracias por el contacto en Belgica... que gente pa gueler ala!

Hello Amsterdam? There's been a bit of delay on this delivery, they got a quarter of the merch in port but we've already dealt for a buy-back of half and what's missing we'll make it up to you next week! PS thanks for the Belgian contact... they really know how to sniff!

Another comment points out the irony of the coffeeshop-country destination, and adds, "LONG LIVE MARMALADE." This shipment was to go out in a container from Cartagena. One comment asks how many more have already gone , while another simply hurrumphs about the narcotics division of the national police: "WHO BELIEVES THEM?"

In their tone is the explanation of why no U.S. paper will pick up this news item.

The Vatican goes 全球性

Catholic World News reports that the Vatican will be providing Chinese translations of important documents out of the Holy See, as it continues to repair rifts with China.

Fine, but check out the Holy See website! Vatican never had reason to pinch pennies (oh, wait: there's Peter's Pence) and someone splurged on some servers in some room with frescoes, so the Vatican can have flashy intros and virtual tours. Libraries and museums well worth the cyber-visit.

Why hasn't the New Yorker sent Alexander Stille to stalk Antonio Cappella, Superintendent of the data processing and applied technologies section? The Vatican always had one of the original global visions -- fascinating to see how they come slouching toward the web.

Capturing movement

That's the way things are these days. You have an idea, you go with it. This is what happened with Maria Gomez, a Colombian anthropologist working as an enthnographer at CUNY.

As part of my fieldwork, I was interviewing "latino immigrants" in the Bronx, and I thought it would be interesting to show life stories as opposed to statistics, and to create an experimental project that involved my own personal experience as an immigrant and that showed my particular reality.

The result: the Colombian Migration Project, a blog posting her collection of video interviews with Colombians living in New York. (All Spanish is subtitled to English, and notes are written in both languages.) The second half of the project, she says, now involves talking to people with overseas experience living in Colombia, and the first of these are starting to go up.

Gomez explains in an update from January:

The project was always meant to be non-spectacular, kind of the opposite of the stuff you hear about on the news around migration. We’re not looking for the drama, we’re just trying to show the experiences of regular people who go and live in another country. It’s not a scientific sample, the people we interview are mostly middle-class, well educated. We’re just trying to show a slice of the immigration experience, what it’s really like. Most of what you see about immigrants always shows the same story, the poor farmer who goes to work in a kitchen in New York or on a farm in California, and a lot of people do live that experience, but the people we know and the experiences we lived were very different from that, which is why we decided to show that side of the story too.

And non-spectacular it is, which is not to say uninteresting.

For a taste, I recommend Vanessa, who talks about her arrival 20 years ago as a child, setting up her beauty salon in Queens, and missing the grandmother who raised her back home:

I was talking about what you lose, the little things you lose... I would have liked not have moved here when my grandma was still alive.

Gomez says she's not sure what will come of it. "For now," she says, "the idea is to put the edited interviews on line so other people can see them." As one comment says, "sometimes you just can’t get home out of your system. you always go back!"

Turn down the heat under the melting pot

An intuitive speculation on globalizing trends: there should be more inter-ethnic and inter-racial marriages today than ever in America, right? The more global we get, the less our racial, cultural and ethnic backgrounds should matter, right? Wrong.

A new study finds that intermarriages (as a percentage of total marriages) declined between 1990 and 2000, reversing a thirty year trend. How did this happen?

The study, published in the latest issue of the American Sociological Review, found "large increases in marriage between native- and foreign-born co-ethnics among Hispanics and Asian Americans" -- that is, immigrants integrating into previously-established immigrant populations rather than seeking to assimilate through access to the white-majority world.

Something both new and old is going on. "Traditional assimilation theory" holds (to oversimplify) that minorities become absorbed by majorities, but sociologists are beginning to revise this view. The intermarriage data confirms previous experiences of immigration "waves": the first generation is ushered in to ethnic enclaves, and the second generation begins to intermarry and move out of immigrant sphere.

But as long as more than half of adult Hispanics and three-quarters of adult Asians are immigrants, the pool remains large enough for any newcomer to seek cultural equivalents for marriage. Just think: 11 million immigrants in the 1990s! As the wave subsides (this is yet to happen), late-arriving immigrants and second-generation populations are forced to look beyond their cultural confines.

A rose is una rosa

Buying or sending roses for Valentine's? Chances are they came from Colombia. Three out of every 4 roses in America originate from the greenhouses of Colombia's Andean plateau, with each rose averaging out to somewhere between $3 and $4, almost entirely in transport and retail mark-up.

