Posts filed under 'College Life'
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
more photos soon!
April 19th, 2010
… 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.
April 5th, 2010
it’s been a weekend of tiered festivities, what with chinese new year and valentines’ day falling on the same day this year. Flushing, New York was redder and more boisterous than usual this weekend, with stalls of roses lining the streets and calls of 新年快乐! being jostled back and forth amongst the exuberant crowd. some of us had gotten together for our own reunion dinner the night before, courtesy of carol the domestic goddess, and this morning we all went for a dim sum brunch before scattering back to our various locations in the american northeast once again.
as we ate, we could hear the faint sounds of the lion dance drums rolling up from the streets beneath us, the familiar thumping rhythm calling out to our homesickness like the pied piper. some of us wanted to leave the restaurant to quickly catch a glance of the lions, but how lucky we were that the lions came to us instead. two of them, white and red with silver skin, burst into the dim sum parlour along with their troupe, and we dissolved into such excitement. i wondered aloud why they had the same colours. ‘twins!’ he responded. and suddenly i was young again, short and sitting on my dad’s shoulders, watching two lions with big eyelids prance around the crowd, soaking up love. ‘twins,’ the adults would nod in marvel and say knowingly, as if twin lions were rare and magical. i used to cry when i saw the big ceremonial platters of roast pig with its head still intact (complete with flower in its dead mouth), but i loved the lions. i loved the wooden ladders and watching the two lions dance up and down, up and down– before one of them would emerge victorious with the red ribboned vegetable in her mouth. i loved getting a fraction of the prize money from my parents if they won the gamble on either lion. and i did so hate chinese new year music, with its annoying pitch, but i loved the pink plastic cherry blossom trees and the red paper fishes that we used to help our aunts make out of angpau packets.
and of course i loved angpaus too. chern han and i chanced upon a little temple in flushing today, and we stepped in to offer joss sticks. they gave us little angpau packets (from Citibank!) as we left, and i thought they would contain some Taoist good luck charm, but instead each packet contained $2. i was so very thrilled, but the slice of authenticity felt strange in my hand. it was my one and only angpau this year. if i were back home, my brothers and i would be hoarding red packets, counting to see who got more this year. my mom called me today to talk about some money that i owe her, and i jokingly said that she could help me keep my angpaus from her friends as part of the repayment. she snorted and said that’s more like a rebate on the angpaus she had to give out this year anyway. and i laughed because it still seems so familiar to me how my mom used to usher us quickly into a corner and make us check how much Uncle This or Aunty That gave us, so that she could ‘pau’ the same amount for their children. in my semi-angsty teenage years i used to think, wow, how artificial this practice of giving angpaus is! but who cares! money is still money. angpaus are still angpaus and they’re still awesome and i still want them. the adults can worry about all the red packet politics!
we didn’t gamble last night but we did play games with cards. chinese new year does lack something without the crackling sounds of mahjong and the smell of new crisp paper notes. i was always the ‘water fish’ so i shied away from gambling, but now i wish i’d learned how to play from my parents and my brothers, who are all incredibly pro at anything involving cards and money. it’s something that you miss out on, just like how you’re missing out on a whole world of existence if you can’t read chinese and you find yourself in flushing or little bourke street, taipei or hongkong, or a chinese dessert place with no english menus. but at the very least i am redeemed by my ability to peel a very mean mandarin orange uni-peel.
i called my parents the other day to wish them a happy chinese new year. they were having reunion dinner at my grandfather’s home, as is the annual tradition, where my aunt makes the best foochow fishballs, steamed fish, fried glass noodles, wined chicken and all sorts of wonderful festival fare. my parents passed the phone around, and for 5 minutes, my soulless suite was filled with life as my relatives gabbled down the phone. so much shrieking! when they hung up, all was quiet again, and it was just me in a house of people who don’t quite get along, in a wintry state, surrounded with schoolwork and the problems introduced by dictatorial democracy, frenemies, long distance, and growing pains. i’ve grown so much stronger being here, even if i often feel helpless. i guess giving up some years of chinese new year and valentines days is a worthy trade.
this is my campus in the snow. it looks beautiful. i was late for class one day but stopped to admire the vast fields of snow as the blizzard raged. days like this i love my school and can’t imagine myself anywhere else. especially when we get snow days where all classes are canceled and there are snowball wars! though i’m still very bruised from particularly well-packed snowballs.
