it sometimes strikes me in a flash of blind panic, when i look up and everyone is unrecognizable, that time is running out and my vacation is likely to end. as these things don’t usually last more than a week or ten days, i must then absorb as much as i can from this new place before i take flight once again. in this photographic instance, all my senses become heightened and every particle of every thing seems to rush off their surfaces and narrow in aggressively on me, and my time, and my consciousness, and all the things that are attached to me like my clothes and the velvety insides of my shoes. it occurs to me that the bartop in this wannabe french cafe is made of steel and how strange that is, and that the woman from earlier has some hair out of place. everything comes as some surprise.
those questions that we like to ask each other as kids- today i remembered one: if you had to give up one sensory faculty, which would it be? my answer has always been the sense of touch. it seems the most disposable. i’d probably miss the sensation of running my fingers across brittle pages of books, or my hand through hair, but what do we get out of water straying across our backs? or pulling at petals. or grasping the fat hips of a cold bottle of wine? not very much. the memory of it evaporates, and it takes a lot of effort to be grounded in the experience. sight, sound, taste, smell on the other hand are perfectly irreplaceable and irresistible. we would be rendered defenseless if any of them destroyed itself. and so lost! sight is probably the most crucial of all — such an immense, vast and rich arena of opportunity it bestows upon us small humans. and how sound complements this arena and helps us make sense of what we see, gives us access to emotions even when we close our eyes. the sense of touch really is the least important, i think. but suddenly some cuff of denim brushes against my ankle and i realize this isn’t really a vacation. i’m actually here and it’s not a reprieve and i’m not leaving in ten days, because this is new york. that’s why everyone looks different. but there’s this denim on my ankle and it feels wonderful. it’s so scratchy. it’s pressing down on my skin quite urgently but softly. if i reach out, our fingerprints match- and i can feel the crest and trough of every groove in the most explosive sensitivity possible. in ten minutes there will be a hug-break, and we’ll slow dance on the sidewalk where people also struck with spring romance will smile at us. there’s that crisp shirt and how it feels on my cheek.
my nose has been so assaulted by the aroma of coffee because we’ve been in this cafe so many hours, and my ears are quite numb from the mutinous sounds of A.R Rahman, and even the lamps are dimming to welcome the evening dining ambience… so in an experience quite like tunnel vision, all i can feel is that damn denim on my ankle. right now it seems like all i can understand. i’m going blind and deaf from this. somewhere in the back of my head i’m remembering that this actually is a vacation. but at least i have more than ten days before my sense of touch destroys itself.
when i returned from Honduras earlier this year, i had a conversation with someone about the discomfort that dogged me almost every day i was there. there we were, a bunch of bright eyed and bushy tailed kids from an ivy league institution, descending upon the slums of Tegucigalpa and the sloping sides of Joyas, like crows so eager to help. we were but ten inexperienced children with some time during the school holidays, many swollen ideas of public health and what could be done to improve the conditions of these people, and our two hands. school taught us to think about these things- things beyond ourselves into which we could apply our strength and intellect, and do something good for people who didn’t have the resources or opportunities that we had access to. before the trip, we raised money for our own airfare and solicited medical donations from friends, families and doctors, which we would then bring to Honduras and delegate. when we got there, we were to assist in building sustainable structures such as latrines, septic tanks, ceilings, floors and stoves that would, we were told, change the lives of the villagers in Joyas, one family at a time. every morning we would gather and have a reflective talk about the magnitude of our presence and role in this project. i think we were all proud of ourselves and how we were doing this crazy wonderful thing called service work; that we could actually see the results of our toil, one layer of brick and mortar at a time. we took many photos, kissed the cheeks of the families we worked with, shared half of our PB&J sandwiches with the kids and even the stray dogs that would lick our toes hungrily as we ate our lunches amidst the labour.
it was strange, but the whole time i felt quite angry at myself for having gone on the trip and allowed myself the unconscious prescription to an ego balm. what were we really doing there, if it took us three days to build one latrine, when one young strapping Joyas local would take only ten hours to perfectly complete the structure? why were we bringing bags full of Tylenol when the health afflictions of the villagers ran far deeper than headaches and stomach pains? why were we even building these monstrosities if some locals thought them useless, and would take them apart after we’d left, to sell the building materials in the market for some petty cash? it’s easy to feel helpless and deflated when you realize these things. we may as well have put the money that we spent on airfare into capital towards a small construction business run by the Joyas locals, or other such microfinance initiatives. to think that we were so proud at having dipped our hands in cement, when the locals were really just letting us have a taste of what volunteer work feels like. they were, at the very least, kind enough to give us warm smiles and watch patiently as we took way too long to saw planks in halves and mix cement the wrong way.