Strangely, this is not widely known (to wit: today's Times op-ed on flowers with no mention of Colombia), despite some staggering figures:

• 2 billion stems of Colombian flowers sold for Valentine's day alone
  
• $900 million in export sales in 2005 for Colombian growers
• 98% of the chrysanthemums and 90% of the carnations bought in the U.S. and Canada are Colombian

This from an industry not yet in its fourth decade.

So if you look at Manhattan delis and see rows of flowers arrayed under a plastic awning outside, you are looking at almost purely Colombian product (with the rest likely supplied by Ecuador).

Where are they and why did they go? 4 million Colombians overseas

(IOM in Colombia)

Over the weekend, El Tiempo covered the publication of an important study on Colombian migration. The study, "Colombia: migrations, transnationalism y displacement," was directed by National University anthropologist Gerardo Ardila, for the Centro de Estudios Sociales.

Besides shoring up data on the astonishing number of Colombians overseas (over 4 million of 44 million total), the study may also serve to alert the government to its responsibilities toward an exceedingly migrant populace, forced overseas for not purely economic reasons. Though the study won't be complete for another six months, the academics involved hope they spur a cohesive migration policy in a government that has yet to examine its international relations with its citizens abroad in mind.

Colombia's one innovation in the area (from the 1993 constitution) is to have a non-voting representative of "overseas Colombians" in the House, elected by popular vote. (There are other non-voting positions for ethnic minorities and one for women, though all elected positions are open to everyone.)

Says Ardila in an interview in the paper:

En el exterior no hay comunidades colombianas. La desconfianza mutua no permite que se constituyan. Si alguien tiene un negocio relativamente boyante, todos los demás sospechan de su origen.

There are no Colombian communities overseas. Mutual distrust does not allow them to form. If someone has a business that works, all the others suspect a dubious origin.

He also points out the poverty of a foreign policy that seeks to capitalize on remittances, as if the more than 3 million Colombians working in developed countries owed more than their share to a state where they no longer live.

A final point Ardila brings up: many of the Colombians in "receptor" countries are not learning their host language -- but this doesn't mean they are mono-lingual. On the contrary: they are picking up several languages: the languages of their immigrant barrios. In Europe, for example, Ardila points out, many Colombians are learning African languages.

Consumido

Can you spot the Virgin? (photo)

Rob Walker's wonderful "Consumed" column in this week's Sunday Times Magazine has finally got to the basics of niche marketing to ethnic minorities, especially once they become large, collectively-deep-pocketed minorities such as Hispanics today.

The case in point is Pizza Patron, which sells "más pizza" for "menos dinero." Go to the store locator on the website and click through to watch the stores spread like the African killer bee invasion touted in the early 1990s. Says founder and prez Antonio Swad, in a company promotional release describing increases of over 35% in sales last quarter, "Our base is growing and so are we."

It's an idea that has that how-come-no-one-thought-of-this-before ring to it (which explains why it made Walker's column), but begs the question: Why has it taken so long to realize that the hispanic market is huge? Why does Hollywood, for example, lag so ridiculously far behind even the modest progress of television's "Ugly Betty"? (Did they really think "Spanglish" was crossing the ethnic divide?)

Walker looks beyond the dust-up in mid-January surrounding the chain's decision to accept pesos and sees the brilliance of repackaging a product in a context that matches the consumer: same product (pizza), different environment (Latino-friendly). Just what "Latino-friendly" means then becomes the challenge.

What is it like to be deported?

El Tiempo narrates the deportation of a Colombian who had lived in Miami for seven years. But it's just a straight chronicle of events, names changed, no analysis, just the one statistic indicating at least 1,742 Colombian deportees last year and nearly 190,000 total deportations (some completed from previous pending cases) to all countries last year in America.

En la tarde, dos agentes lo acompañaron hasta la silla de un avión de Avianca y antes de despegar le entregaron su pasaporte con el sello: 'Deportado'. Llegó al Eldorado y en inmigración del DAS le preguntaron qué había pasado y él contó su historia. Entonces, el agente le puso el sello de ingreso y le dijo: "Bienvenido a su país".

That afternoon, two agents accompanied him to his seat on an Avianca flight, and before take-off, gave him his passport stamped "Deported." He arrived at Eldorado airport and at the immigration counter was asked what had happened. He told his story. Then, the agent stamped his entry and said, "Welcome to your country."

As an experiment in empathy, an interesting story-telling approach. El Tiempo's comment page lit up with approval for finally telling it from the deportee's perspective, and other, similar stories started pouring in. Commenters discuss just how hard it is to get set up here, whether it's worth it, who to avoid (lawyers, mostly). There's an interestingly skewed view of fairness in all this, worth checking out.

