This is the culmination of my sketches from the last two years. The book in which I drew them is pretty beat-up from my travels so it’s going into storage. I’ve digitized these for posterity. I like drawing because it’s not as conspicuous as taking out a camera. The medium has helped me to capture scenes from everyday life in places that are sensitive to being recorded. It’s also helped to break the ice on a number of occasions. I might not always share the same language as my subject, but the sketchbook has provided another mode of communication.
Far from being a luddite, I’ve always marveled at emerging technologies in media. However, paper and ink has a tangible subjectiveness that mechanical-aided design will never quite achieve. Also, when I didn’t have electricity and the batteries on my camera and laptop went dead, my sketchbook still worked every time I opened it.
It probably wasn't the safest idea to dig a deep hole in the middle of a school and not take any precautionary steps to safeguard it from children falling in. Nevertheless, it's the first stage in the construction of a new VIP latrine at the school where I worked at in Uganda.
After the new toilets were built, speculation arose amongst the student body over who would inaugurate the facilities first. This documentary captures the excitement as the events unfold. On the day of the grand opening the students put on a show for the community. The program was filled with music, dance, and drama with a health and sanitation theme.
This isn't the porta-potty you remember from summer camp. It's a ten-stalled waste management system that will cater to over 1,000 school children and teachers daily for the next five years. I drew up this blueprint in case the need arises for you to build one of these structures at your own home.
My small friend gave me a tour of the existing school latrine. It had been built eight years ago and all the traffic it's received has left the stalls messy. It was clearly operating beyond capacity. The pit had already filled up a year ago and the teachers would get sticks to compress the fecal matter back into the hole. It was time for a new toilet.
Here's a picture from the new long-drop. It's clean and inviting. If something falls down that hole it will take a few moments before you hear the reassuring thump that it's hit the bottom.
The new toilets were built in the shade of an old tree. The students found it to be an idyllic place to study and relax between classes.
These girls are on their lunch break. There's probably bananas in those little red pales. Since the construction of the new latrine, there has been a marked improvement in the school's overall cleanliness. The girls can enjoy what they eat on the campus and stay healthy and happy.
The latrines were built with a small projects assistance grant from the Peace Corps and USAID. If you'd like to know more about the specifications of the latrine and the background of the community where it was built, you can read the original proposal.
There has also been a push recently to introduce composting toilets in the developing world. The waste is collected and used as fertilizer in gardens.
It has been a long time dream of mine to visit the Democratic Republic of Congo. Unfortunately, when I finally did, I left my camera in Uganda. Luckily, I was traveling with my friend Chris Baxter who was smart enough to bring his along and take the amazing photos in the sideshow above.
I've done my best to provide commentary describing what we saw on our trip. However, it gets to be TMI at some points and the captions occasionally cover the entire photo. You can toggle them on and off with the green, speech bubble icon in the lower left hand corner.
Goma is a modern day Pompeii and vulcanologists flock to Nyirigongo. There are a lot of great stories and documentaries that have been made about the volcano.
The latest came out just a few weeks ago from the Associated Press.
A similar story was written by the New York Times back in 2008. This article features Kennedy Rwema, the guide we used for the trip. We had the privilege of spending a night at his house.
WGBH's NOVA did an episode on the 2002 eruption. Even though it's supposed to be "public television" the only free media I could find online was this trailer. Nevertheless, it's amazing footage.
Baxter alerted me to this documentary on Nyirigongo and other African volcanoes that aired on the Science Channel. Here it is in full, but be patient with the annoying pop-up ad at the beginning. Guy, the vulcanologist featured, is very melodramatic. He makes it seem as if the volcano could explode at any moment and rip him and his fawning students to smithereens. It makes for good television.
Grasshoppers are a ubiquitous snack in Southern Uganda. They are lured by lights, trapped in barrels, and then fried up in a little oil with salt. Kids love them and the ones you see enjoying them here are orphans from Nazareth Children's Home in Nyendo, Masaka.