perhaps it is cynical of me to approach volunteer work from this angle, but i wished that in Honduras we could have done something real with our intentions and energy. it would be nice to know that time and resources were being optimized, instead of being expended unnecessarily and at a sub-optimal rate, just to… what exactly? i’m still not sure where the benefit lies– be it on our part, or that of the villagers, or that of the organization we traveled with. sure, we take away valuable life lessons about the importance of teamwork, service work and what it means to play a small role towards sustainable development, small steps big change etc, but what about the people we were told we were there to help? they get this brand new cement floor, latrine, ceiling or stove. that’s really nice but apparently they could have built it faster and better themselves. why did we fly all the way there to do it? it also seems that they may just dismantle everything to sell the scrap metal. further, latrines just weren’t their way of life, and there’s really not much point putting a small band aid over a large wound if other public health problems (such as the lack of clean drinkable water) weren’t first addressed. correct me if i’m wrong but the most valuable benefit seemed to have been taken home with us instead of being left there with them. how did volunteer work come to have so little real impact, and become almost self-serving?
for some time i struggled to understand our place and purpose there. during some nightly conversations with the team, i would carelessly and insensitively rain on everyone’s parade by expressing my slight dissatisfaction surrounding the aforementioned conundrums. who were we really there to help? how much exactly were we helping in terms of what we thought we were there to do? could we think of ways to be more useful? could we push the envelope a little further? can we address some of these questions before we clap on our proud arsenal of shovels and saws?
there are many ways to answer these questions that would make sense of why we went and what we did. some popular ones: (1) it doesn’t matter that we essentially went there to play in sand, as long as we show people that our intentions are good and that we care and are willing to take steps to help; (2) we take away the important lesson of understanding how small our roles were in Honduras, and it will push us to think about bigger things that we can do to truly make big and helpful changes; (3) our mere presence entails expenditure on airfare, accommodation, food, and building supplies that will directly stimulate the local economy; (4) we can bring back to New York the eyewitness account of an impoverished community, and spread awareness of problems beyond our borders; (5) some effort is better than none at all… and so on and so forth. while these responses are highly relevant ones, a quick glance and some thought will quickly reveal the problems with each, and how ultimately they just do not answer the question of why we went there to do what we did without actually doing what we thought we were doing. yes, residual effects are important, but so is the main task at hand, which was to directly improve the state of public health in the villages of Honduras.
i don’t regret the trip. it wasn’t the fairytale volunteer experience that i’d thought it would be, but it stretched my mind and my heart so far, even despite the realization that we hadn’t been all that effective as a brigade that championed public health. it forced me to reflect on every single volunteer work experience that i’d had, and to pick out all the plausible reasons why we did each one and why we were made to do it (big distinction). it was a clear lodestar towards what was important, and even further towards the understanding that ‘what is important’ isn’t something static.
ultimately, being in Honduras taught me that the best way to help people is to allow them the knowledge that our helping them helped us back more than we helped them, or just as much as. in that way, they have done us the big favour of gratuitously helping us even though we were originally there to help them. this, i think, empowers the Honduran a whole lot more than some latrine hastily constructed out of misaligned bricks. we may have done this one small thing of building one family a stove with a piping system, but they did us the bigger real deal of educating us. the crucial ingredient however is that they have to know they did us this favour, otherwise that potential is wasted. they have to know that they did so much more for us than we did for them in the short time we spent there. that despite being ‘impoverished’ and ‘uneducated’, they are equipped with the ability to teach and do many things better than these random americans who fell from the sky with secondhand clothes and free medicine. such knowledge, even if unfurling from a very small flicker of pride in showing the random malaysian volunteer how to mix cement the right way, can be so powerful if harnessed correctly. i only wish i knew how to convey this information to them at the time, but alas i think i was either too shy or too stupid to recognize what my real role in Honduras was.
there was a girl from the family we built a latrine for who patiently kept refreshing my memory of the spanish words she’d taught me earlier in the week. her husband showed us how to hammer a nail into a plank in 3 hits and smiled encouragingly when we kept breaking the nails. they shared their food with us. explained the religious script on their doors. the women of the sanitation committee first bore children at the age of 11 and then raised many more in the years to come. the young boys that moved like greased lightning on the football field could kick a ball harder and faster than any of us could. all so awesome in their own right– why are we the ones who get to say that we are ‘helping’? what exactly were we doing with our hands in Honduras that is worth more than what they know and can do? i still dont have the answers but for all the above gifts from Honduras and for the questions they inadvertently raised, i’m grateful that i had the opportunity to go, and that we did what we did.
we’re going to Panama this year, hopefully with a bigger and better brigade with clearer goals!
#1 putting the tin roof on an almost finished latrine
#2 laying the base for the latrine
#3 starting on a water storage tank
#4 an average Honduran water storage tank, where the locals store water for cooking, cleaning and bathing as there’s no proper pipe system in the mountain of Joyas. also a big contributor to mosquito breeding
#5 nino!
#6 the men of the house helping us with the cement, which they mixed 10x faster than we did!