Off the ground

a street dancer in Paris, by Denis Darzacq

Winner this year, but strangely in the arts and entertainment category, of the World Press Photo for his portfolio called "la chute," or The Fall, Denis Darzacq has turned the uglier Paris into an aquarium of wonder. If it is an arts story, it's a powerful allegory of life on the French fringe. These photos were taken following the well-publicized riots in November of 2005. An appropriate commentary track is from La Haine, Matthieu Kassovitz's 1995 portrait of the Parisian suburbs that practically predicted the unrest ten years later. One of the young misfits in the film tells an allegory (while watching the lights go off the Eiffel Tower from a distant roof) of a man jumping off a building, and on his way down repeating, "jusqu'ici, tout va bien," -- so far, so good. Of course it's the landing that counts.

In the landscape of these photos, I get an echo of Atget...

(Eugène Atget, 'Church of St Gervais, Paris', about 1900: Victoria & Albert)

A sense of time far removed from Hockney's collages...

(David Hockney, 'Scrabble, Hollywood, 1 January 1983', V&A)

And the grace of athleticism at its best. Compare the link to Darzacq's work below:

6 x 6, from wall to wall

The Bellevue/NYU Program for Survivors of Torture is one of those hidden international gathering places in New York, oddly cosmpolitain, painfully connected to world realities. Dr. Allen S. Keller has run the program since its inception, and was profiled by Jan Hoffman of the Times in 2003. Tina Rosenberg, who has written extensively on the effects of violence on people in developing countries, wrote a portrait of the center's work in 1997, again for the Times, which has covered the treatment of refugees in New York with some care.

But it's a story that continues to evolve, as the clinic adapts to, sadly, new forms of torture, new waves of arrivals (almost all the referrals, one of the pyschiatrists there told me, come through word-of-mouth in the refugee community), and new conditions here in New York. Language access laws and services have changed doctor-patient interactions, not always for the better. (The same psychiatrist describes the way patients all of a sudden feel cultural stigma once a native translator enters the room, for example.) Mexicans with kitchen jobs, who come in for a quick treatment for a cough, sometimes find themselves quaratined in the TB wing, knowing that a day lost on the job is a job lost. There are still challenges to explore. More as I get better access to the hospital.

Where do I belong?

NIRUPAMA HEGDE

She is a second generation Indian studying in the tenth grade, in New Jersey, U.S.. She visits Chennai every year. A first person account of what it means to be caught between two worlds.

Adopt, deport: how did I end up here?

A follow-up on those 1500 Cambodians who were deported, in what immigration observers agreed was a bizarre and tragic case of systems failure: Cambodia was deemed recovered enough to handle its own criminals. In a series of three-strikes-you're-out type rulings against immigrants who had never bothered (or been unable to) take U.S. citizenship, judges across Cambodian enclaves in the U.S. were all of a sudden ordering exile for people --most, former refugees-- with 20-year histories in America. As many of the initial reports mentioned, none of the deportees were saints, but many articles questioned the idea of sending people back to a country they barely knew as a remedy for social maladjustments here. (See an overview, an early report.)

A report this week in the Seattle Times finds one of the deportees two and a half years later, in a "remote village" where his distant relatives had taken him in. It's one of many reports covering the wake of a blinkered policy.

I had seen the deportees starting to arrive in Phnom Penh in 2002. Many of them landed at a the home of Bill Herod, who ran an impromptu shelter originally called RAP, or Return Assistance Project. That has since evolved into RISP, the Return Integration Support Program, funded by Vietnam Vets and US AID. Their website is worth exploring: it's a phenomenal record of displacement and fate. They have archived the extensive press coverage.

RISP offers a survival guide, but each deportee assumes his fate differently. In the photo gallery:

several returnees have become monks

Here's how Colombia works

Here's how Colombia works. It's perfectly laid out in today's El Tiempo, the last large paper in the country, if I can just deconstruct for you what's actually going on.

For the ninth year now, Bogota, a city of over 8 million people, is having a no-car day. That means that private vehicles are outlawed from 6:30 am to 7:30 pm. The info-graphic above tells us that 1.2 million cars will stay in their garages, or their owners pay a $100 fine. Only the red articulated buses and taxis are allowed access to the streets (the picture above is from last year) -- oh, and anyone with a licensed bullet- or bomb-proof car, or anyone with security escorts. Over 300 kilometers of designated paths will flood with bicycles today. The air will be noticeably cleaner. The mayor will push his entire fleet of 1000 buses into the network, and in general it will take half the time it normally takes to get from here to there.

