Next Stop: Eireann

I'm cold! I'm writing from overcast Cork, Ireland. I'm a bit dazed after a quarter of always having something hanging over my head, of never being able to catch up. I was able to take it in stride and accept that I wouldn't be able to actually catch up, knowing that I was still a good student and that the work I was doing was good.

I was swimming around in future soup a lot during this last quarter, not sure of what to grab on to (a PhD program? But in what subject? A master's? Where though? Should I stay in California? Should I change course from linguistics to equality in education? Would a higher degree linguistics be in line with my values about social justice and equality? Would it separate me from the real world? Could I do anything practical with it?) but thinking it was probably best to grab onto something. In the end, I decided not to apply to graduate school this year. Imagine: for the first time in my life, I will do something that I devise interesting or worthy of looking into rather than just taking the next obvious step that my scholastic career so far has molded me, has indoctrinated me to take. And even that seemed like too gaping a precipice to drop right off of, so I will be turning in one application. It's for Teach For America, a program whose goal is to supplement the deficiencies of rural and urban public schools whose students are years behind in literacy and math standards. It sends students with bachelor's degrees to these communities to become actual teachers for two years. Students like me, with no formal or informal training as teachers, who may have majored in biology or linguistics or history of consciousness as is possible at Santa Cruz or best yet, education. There is an intense and rigorous summer training, followed by two years of classroom practice.

I'm reading a book by the founder of Teach for America, Wendy Kopp, who, like me, was evaluating her future options as a senior a Princeton in the late '80's. She wanted something meaningful to work for rather than to go to a two-year business school just to get rich. I guess it's fair to say I'm not exactly worried that my alternative options are just to go get rich, but I am concerned that they might not be meaningful. Or rather, I think time off doing something real and practical could set the stage for a meaningful degree in something I believe in, and would help me figure out EVERYTHING that I don't know, which is most everything.

Hark, I think I see the sun! And by contorting my body at weird angles, I think I might have spied a tiny corner of blue sky from the window of Giovanni's apartment, one among many in a complex not designed to bring in the little natural Irish lighting that might poke through the clouds now and then. I am reticent to say that this is a dreary city, but suffice it to say that this is a city with friendly people, fighting not to be dreary against the very stiff odds that the omnipotent weather imposes.

This is Day Five in Cork. I have been volunteering half days at the Oxfam Fair Trade shop on French Church Street, and it's been a very good way for me to spend time while Giovanni is at work. It's fair to say I've met more non-Irish people than Irish, but I've met a few of them too. I price and count things that have arrived, I restock the shelves, I work at the cash register (often causing it to stop working when there are more than five people in line), and I drink divine hot dark chocolate from the shop down the way and chat with Esther, the Belgian manager, and other volunteers. Many of the other volunteers are international: French, Italian, etc. Others are Irish, and despite the difficulty I have in understanding many with really broad accents, I'm having fun meeting so many people and actually talking to a few for an extended period of time. It's nice to travel when you can manage to find real opportunities to meet local people.

It's been a quite international experience so far. The first night I arrived, Giovanni and I went to dinner at his friend Giuseppe's house, another Italian who's girlfriend is from Oman. There were also two other couples, the recurring them being Italian male, international female. The other two girls were Dutch and Serbian. It was a lovely evening, especially since the two Sicilians cooked pizza and pasta al forno for dinner!!

I'm going to step out now that the sun has unabashedly begun to shine outside the window. I can't miss the occasion! I would like to see the University of Cork on a day like today. Pictures will be posted soon.

Next week, Giovanni and I will go to West Cork hopefully, and perhaps Kerry, and Wicklow for Christmas. Maybe we'll even make it to Galway before he starts work again!

I only know how to say "buses" and "potato" so far in Irish. I don't know how far that will get me...

Bella Ciao

It's a great moment in the history of the world right now: women are going to be the positive change in the world. And we're going to do it with love. After all, it's women who pay back their loans and who are creating mini-revolutions in peripheral nations. It's women who have been silenced but who are beginning to spotlight the value different kinds of discourses, and present new kinds of dialogues. Women are the innovators: this is true in language use in most societies. It's my understanding that postmodernism shares many parallels with historically feminine ways of conceiving the world: is it not true that there are many truths, that each person has access to multiple ways of conceiving of the world? Ursula K. Le Guin recounts an experience she shared with a group of women discussing theory. One woman said, amidst arguing and verbal jabbing, "Offer your experience as your truth," to which the women markedly shifted their style of dialogue. Le Guin remembers

"When we started talking again, we didn't talk objectively, and we didn't fight. We went back to feeling our way into ideas, using the whole intellect and not half of it...not claiming something: offering something. How, after all, can one experience deny, negate, disprove, another experience?"

And indeed, this is what postmodernism is about, to the extent that I understand it. It's about the lack of an absolute reality outside of our individual perception of it: it means there can be contradictory truths, even for the same individual at different moments, in different circumstances. I wrote about this before, remarking on the strangeness of the fact that if I could have a conversation with myself from one day to the next, or one year to the next about my deepest convictions, I might end up arguing bitterly about TRUTH with my own self!

As Le Guin's "mother tongue", or the language historically associated with women that does not require distance between the speaker and the subject, or the so-called objectivity of the speaker, begins to be reevaluated, revalued in spheres besides the home, there will be a cultural shift, a social change, a transformation. In Le Guin's words, "It is a language always on the verge of silence and often on the verge of song." Not oppressed silence, but a silence that listens, a silence that speaks.

When I hear men talk about feminism with disdain, defensively, I want to have the presence of mind to have a discussion about what good it is doing us ALL. Surely men suffer the imbalance in society as well: the cultural norms that require stoicism and emotionally constipated strength cannot benefit those who identify as men in our world. Of course Le Guin is not silent on this issue: many men aren't allowed to speak this mother tongue, or don't learn to speak it. "At home, to women and children talking mother tongue, they respond with a grunt and turn on the ball game. They have let themselves be silenced, and dimly they know it, and so resent speakers of the mother tongue; women babble, gabble all the time...Can't listen to that stuff."

Amartya Sen wrote a famous essay on the 100 million women that are missing in the world. Sen claims that given equal access to food and healthcare, the ratio of women to men would be 106/100. This is nearly the ratio in many industrialized countries, but it is not because of wealth or so-called "Western" cultural values. It's a matter of the economic empowerment of women, which can take many forms. In matriarchal societies, the ratio tends to be nearer to 106/100, even if the region or nation is poor or non-Western, such as Kerala in India. Amartya Sen won the equivalent of the Nobel Prize in Economics in 1998. When women are given the means to become economically independent, there are more women! And it is perhaps necessary that many societies began to recognize women as not just assets to their communities as procreators, but as economic actors who bring home the bacon.

There are a couple of organizations that are empowering individual women by connecting them to donors from wealthy nations. Small donations of $25 can help a woman in Bangladesh or Belize or Uganda start a small business enterprise, and after she pays it back, the money is recycled to help someone else.

Namasté Direct
http://www.namaste-direct.org/index.php
Kiva
http://kiva.org/

Are you with me, sisters? Are you with me, brothers?



The excerpts from Ursula K. Le Guin come from her 1986 Bryn Mawr commencement address. The information cited by Amartya Sen is from the New York Review of books, "More Than 100 Million Women Are Missing", 1990.