(In) Visibility of Waste

For some time now I have been thinking about waste and consumption in terms of use of resources, visibility and impact. Studying and teaching about agriculture, technology, development and food has led me down this road. For about a year now I have been creating a course in my head about international development, focused on geographies of waste. More recently, during the process of applying for academic jobs, I have also been designing my next research project as a comparative study of waste inBrazil, India and the United States.

What I am referring to by geographies of wasteare the cultural and spatial differences in terms of the creation, treatment, attitudes towards, and management ofwaste in different places. Is it kept hidden out of sight and buried? Is it gathered together out in the open, sifted through, reused and collected? Is trash seen as opportunity or as something to be quietly disposed of in less affluent areas? What items are labeled as waste, and what are given new life in some other form? One of the key thoughts running through this is the idea of visibility and invisibility of waste and how this reflects upon and influences practices.

Sage has, of course, heard about this interest– she has listened and contributed to my brainstorm sessions, she has brought relevant books and articles to my attention. Now, as we travel, we both look around for signs of trash collection, for people doing the work of collecting waste, for ways that people define what is trash, and for the many different ways things are re-used and disposed of. Even the smallest towns in Laos seemed to have curbside trash bins made out of old tires. In Fiji and in rural Cambodia, people burned old coconut shells for fuel. In Vietnam, there were massive street-side markets filled with used bits and pieces of various things that would have been thrown away long ago in the US. Outside of Hanoi, along amajor highway, we saw a giant dump that appeared to have been burning for years. One of the quintessential smells of traveling in India and South East Asia we refer to as “the sweet smell of burning trash”. Everywhere, everywhere, there are plastic bottles and bags lining the sides of the road.

The first things that visitors to India generally notice are the visibility of poverty and of trash. I have certainly noticed and considered these two things, and how they may connect, at length. Trash, waste, dirtiness, illness, pollution have played major roles in my time in India, and I have found myself considering in particular my impressions of waste in India and in the United States. Waste is kept invisible in the US and is often quite out in the open in India. That is often true for poverty as well. In both rural and urban India I have been struck by the amount of trash one sees, and I have wondered: is there really more waste produced in India – or is it simply not hidden?

As I have watched Indian families, businesses, cities and individuals create and dispose of waste, I realized that the key difference between these two countries is the extent to which we hide our waste in the US: we hide it in our homes in black plastic, in cans with lids, in bags in dumpsters; we try to never see it. Part of this most certainly has to do with what we know about sanitation and disease, but the extent to which we go to never see, smell, or come into contact with our waste goes well beyond the need for cleanliness. Someone hauls off our waste and buries it, and we never have to look at it (unless we are one of the unfortunate people that live near the hiding place).

In India, it became very clear that I created a lot more waste than the Indian family I lived with, than the other students in the dorm where I stayed, than my friends, than just about anyone. All of the paper, in particular, stood out. I used tons of toilet paper, napkins, writing paper – while those around me managed to create little more than organic waste – using almost no paper products. The family I lived with put out a small bucket of food scraps and an even smaller bucket of plastic and other waste every couple of days. One person came to collect the organic waste, and another person came totake away the recyclables/reusable goods.

If I happen to be on my period I had to collect my used tampons, wrap them in newspaper and find a heap of trash on the street to place them in. There was no other place to put them. I could not put them with the household trash (organic, or recyclable?), lest they be discovered and offend someone in the family. I had to hope that the various people and animals that would surely sift through the piles of trash in the street for recyclable/saleable materials or edible things would not find what I had left.

As I prepared to lead the study abroad program in India last year, the issues of waste came up in the planning stages. I would need to instruct and assist our 12 female students on how to get rid of their “unmentionables” over the three months they would be there: by burning them in pits. I explained this to the students during orientation and then again when we arrived as a group. I tried to explain to students that any waste we created would have to be burned – even the plastic. A few weeks into the program, one of the most sensitive of the students helped to burn the trash created by her and some of the other students. She was struck and deeply saddened when she realized – by looking into one of the pits – the kinds of things that were regularly burned: plastic of all types, aluminum foil, all of the wrappers from the cookies and candies they bought at the store down the road. She was crying as she watched the trash go up in pungent flames.

I have used the exercise of measuring use of resources in undergraduate classes, but I want to push this further in a class on waste. To my mind, understanding and shifting attitudes and practices around food consumption and waste presents the potential to make serious change. I think about waste in terms of labor, of dumping, of environment justice, of globalization. Wouldn’t it be so much more powerful and positive to truly see all of these connections - to put as much effort into reducing consumption as we do into hiding our waste?

Please Hold

We're on an island in the gulf of Thailand and will write more soon.