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early last night we walked past one of those flower warehouses that was open all night in preparation for the valentines’ day rush. the buckets and buckets of flowers and fillers and strewn newspaper everywhere reminded me so much of valentines day in 2005, and the flower project that we had in high school. we’d went all the way to cameron highlands, song jun and i, to look at the different grade of roses so that we could order them in bulk to make bouquets for sale. i vaguely remember us having them delivered to someone’s (aira’s?) house and storing all the flowers in her bathtubs before we started the wrapping. jamie, who’d worked in a florist the year before, taught us how to wrap bouquets and shred curled ribbons. it’s a lot harder than it looks, as is de-thorning roses. but we made so much money! it was the most exhausting valentines day ever, but so memorable. this year, i have a silly smile on my face. it’s quite like the silly smile that sieutheng used to get so aggravated by back in form 2. :) there is a lot of health in how i’m feeling. these smiles keep spreading across my face like– dandelion seeds! in the wind. and they are really quite unstoppable.
happy chinese new year, happy valentines day, and happy life, everyone! :)
February 14th, 2010
t’is just a quick note from the dismal belly of the international affairs library. there’s a snowstorm here in northeast america and i’m stuck here. but that’s just as well, because i still have so much more to read before i take my last three finals tomorrow and the day after. so my quick note is about how college leaves me smitten so very often. there are just too many smart and charming people moving around this place. they are all provocative in their own ways, but i have realized that the sort i am most fatally attracted to is unembellished intelligence. tonight i had a review session for the macroeconomics exam i’m sitting for on monday (jian wei if you are reading this, why is your macro course a 4000 level one but columbia’s is a 3000?! it’s the same syllabus!). most of us came in armed with a deranged muddle of notes, textbooks, formulas, problem sets and confused questions that should not be asked this late in the semester. myself included, of course– i was in my usual worried flurry of coffee cups and excessively scribbled-upon notes, but i sat beside this guy who came in with just a blue pen. the pen didn’t even work, and he had to borrow another. he did have paper too, but it was one mere sheet of crumpled lined paper which he’d torn out of a notebook and unfolded out of his back pocket. he was blonde, with brown eyes, and had a very lazy european accent. polo shirt. scruffy. incredibly good looking. although the TA was making a few mistakes at the board, he wouldn’t correct the TA, but i noticed that he was deriving the right answers with the appropriate corrections on his disheveled scrap paper. at one point, he leaned over (omg!– smelling of fresh soap) and asked me a question about the liquidity constrained consumer. i answered as best as i could, but midway i hesitated to give it some thought, at which point he answered his own question. so i asked him back another question about the borrower’s behavior in C1 and C2. the girl next to us launched into some textbook answer, but he interrupted her with a real world example that took all of 5 seconds to put into perspective. then he said, when in doubt during an economics exam, just think about what you would do with your own stuff in real life. and he smiled this simple smile. i do love smart real world examples, especially when they come from sparkly-eyed, drawling, scruffy blondes with a cute smile. way too sexy.
December 20th, 2009
while walking through campus today, i saw a little kid pummeling down the walkway on his plastic tricycle, tilted forward like a colorful torpedo!, as his dad strolled alongside. i wanted to quickly bend and take a picture, yet it felt disrespectful of the moment, so i just walked and watched. when we all shored upon the stone steps outside the library — me, the dad, the kid and his tricycle — the boy got off his vehicle so that his dad could carry it down the steps. but he also held on to one handlebar as he tottered down the steps, while his dad held on to the other handle, and they both lifted the proud tricycle down the steps ceremoniously and carefully.