Some people will grumble, but for 13 hours, a general sense of solidarity and accomplishment will be spread across the plain.

Tomorrow, the gridlock returns. In the mean time, Bogota is just mad-cap enough, just authoritarian enough to pull this off, and Colombians are Catholic patrician enough to be told what to do.

And while this is going on, the top report above announces that the US military, counter-narcotics and now counter-terrorism aid to Colombia, known by the Clinton-era name of "Plan Colombia," will be funded at 7 times what it was worth in 1999. Not an escalation, but an augmentation. Phase 2, with greater emphasis on humanitarian aid, economic development and refugee relief, had to be made palatable to the new Democratic-led Congress. But it's a reminder that the war's not over.

And below the fold (article circled in red), the real Colombia of paramilitary bosses and revenge killings:

Desde su asistencia a la primera versión libre del ex jefe paramilitar, en diciembre, comenzaron a llamarla para que se quitara del camino. Ayer, con seis tiros, dos sicarios sellaron las amenazas.

Yolanda Izquierdo acababa de salir a la puerta de su casa del barrio Rancho Grande de Montería, un humilde sector de la margen izquierda del río Sinú, para recibir a su esposo Francisco Torreglosa.

Dos hombres en motocicleta se les acercaron, cruzaron varias palabras con ellos y luego el parrillero disparó.

Ever since her attendance at the first open hearing against the former paramilitary boss [Salvatore Mancuso], in December, the calls began to come in telling her to get out of the way. Yesterday, with six shots, two assassins followed through on the threats.

Yolanda Izquierdo had just emerged from the front door of her house in the Rancho Grande neighborhood of Monteria, a humble part of the left bank of the Sinu river, to greet her husband Francisco Torreglosa.

Two men on a motorcycle approached, exchanged a few words with them, and then the man on the back began to shoot.

Izquierdo represented 700 peasants who had been forced to sell land to a faction of the largest paramilitary group in Colombia.

It's the third attack against paramilitary victims in 11 days, El Tiempo reports. (Where is the US press?)

And to the left of that report:

What can you do to stop Global Warming?
deck line: Use your iron less and open your refrigerator less frequently.

Wherein I fall victim to weak international copyright protection

Following the grand jury prize at Sundance going to "Padre Nuestro," I wrote a news brief for the largest-circulation daily in Bogota, El Tiempo. The reporting was then gamely stolen and bizarrely credited to the Spanish wire news agency EFE. I guess I became a cross-cultural stringer there, with quotes I gathered listed "as told to" Matthew Fishbane. Other words and descriptions from my original article submission appear verbatim -- but from here what recourse would I have for attacking that theft?

Sadly, it's a tale of provincialism: that the producer of the film had lived in Colombia and written a film there as well as hundreds of hours of Colombian serial drama was enough to claim a victory for the country on an international stage. This was, after all, the gist of my report, with more emphasis on the Colombian-born actress in the film than on the producer. A few connections to the paper, a couple of emails, and all of a sudden the bridge is made. Some readers commented early in the day about the stretch, but their complaint is not that Colombian triumphs overseas shouldn't be celebrated, just that the triumphs have to be "authentically" Colombian. A gringo who spent time there is just not connection enough. But if the producer says his work was influenced by working and living in Colombia, then isn't that reason enough? It was reason enough for me to nudge into the paper.

How do you say, "I have a cold"?

Reporter Jamie Holguin gives an overview in the Canton Repository of the basics of hospital translation, with "some blunders attributable to language barriers" culled from a 2002 study:

Like the elderly Russian man who was instructed to undergo a battery of expensive tests for angina after an emergency room physician misunderstood his complaints of “urgina” -- Russian for sore throat. Or the migrant worker from Oaxaca, Mexico, who was committed to an Oregon psychiatric ward as a paranoid schizophrenic, only to be released two years later after it was discovered that he was simply speaking an Indian dialect.

More significantly, perhaps, is recent research into providing transnational medical histories for foreign patients, who sometimes seem to appear as clean slates when they arrive in the U.S.

The following a-ha moment provides the epigraph to a recent study by the National Diabetes Education Program:

A middle-aged Cambodian woman had had an excellent relationship with her American doctor for 9 years, but he had no idea that she had been tortured. He had only partial success in controlling her type 2 diabetes. After attending a training session on treating the effects of terrorism after the events of September 11, 2001, the doctor asked the patient for the first time whether she had undergone extreme violence or torture. She revealed that two of her children had died of starvation in Cambodia, her husband had been taken away violently and disappeared, and she had been sexually violated under the Khmer Rouge. More recently, in the United States, her remaining daughter had been nearly fatally stabbed by a gang that burglarized her home. Since September 11, the patient had taken to barricading herself in her house, leaving only to see her doctor.