The Measure of my Addiction

I want to talk about books and traveling. Not travel books, or even travel literature, but the fascinating and sometimes frustrating process of choosing and finding books to read while traveling. Before I left on this trip I spent a lot of time thinking and talking about whether to bring a Kindle or an iPad. In many ways, traveling seems to be the ideal venue for an electronic book: it’s a lot lighter than carrying a bunch of paperbacks with you, and you’ll never find yourself stranded without a book (at some point last summer I walked out of the house to go see a movie downtown with just my wallet, phone, and a paperback stuffed in my back pocket. Kacy wondered why I needed the book and I tried to explain to her the feeling of freedom it gives me. With a book in my back pocket I feel like I can go anywhere. I could leave the movie and go sit at a bar or a coffee shop and read my book. I wouldn’t have to make awkward conversation with people. I wouldn’t have to find something else to do, or just sit there feeling bored. I could read! Or I could get on the ferry and go to Bainbridge and read on the way over. Or I could walk around all day and never have time to read, but at least I would have the assurance that I could read if I needed to. I think that’s when Kacy finally understood the measure of my addiction). The problem was, I tried to imagine myself sittingon a bus in Laos reading off a piece of electronic equipment that costs nearly half of the averageyearly income of most of the people around me (estimated to be $2,500/year in Laos), and I just couldn’t do it. Also, there’s something about the serendipity of the books you manage to find when you’re traveling.

Two days ago in Pakse, Laos, I found a small shelf of used English books at a tour agency. About half of them were Danielle Steel or the equivalent. There were also a few mystery books. And then there were the aspirational books. The books people bring with them that they think they should read, and assume they’ll finally have the chance because they’re traveling. Wuthering Heights is common. So is The Last of the Mohicans. There’s often lots of Dickens and Tolstoy. I even brought a Trollop to India (I didn’t much care for it). In Pakse I found a Doris Lessing book I’d never heard of. In India, Deepa and Ashish’s shelves were filled with the books left behind by ambitious students. They had four copies of The God of Small Things, but only one Midnight’s Children, and no A Suitable Boy's.

There's something very specialabout the way a book meshes with your experience of the place you're in. You can read so much more intensely when you're not at home. Partly it's because you have so much more time to read, of course: waiting for the late night bus to leave, waiting for the hot part of the day to be over, taking the slow boat down the river. But also I think there's something unique about the experience of being somewhere other and finding comfort in familiar words and stories. Of course it makes perfect sense to read The God of Small Things when in India- to learn something more about the place you're in through the fiction that came out of it. I feel like most of what I know about the world I've learned through fiction. But there's also something deliciously lovely about reading stories incongruous with the place. I brought The Wind Up Bird Chronicles to read for a second time while in India and Kacy just finished it here in Laos. We both read Blood, Bones, and Butter, a memoir about cooking in New York City while we were traveling through Vietnam. The mental gap you have to cross when you look up from the page somehow brings everything into clearer focus.

It’s interesting to look at at these books you find in cafe's and guesthouses around the world, washed up upon remote shores: the detritus of people’s long ago choices about what they wanted to absorb while in far off places, now sifted through by many fellow travelers. Here you find the ultimate gulf between what people really do read (mysteries, romance), and what people aspire to read (‘classics’). I hesitated for a while over the Doris Lessing book, but in the end I went with a Dick Francis mystery. I read The Golden Notebook long ago because my grandmother told me that book had changed her life. I wanted to like it, but I found it a little dated and dull. I read my mystery paperback on a grimy, hot, and somewhat disgusting 8 hour bus ride yesterday surrounded by ordinary folk from Laos (and their roosters). I didn’t feel out of place. And now I’ll have to see if there’s somewhere in this town where I can find English books. But I’ve got all day to explore.

Visibility

What a pleasant experience it was to go from India to Fiji and find women playing pool on the porches of shops and beautiful smiling women out everywhere in the streets. Then, to go from Fiji to Vietnam has been very refreshing indeed. Sage and I keep looking at each other and saying things like: “can you imagine a woman in India straddling the back of a motorcycle taxi like that?” Or: “women drinking in a bar!” Even: “look at all of these women exercising and dancing in the park at night!”



At the Fine Arts Museum in Ho Chi Minh City I noticed as many women portrayed in the art work as men: women in factories, as soldiers and guerillas, as mothers, as revolutionaries, as people in any kind of scene. The rooms were separated into before 1975 on one side and after 1975 on the other. In both eras there were countless images of war and battle and daily life, and women appeared in nearly every image. I need to read up on the history of women in Vietnam, and I certainly do not understand power relations and the status of women across difference here, but it simply makes me happy to see them wherever I look, doing all of the same things that men do- smoking cigarettes, playing cards, selling things in shops, riding motorbikes- and smiling lovely smiles back at me.

Woman Rowing

There is something very important to me about seeing women in society. I feel a bit this way about gay people too, it just feels good to be somewhere where they are visible. This has to do, in part, with finding a sense of security, to be sure, but it also helps me to understand a place- to see and interact with women.