i really liked that. for 11 years, i went to a school where little kindergarten children were driven up to the gates in big, glossy cars driven either by uniformed chauffeurs or curly haired, clackety-heeled young mothers who would gather around in a perfumed gossipy gaggle after they’d walked their children to the classrooms. these same children had their bags carried up to the classroom for them either by accompanying maids, or said pin-neat perfection mothers. during recess, their maids would bring them lunch in tiffin carriers, and often feed them, as they grumpily ate, fidgety and itching to join their friends at the quad. of course, not many students at our school were like this — i think the tendency falls more towards the younger generations of our institution — but nevertheless there were some older kids that displayed teenage versions of such behavior too. mostly they came in the form of self-entitled kids who would say things like, “you think my parents never pay school fees ah?”
money is a good thing to have, but it’s a better thing to have when you can bring up your children to still be kind and gracious in the midst of such abundant blessings and opportunities. i recently discovered that the grandson of singapore and hong kong’s largest property developers goes to school here, but he’s one of the humblest and nicest people i’ve ever met. my boss from a previous internship came from a very affluent family, but the heritage was never apparent; quite the opposite in fact. i used to find it so amusing when i went with him for meetings at clients’ offices, and he’d get very excited when he saw that there was free parking in the building. omg su ann! free parking! YES! likewise, there were the little kids in my school who quickly learned to be embarrassed of their wealth, and would hurriedly grab their schoolbags and run into the school building after saying thanks to their drivers.
i’ve been missing my grandmother a lot lately. i had a truly awful night last night and all i wanted to do was curl up in bed and talk to my grandmother in (broken) cantonese. when i was younger and did that all the time (i was a crybaby… actually i still am), she would make me marmite soup and pat me to sleep. when i woke up, there would be barley boiling on the stove in that little pot that always looked like it was going to fall apart. when you make barley, you need to use ping tong (rock sugar), she would say. so there was always a packet of rock sugar in the pantry, which i liked to steal from. the little tablets of sugar were like sweets! and i used to do the same with the rice from the rice cooker — open the steamy thing and steal bits of rice with my fingers. once, my grandmother was having dinner with my aunts, and she loudly exclaimed, “hah! i think we have a mouse in the kitchen that’s been stealing food (”tau yeh sik”), because there are always little holes in my freshly cooked rice! one day i’m going to catch this mouse and punish it!” i remember feeling very indignant -_____- catch me! you will never!
i wonder what my grandmother is doing now. it’s about 7 A.M back at home which must mean she’s just about to get up.
my grandmother has never been the kind of grandmother to bring me food at school, or walk me up to my school gates, mostly because my parents never encouraged that sort of behavior. i remember once i had an issue at school over something fairly bureaucratic, and i wanted my mother to do something about it. at my school, Parents Complaining is a big event, always spoken of in somber tones, and it’s the trump card of any student’s affair with the administration. but my mom would have no such thing. if i recall correctly, she told me to grow up and handle things on my own if i really wanted the problem solved. tough love. but the right kind.
family’s such a strange thing sometimes, but it’s always just there, orbiting around everything else that happens. my roommate has consistent screeching fights with her mother over the phone, and each time she does, i’m always glad that my parents and i dont have a stretched relationship. we barely fight, and my parents are reaching that mango-ey stage where they’re trying to act cute all the time. despite the excessive freedom that they’ve given us, and it’s excessive enough to let any child go wayward, i think all three of us turned out pretty okay. pretty darn good, in fact, if you disregard the occasional lack of concern for authority :) we each know what we want and how to get it, but we dont forget what’s important.
we’re moving in December! i only have two weeks off during winter break, because we only get three weeks this year and i’m spending one of those in Honduras (very excited about this). i’m debating if i should go home for the house-warming. what’s a house-warming without me there!!! but i’m afraid going home for two weeks isn’t worth the airfare, and that i should probably spend the two weeks somewhere closer to NYC. like, New Jersey or something. WTF. but i miss home :( and my family.
here are some pictures of children, fun and fall leaves. i’ve been through many so months of fall leaves but i still get so thrilled by the colors, the crunch, and their carefree flitting.
November 8th, 2009
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