When the doctor became aware of the patient’s traumatic history, he used a screening tool to explore the effects of her traumas, diagnosing major depression. Over time, he was able to treat the depression with medication and counseling, eventually bringing the diabetes under control as well.

— Dr. Richard Mollica. Surviving Torture. New England Journal of Medicine 2004.

In New York, too, the past doesn't go away. A look at the Bellevue/NYU Program for Survivors of Torture in a future post.

Terror makes us more informed

We know that September 11 changed everything -- here's yet more proof. A study published in the Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies concludes that multi-lingual families and households in the UK started changing their viewing habits after acts of terrorism, turning to news services other than English-language sources, after developing a perception of Western bias.

It's a "no-duh" that maybe needed articulation. But why had the bi-cultural families stopped watching or reading their ethnic news sources in the first place? Had the multi-lingual families been dumbing down to fit in? Further, the researchers found a highly nuanced understanding of political and international matters from news culled from such a wide range of sources -- this, in turn, set the foreign families at odds again with their English-only neighbors. The more you know, the worse off it is.

To win, it had better be foreign

Two years in a row? It must be a trend. Sundance has awarded its grand jury prize to a US-made Spanish-language film again this year, after last year's crowd-pleasing "Quinceañera." This year, it's "Padre Nuestro," a thriller about a pair of young Mexican immigrants in New York. The film stars Jesus Ochoa (above) as Diego, the estranged father of one of the two boys. The film's irony is built on this bear of a man not knowing which one of the boys may be his.

Ochoa is a prolific, prizewinning, full-fledged star in his native Mexico -- and totally unknown here, as are some of his co-stars, including the celebrated clown Eugenio Derbez, who plays one of the kitchen staff at an anonymous New York restaurant where Diego has stolidly washed dishes for years. Paola Mendoza, a Colombian-born New Yorker, plays Magda, a drifter swept up in the plot by the whatever-it-takes attitudes of foreigners literally kicked out of the beds of tractor trailers onto the streets of Brooklyn.

The director, Christopher Zalla, describes his film set as looking like the United Nations. "My childhood was one of constant movement," he says.

I was born in Kenya after my parents moved to East Africa to study its burgeoning socialist movement. They divorced, and over the next 18 years I was shuttled back-and-forth between them to wherever in the world their lives lead us. I lived in Africa, Europe, and South America, where I stayed for several years with extended family in Bolivia. When those 18 years were over I could speak three languages (I’ve forgotten one), I’d gone to 13 different schools, I’d lived in 21 different homes; and with each new encounter I found myself keenly aware of the existence of borders – spatial, cultural, and personal. I was always a foreigner in the foreign land. And then I came to New York, where everyone is a foreigner on some level. It’s my first real home.

This experience of movement and longing --as well as some solid Catholic morality of the much more cruel Old Testament variety-- is what gets translated to the wayward characters of a compellingly narrated film: immigrants more in search of family than economy, negotiating borderlands where the rights and wrongs of civility don't necessarily stand. But there are neither saints nor angels in this Our Father -- only a dark palette from director of photography Igor Martinovic and a remarkably de-glamourized Manhattan skyline, somewhere over some fences and across a river or two: not much closer, it seems, than it was back in Mexico.

Like its cousin, Maria Full of Grace, this isn't a movie about the American Dream. Diego hasn't bought in to the immigrant story because he hasn't had anything, or anyone, to buy into it for. As he starts delicately sewing artificial roses in his dilapidated hovel somewhere in ill-lit Brooklyn, one of the boys looks on with the universal teenage sneer.

"What do you get for each of those?" he asks.
"Cincuenta centavos."
"Fifty cents a piece? That's all? Pinche sueño Americano."

The film is well made, carefully shot and thoughtfully put together, but it's how the immigration experience is made universal that won over the jury in Park City. The way "Padre Nuestro" dashes headlong into the foreign all around us, and asks who among us are strangers.

Destination: Colombia

There's more than magical realism in the literature of this beautiful and still very dangerous country.

By Matthew Fishbane

Pedestrians in Colombia are warned to look both ways before crossing a one-way street. The advice encapsulates not just this fragile country's lawlessness and disorder, but the slapstick, deeply ironic and often resigned dark humor of a people both tormented and exceptionally resilient. A second saying in Colombia holds, "Como nacimos en cueros, todo lo demás es ganancia," which translates roughly to "Since we were born buck naked, everything else is the takings."

READ THE REST AT SALON.COM