New Year's in Hanoi!

We really like Hanoi! In just a few days we have seen a million fascinating things. One of my favorite sights was a woman carrying an entire restaurant on her shoulders: a tiny stove, four tiny stools, a small cooler and some baskets of food. Tonight, for New Year's Eve, we are headed out for what promises to be a delicious Vietnamese meal - the menu looks out of this world! Sage let me do some window shopping today. It turns out that Hanoi is very fashionable, and that as well as being a major center of clothing production for the world, it has an exciting boutique and crafty clothing scene. We are staying in a super funky place that is down an alley and among many tiny apartments, with an open patio on the ground floor and a tiny cinema house. To our disappointment the cinema is closed for the holidays - but nonetheless the cool movie posters mixed with the sounds of cooking, cleaning, and informal industry, etc. make for excellent ambiance. Tomorrow we are headed for a tour of two bays, which includes sleeping on a boat, kayaking and riding bikes. We also get to cook with and stay with a local family. The pictures show fried butterfly larva, which makes me a little nervous, but we are here for adventure, and we are up to the challenge! We want to wish you all a wonderful New Year and please remember to keep in touch - we especially love comments to our posts!

Loud enough to hear

Yesterday, as we swooned at the Fijian voices of two choirs celebrating Christmas - one small and the other quite large (see Sage’s posting) - I was reminded of how much gospel music and spirituals have been inspirational to me. Little trace of organized religion runs through my family, and I have listened to this music outside of that context: recorded, at the New Orleans Jazz Fest, and in the gospel choir I joined while at community college back in the day. In some inexplicable way, I identify with gospel music. Most would agree that it can be unbelievable beautiful, but for me it is stronger than that.

Many of my earliest musical inspirations - after Stevie Wonder, Michael Jackson (from my mom), and Tom Zé (from my sister) – date to a trip I made with my dad to a music store for my birthday. He let me loose to buy several CDs (the first I owned). This was in one of those stores where you can listen to everything before you purchase it – as I remember it he let me wander and sample for hours. The CDs that I remember buying that day include: Mahalia Jackson’s Greatest Hits; Ella Fitzgerald and Louis Armstrong; a sampler of female jazz vocalists from way back; and various hip hop albums. At least 15 years later I still own those albums. Mahalia Jackson is still at the top of my list. Thank you, dad!



I have been very shy about singing for as long as I can remember, though I think my family would tell stories of how much of a little showboat I was in my younger years (Lia loves best the story of me breakdancing in the park in Ashland, dressed up like Michael Jackson). Even as I have gone from a reluctant speaker in classes all the way to a confident professor in front of a class of 90, singing remains both a scary and an enticing prospect for me. I want to sing, I do sing, all the time – but not loud enough for anyone but Sage to hear. When I sing “for real” it is low and when no one is around.



I once got up the nerve, while living in San Francisco, to take voice lessons. The only teacher available within my price range was a tiny elderly opera singer – who only taught opera. I loved her, but she told me that “an alto is a lazy soprano” and so I struggled. At the time I was also working on a film and soundtrack. I wrote a song, very much inspired by Mahalia Jackson, and sang it to my teacher, who shook her head and said “it’s such a waste”. But it was not a waste - it was who I was/am. The music I love to sing is jazz, gospel, spirituals, Motown, and hip-hop. This music moves me, it makes me feel spiritual, without any need for a stronger tie to religion and without much in the way of beliefs: other than the fundamentals such as doing the right thing, working for justice, loving and sharing.

Today, on Christmas, we drank Fijian Kava with some locals and sang Johnny Cash and Bob Dylan and Christmas carols to two ukuleles. When we came home I sang in my “good voice” for Sage while we swam in water that could not have been cooler than 70 degrees. This is my religion. In an attempt to start the next year by singing loud enough to hear, here is the song from my film: Lars the Daydreamer. I am also including some drawings I have done over the past few days. So much love to you all, our dear family and friends.

The Sound of Fiji

The sound I wish I could record is the snap, crackle, pop of the coral underwater and my Darth Vader breathing as we snorkel over the reefs- something we've done nearly every day since we've been here. Second to that, though, the most universal sound in Fiji is the subtle whoosh of the ceiling fan.

The crabs here are nearly translucent and have very tall eyes. They bury themselves in the sand, so that as you look down towards the water you see little stalks of eyes peering out at you over the beach. We flew over from the main island on a plane with 12 seats and all of our luggage in a compartment in the nose under the pilots. Also on the plane with us was a native Fijian fellow and his American wife. They have a landscaping business in Oakland and run kayaking tours here a few months of the year. He grew up on a little island off the coast of Taveuni with his parents and 11 other siblings. He remembers the first time he saw white people. Two German tourists came over to the island on a boat and he and his brothers and sisters ran into the woods- they were so terrified. The man who opened the door to the plane when we landed was a cousin of his. So were the two taxi drivers who met the flight. So was the man who had come to the airport to hang out for the afternoon. I wanted to ask why and how he had come to leave this place, but the plane was too loud, and it seemed an impertinent question. Later in the conversation he told me: “We don’t have elections in Fiji, we have coups.”