#7 G working on smoothing out a cement floor. most of the homes in Joyas don’t have floors, which renders the family members (who often walk around barefoot) very susceptible to the fatal Chagas disease which is caused by parasites from the ground.
#8 stray chickens doing a run
#9 M and B making peanut butter and jelly sandwiches for us and the kids of the house. isn’t this picture super adorable :)
#10 playing games with the rest of the Joyas kids, who really love games
#11 young man with perfectly sculpted double eyelids, proud to receive a Superman sticker
#12 evening soccer with the boys, who run and play like superstars
i love watching beer ads, but the only time i ever get to watch any these days is when I’m in KL and frequenting the cinema as i usually do. theaters here don’t screen beer ads at all, so i was rather surprised that most of my friends here in the US have watched the below Guinness ad, but i haven’t.
it’s so cute! the part where the dog looks at the pint as it slides past him absolutely cracked me up. can’t believe i’ve not watched it before, but i guess i just don’t watch as much TV as my American friends, who are almost always watching some sport or reality show on TV. (in other news, i just went to watch my first baseball game this weekend! it was mucho fun)
my friend Isa was visiting NYC from California together with his handheld camcorder some time ago, and we were talking about this ad and how we should best film our response to it. i was really excited because there are so many wonderfully classic Irish bars in New York that i could take Isa to, and at the same time use that as a backdrop for our response. so we sat down together at the King’s Head, an Irish pub in East Village, to come up with some new video ideas since obviously we can’t slide a pint of Guinness all across NYC to some ballsy corporate guy!
we sat down to discuss different ideas for about 45 minutes, and most of those ideas involved other people in the bar. so the idea we were going to stick with was me chatting up random guys in the bar and asking them to buy me a pint of Guinness. hahaha cos fortune favours the bold mah!!! but as we were planning out the takes, people kept leaving the bar. Isa kept reminding me of the fact that eventually there would be no one left to approach for pints, but I brushed it off la, stupidly thinking that it was a Friday night (it was actually a Thursday night) and that more people would keep coming in. unfortunately no one did, so we had to scrap that idea, and Isa eventually had to be both principal photographer and leading man :P
here’s the fruit of our labour!:
DISCLAIMER: The (very hot) bartender used the one-part pour method to pour the pint, but her boyfriend later showed us how to do it the two part pour way, which is supposed to be the right method to achieve a perfect Guinness pint. We don’t have that on video, though we did come away with a photo of his UPenn tattoo on his groin…
haha please watch it and give us your comments! every time I watch our video, I laugh so much (probably more than the video deserves) cos of all the stupid inside jokes that came with the filming. like how we kept spilling the Guinness all over the bartop each time we tried to slide the pint across the bar. and also Isa’s funny expression as he’s waiting for the Guinness to come to him. and also the overtly seductive mood as the bartender pours the pint…
at the end of the day we had to pay for the Guinnesses we spilt (and drank, on the job). damn. we should have worked faster so that we could get all those free pints from random strangers… though i doubt that would have worked at all actually, because I am a complete failure at acting, and would likely have dissolved into giggles each time i approach someone. this is a practice take of me acting annoyed when some big black guy stepped in to intercept MY Guinness. we eventually didn’t use that footage, even though it took me so long to practice my annoyed face without laughing:
i’m not really much of a drinker, but i’m fast becoming a fan of Guinness! it’s so smooth and delicious, and i could easily finish the pints that we bought for this filming without feeling queasy. or turning tomato-red as i often do after just one shot of anything. Lou Paeng, you would be proud! and so would Ah Ma, who is long gone and chilling out in heaven, but so ardent a fan of Guinness that we always have to bring 3 cans of stout to her grave on Cheng Meng, otherwise the coin flip would tell us that she’s not happy. wtf.
… incredibly attracted to girls with messy hair and strangely combined outfits, who carry a book or a camera everywhere they go, and who talk in a manner that indicates that their thoughts and opinions are pulled from a source that resides in a space outside and above their corporeal crowns. glasses are optional, as are likenings to luna lovegood of the harry potter world- though it must be said that these are helpful signposts. some men could fit this description too, but then they just look silly to me, instead of dreamlike.
by the way, let this be the resurrection of the quaintly.net monday meme! what sort of person are you quite immediately attracted to, whether from first glance or superficial conversation; and what Monday obligation are you neglecting in contributing to this meme? yes, it is a meme, Waffle, and it will always be. and my neglected Monday obligation is a draft on the whys of utilitarianism, due in three hours.
Su Ann is a 21 year old Malaysian jabberwocky currently studying in New York. Still an optimist with a penchant for pessimism and shoe shopping. More?
Contact at : im.suann[at]gmail[dot]com
Quaintly.net
Quaintly is how I'd like to live my life, which would be quite like a movie, or a mellow book. This blog eschews capitalization because it is irrelevant unless used for proper nouns; but sometimes even when used for proper nouns, it is irrelevant as well. More?
