Guest blog by De Wai

The little town of Brattleboro is always lost inside its own self --a great self by the way- and survives all kinds of transitions.
For humans this would be called something like frustrations, anxieties, fears... here it's transitions. One of these transitions was a big storm that hit the town and lasted 15 minutes. After the storm was still a transition that lasted longer then that. maybe a few more months.
Anonymous said on ibrattleboto.org.
“At just about 6pm, in case you missed it, a spectacular storm blew through town. It rumbles as I type. Strong winds, heavy rain, pebble-sized hail, and flash flooding and it was all over in about 15 minutes.”
The church, known as the church, looses its cross. The website of the town says in the saddest reporter tones: “The cross now sits on the corner of Main and Grove, and damage is visible to the steeple. Stonework litters the lawn.”
Now it is September. Transitioning into winter with cold and snow is the name of the present transition. I am sure the town will have more to tell but on the way there..there is a video. Brattstreet made by De Wai for you.

Lost

Apologies to all my readers for being away so long. I have moved since the last post, visited family, and started a new teaching job. All big exciting and wonderful changes.

More importantly I have found myself struggling and working to live and act out many of the beliefs and principles I have posted on this page. It is an exciting challenge, though at times overwhelming. What I have learned so far is that the struggle is a good thing. Everyday I teach, I run into new bumps, or find myself in different tangles. It is the process of exploring these bumps (which lie largely within myself), following the thread of the tangle that I am learning to put the ideas and principles into concrete actions or words, maybe even a certain state of mind.

My blogging silence has come from not having any of it figured out just yet, not having anything concrete to say - however, i was thinking about it this morning and the humility of struggle and not knowing can be a great antidote to the hubris that can come with books and theories standing alone without action. It is in praxis, the combination of action, thought and reflection, that we can really forge our beliefs. And i think that more often than not praxis is messy, and that is ok. it is better to wade into the mess waist deep than stand on the safe shores of our certainty. So i invite you to join me as I find my way through the swampy bog of the real world.....welcome to the bog blog!

More on "Saving" Africa

This article published in the Washington Post on July 15th nails it. For those of you "Save Darfur"-ians out there, take a deep breath, open your big heart, and listen.

This is a great piece of writing and is creating a lot of discussion.

Stop Trying To 'Save' Africa

By Uzodinma Iweala

Sunday, July 15, 2007; B07

Last fall, shortly after I returned from Nigeria, I was accosted by a perky blond college student whose blue eyes seemed to match the "African" beads around her wrists.

"Save Darfur!" she shouted from behind a table covered with pamphlets urging students to TAKE ACTION NOW! STOP GENOCIDE IN DARFUR!

My aversion to college kids jumping onto fashionable social causes nearly caused me to walk on, but her next shout stopped me.

"Don't you want to help us save Africa?" she yelled. More...

Sweat

So I wrote this post sometime last week thinking it was a little silly, and not well written. I asked the friend who got me started on all this blogging business if I should really let myself blog every thought that comes to my head, his reply was something like this...

i am thinking a blog is a description. etymology. a cripted, coded idea that you want other people or yourself to see through language or some form of decoding. you can't censure yourself. or build a police station inside.

So the police station has been closed and we are letting all the bad ones out. Here goes...
Sweat. Its something almost all of us are acquainted with. Its natural, and it helps keep our bodies cool. I have been thinking a lot about sweat lately while walking around in 90 degrees heat with oppressive humidity. I said to a friend that I felt disgusting with all the sweat on me, and he insisted that it is not a disgusting thing. I replied that when I run, I love it. Thinking about this further took me to the ideology and sociology of sweat. Historically, naturally, and currently, those who do the most ardent physical labor are those who sweat the most. They are farmers, construction workers, sweatshop workers, and factory workers. Those who live relatively sweat free lives probably do so in air conditioned offices with ergonomically correct chairs and keyboards. Those with power, in general only sweat when they choose to; perhaps at the gym, or over the grill.

What I am getting at here, is that maybe we see sweat as being disgusting because it is something associated with those who work (physically) for a living. It is also associated with those who don't have air conditioning, or cars. Here in this country we even go so far as to try to get rid of sweat by way of chemicals we call anti-persperents. We try to cover up the smell when we do sweat. Is sweat a part of the classist ideology that permeates this country? I think so.

But sweat is good. It provides temperature control, can attract the opposite sex, and detoxify our bodies. It is not something gross or disgusting - it just is! So lets stop turning up our noses at sweat, and even more importantly at those who sweat, and appreciate what our bodies can do.

photos

I recently ducked into an exhibit of photos that a woman had put together after a trip to a hospital in Rwanda. The pictures were mostly of very thin Rwandans lying in hospital beds with different tubes or bandages attached. The commentary on the photos described the impoverished condition of the people, the high level of HIV, and the womans struggle between feeling the need to stay and help, and the need to take her ailing son back home to the United States where he could see a proper doctor. Also prevalent in the commentary was the genocide that happened 13 years ago.

I was with some close friends of mine and one of them asked the other - What is the point of showing those pictures? Now for some of you that might seem like a strange question. Just a few short years ago I would have thought the exhibit a wonderful brave and courageous thing - I would have donated a few dollars to whatever non-profit the artist had worked with, patted myself on the back, and left feeling great about my awareness of the poor people in Africa. But lets take another look. What has led to the extent of poverty and war in this small central African nation? Lets start with colonization, first by the Germans and then the Belgiums. Both groups took what had been some loosely defined groups, divided more by occupation and power, and racialized them. They distributed identity cards to make clear who the Hutu were, and who the Tutsi were. They then used the Tutsi (who comprised around 15% of the population) as their slave masters essentially, forcing them to force labor on the Hutu in order to provide the resources demanded by the Europeans. This, of course, did not make the Hutu and the Tutsi best of friends. Indeed it created a lot of anger, so when independence came in the 1960s, and the Hutu majority gained political power, there was a lot of bloodshed. The poverty created by colonialism, and growing global capitalism have forced these two groups to share, or fight over increasingly scarce resources. Not only did we set the stage for genocide, we probably provided the weapons. in 2005 82% of weapons were manufactured in five industrialized countries including the United States, Germany, and France. Over two thirds of the worlds weapons were bought by those living in Africa, Latin America, or Asia. Further more, when looking at those pictures, we not only fail to see our historical and present day contribution to the photo, we have an unspoken tendency to either blame the person in the photo or to see them as only a victim, waiting to be saved by white hands, or money. Both of these lines of thought are founded in white supremacy.
......
Essentially this is all to say that we go and look at pictures of Africans on hospital beds, we give money, money that was at one point stolen from those same Africans, we feel pretty good about ourselves, and we shake our heads thinking "wow, those Africans sure are violent, they just can't seem to get it together, good thing we are there to help." And we go on our merry way. I am sure the woman who created the exhibit had the best of intentions, as did many people who saw the exhibit and dropped some cash, or wrote a check. But we are only returning stolen money, maintaining our position of power and control, deciding who should be saved when from the nightmare we created.