Cement Factory (women arguing in background)

In India, I have always been able to find spaces to interact with women and children, but this has not happened organically. I have had to seek women out. The most wonderful moments of my dissertation research involved laughing and chatting with women and young people in their homes. The most memorable time during this last trip to India was helping my students to do their research: asking women about their lives. Many of my worst moments in India have been in places where very few (if any) women were present – in huge polluted city streets, on long bus trips, and in smoky government offices and police stations. In the places that I have spent the most time (namely, Ahmedabad in Gujarat) there have been very few women visible. This gets right to the heart of things. What I realize that I most want to know about a place is what women are doing- about work and rest, and about food.

Women and Men Playing Game in Park (men making noise)

I re-lived some of these experiences - coming to terms with gender inequality in India - through my undergraduate students this past quarter. At times they were frustrated, nervous, impressed, and in awe of what they saw of women’s lives and the attitudes and actions of men. They were confused by the roles of men and women, about the ways that they themselves were treated, and about how they should/wanted to act/be perceived. I remember all of these feelings from my first encounter with India in 2008. Watching my students helped me to realize how far I have come in my experience of India. I have a much better sense now of who I am while there: what I expect and what I will not accept. I am still frustrated and angered by some of what I witness and hear about, but I have developed ways of dealing with and responding to this. I hope that I was able to pass some of this on to my students. Some of it, though, I know now comes only with time and distance. You are likely to hear more from me on the topic as I continue to both take pleasure in learning about and seeing women, and as we continue to make our way ‘around the world’.

B-52

Vietnam. This is a place I’ve been both apprehensive and excited about visiting for years. Excited for obvious reasons perhaps: the food (Pho, Bahn Mi), the culture (Saigon, Hanoi), the scenery (Mekong delta, Ha Long Bay). And of course, as someone with a somewhat socialist bent, visiting the remaining communist countries has always been high on my list. (I’m looking at you Cuba.)

But I was apprehensive, too, because of the American history with this place. It’s messy and complicated for both countries, and it’s something I know I don’t understand as well as I ought to. I don’t even know if it’s wrong for me to say Saigon, rather than Ho Chi Minh City (even though most people here seem to refer to it as the former).

Is it insulting to come as a naïve tourist looking for a good time to a place that my country bombed to smithereens forty years ago? Or is it ridiculous to avoid a place simply because I feel guilty for something my country did before I was born? And before the majority of people in this country were born too. There are quite a few countries in the world I'd have to avoid traveling to if I was worried about the history of US involvement there.

Is it enough to hold these conflicting ides in my head and try to be a respectful and appreciative and curious tourist, rather than a loud, brash, drunk American who goes to buy trinkets at the war souvenirs market? I hope so. I know for sure that neither of us had the least desire to sit at some fancy beachside resort in Danang, though that seems to be a popular vacation town for Vietnamese folk these days.

As far as remnants of the war, we have seen very little that is obvious to us. When it began to rain in the north, many of the men took to wearing North Vietnamese Army green pith helmets to shield from the damp. There are a fair number of legless older folk, especially in Saigon, begging on the streets. But far fewer than you would see in any city in India. I'm told that bomb craters are still quite obvious in the rice fields, but we haven't been out in the countryside much yet. The museums are full of paintings and woodcuts and photographs.... It is far easier to see lingering influences of French colonialism: baguettes, coffee, cigarettes. Perhaps the legacy of the American time in this country lies a bit deeper below the surface.

Last night at a bar we watched a group of young Vietnamese women at the table next to us celebrate one of their birthdays. They were laughing and raising their glasses to each other and to us. As the culminating moment of the celebration, they ordered a special shot for the birthday girl to do. It involved a precarious tower of shot glasses one on top of the other over which a flaming fountain of blue curacao was poured, and, when it reached the bottom glass, drunk. They told us the shot was called a B-52.

Best of 2011

Dissertation defense

Mitch's 90th birthday party on the beach

Spontaneous Chinese dinner with 15 friends after our going away party

Macklemore at KUOW

Dinner at Beast in Portland with Liz

Double rainbow at Mammoth hot springs

Passover Dinner

Sinking Daniel's boat with the PRS ladies

Our families at the SLEE dinner

Square dancing at Dominic and Elisa's wedding

Austin with Amanda

Yelapa with DiAnn

Discovering a kindred feminist in Keith G.

Drinking Kava on Christmas day with Alisi's family in Fiji

8 bears in Enchanted valley

Talking about books with Deepa and Chicu

Following 'The Binder' at Sharon's wedding

Floating down the Yakima River

Talking to women in Mauna village with Erin, Rachel, Alice, Neetu and Hema

Dinner at Le Gourmand with Amanda

Multiple sightings of the American Dipper

Goldmeyer hot springs

Snorkeling in Fiji

Dancing at Chop Suey (Talcum and Lick)

Students singing Cee-lo for Kacy's birthday