Of course, Fiji also has gorgeous white sand beaches, coconut palms for miles, and incredibly beautiful people.The women wear their hair in short afros and the men are thick and muscular with long eyelashes and ready smiles. I think our friend Travis would have an easier time buying pants here.

Many Indians were brought here by the British as indentured servants to work the sugar plantations, and four or five generations later they are still a big part of the population. There seems to be an interesting, but fairly uneasy relationship between the native Fijians and the Indo-Fijians. Only native Fijians can own land, which leaves the Indo-Fijians to operate many of the businesses. It’s all Patel’s Hardware, Bhimla’s Curry Shop, and Vinod’s Milk Bar everywhere you look. Kacy understands much of the Hindi spoken, and the curry spices are reminiscent of what we’re used to. Of course, so much else is different. After a few days in Delhi, we were very ready to leave India. The pollution and the chaos and the people everywhere… India is a remarkable country and we both look forward to going back, but for now, sitting on the beach eating papayas and coconuts in a place that’s clean and warm and relatively simple to negotiate, feels just about right.

One of the women who works at this place has an Indian boyfriend. She jokes that he's very ugly, but she's lucky because he's a Christian, not a Hindu. She took us to the Catholic church with her last night for the Christmas Eve midnight mass. There were so many people, they had moved the ceremony to a giant barn with a loudspeaker amplifying the priest's blessings and sermon. We sat on the floor- and stood, and sat, and knelt, and stood- and smiled at everyone around us and listened to the incredible choir. The priest was barefoot. There were pigeons in the rafters.

Earlier in the afternoon, a group of Methodists had come caroling. They stood on the beach in a semi-circle and sang familiar Christmas carols transposed into Fijian. This is certainly a whole other way to imagine the holiday season- with the sound of warm waves underneath.

I’m sitting on the beach as I write this, under a little thatched hut in front of the place we’re staying. Kacy is peeling sugar cane to eat.

A woman just walked down the beach and came up to ask me: “Ma’am, just one small question. Have you seen a little grey goat?” I laughed and told her that I had not seen a goat on the beach, but assured her I would keep an eye out.

Happy Holidays

... from Fiji!

Rhesus Factor

One last post about India.... Here's a little radio story.

Double Day? More like a Quadruple Day

I spent the past week out with three of our students in one of the most picturesque villages I have ever seen. I was facilitating and interpreting interviews for these students on topics related to women (pregnancy/childbirth/gendered differences/sex rations/training programs), and thus got to hear stories and interact with many incredible women from roughly 18 to 80+ years of age (though we spent time with lots of small children as well).

We met a young woman who is an orphan and a scholarship recipient who sang us a stunning rendition of the title song of a Bollywood film (Kal ho naa ho). We met an older unmarried preschool teacher with a physical handicap, who told us that she became a teacher because she had always loved children and had none of her own. We met women who proudly told us they had had ‘love marriages’. We met a woman who had an arranged marriage and lamented her terrible luck with a bad husband as well as a very bad-natured mother in-law.

One woman told of how she wakes up at 4am to cook food for everyone in her home, to wash clothes, and to collect fodder from the forest for the fire and for the animals before heading off for a full day’s work at a local NGO. When she returns home, hopefully before dark, she once again goes out into the forest to collect fodder, she cooks and cleans and spends a moment with her young daughter.

We met women who told of the pressures they face to have boys, and the disappointment and grief they experience if they give birth to a second girl. “Having a minimum of one boy is required”, several young women told us. They told of the secrecy around the illegal use of ultrasounds to determine sex and around the practice of sex-selective abortions.

A few women told of how, despite not having had a boy, they would not have more children. They told of how they intend to resist societal pressures to have boys, "come what may".

I found myself thinking about the idea of the ‘double day’ – an explanation for what happens when women are expected to do all of the work within the home, in addition to waged work outside the home (productive and reproductive labor). This idea shows how women’s labor comes to be seen as elastic. This idea is taken to another level in an area where there are increasing opportunities for women to work outside of the home, without change to household dynamics and, in particular, the expectations upon women as wives and daughter’s in law. Forget the double day, here we are talking about something like a quadruple day.

Needlesstosay this has been a powerful week. The three young women (perhaps 21, 24 and 28) from Chirag that worked with us (made the work possible, really) are incredibly strong, affectionate, intelligent and dynamic women. On the last day, I found myself on a rooftop overlooking this village, with hay stacks behind me, and the Himalayas ahead of me, dancing to Bollywood songs on someone’s cellphone with lovely young Indian women and my wonderful students – it just felt right.

I don’t want to leave, I am fascinated and delighted by this place. I have so much to learn and there is so much that I would like to do, but since Sage has agreed that we will come back, whether next summer or further down the road, I am saying only "phir milenge" (see you soon).

Chicu and Keith's house

The Home Stretch (part 2)

The same students (Morgan Gard, Victoria Evert, Shira Stern, Erin Slomski-Pritz) reflecting back on the first week of their homestay experiences.