Nyendo’s a suburb that sits 45 minutes away from the Equator on a stretch of highway that curves around Lake Victoria. It’s a place where busses from as far away as Kigali, Rwanda and Mombasa, Kenya stop in the middle of the night for their passengers to relieve themselves and stock up on street foods like meat-on-a-stick and fried lungfish. Grasshoppers are plentiful too. Teenage street vendors peddle nsenene from minibus to minibus with same entrepreneurial spirit as the guys who feel obligated to squeegee your windshield in New York.
The coming of the grasshoppers coincides with the end of each rainy season. You know it’s that time of year again when you see fluorescent floodlights pop up with the glow of a car dealership lot. Overnight they are set up in unlikely places. They span over several rooftops in slum areas, deep in the middle of swamps, or in a neighbor’s backyard. Often the traps are assembled where there was previously no electricity, but someone has shimmed up a nearby power line with a cable for a free hook-up.
The traps themselves are metal barrels fitted with a 10 foot piece of corrugated iron sheeting. The lights are aimed at the metallic surface and the grasshoppers become dazzled by the display, much like moths around a porch light. The insects are drawn into the brilliant luminance and whack themselves on the metal sheeting. Stunned, they slide down into the bottom of the barrel. At the end of the night they are collected in plastic bags and sold at roadside markets.
The Ugandan varieties of these insects are not the same grasshoppers that you’d find in America or Europe. They’re actually a type of katydid that are closely related to the same migratory locusts that plagued Pharaoh in the book of Exodus. Like Egypt, Uganda also sits along the banks of the river Nile (and Moses has always been a popular name), but the grasshoppers there are too delicious to pose a threat. However, if the insects weren’t eaten they could strip the lush tropical environment of its foliage. On one acre of land, fifty live grasshoppers (or two recommended serving sizes in fried snack form) have the same grazing power as a cow. For a country where 80% of its inhabitants’ livelihood depends on agriculture the result would be devastating.
Yet most Ugandans don’t see themselves as agents in pest control. They consume grasshoppers because they’re a nutritious snack. Every 100 grams of grasshopper contains a whopping 20.6 grams of protein. That’s as much as in an equivalent weight of beef. Many people in the impoverished, rural areas of the country are malnourished. Grasshoppers provide them with a cheap, and often free, source of nutrition.
Nsenene is a perfect afternoon snack for kids. The orphans in the video tried nabbing a few hoppers even before they were done cooking. Nazareth Children’s Home was started in 1978 by a woman named Josephine. Many of the children you see were dropped off on her doorstep in the middle of the night. Today the orphanage looks after 25 orphans who range in age from 1 to 20 years old. Josephine’s still around, but one of the older orphans, Nankya Carol, has taken up most of the home’s responsibilities. Carol’s the young woman in the video frying up the grasshoppers. She makes sure that the other kids are healthy and that they go to school. She also keeps a small garden that provides food for the orphanage. Nazareth Children’s Home loves visitors so if you find yourself around Masaka visit them. Their postal address is:
PO Box 86 Masaka, Uganda
If you can’t make it out to Uganda, I’ve done my best to piece together Carol’s Nsenene recipe below.
Grasshopper recipe:
Collect grasshoppers- as many as you can catch Peal wings and legs off Soak in water for 15-20 minutes Drain the water from pan Add a couple of tablespoons of vegetable oil Fry until golden brown over medium heat Stir occasionally to prevent burning Add salt to taste
I’d also like to thank Lisandro Torre, a Peace Corps volunteer, who served at Nazareth Children’s Home. He's the mysterious white hand in the movie that you see sampling the nsenene. Without his assistance, this video wouldn’t have gotten made.
Links The Internet is well versed on eating weird foods and Ugandan grasshopper culture is no exception. Here are some other blogs and websites on the subject. Many have their own variations to the classic nsenene recipe.
The popular Bizarre Foods show on the Travel Channel featured grasshoppers on its Ugandan episode.
That's Luganda for "I'm baaaack..." I've been in Uganda for the last two years serving in the Peace Corps and this website has been on hiatus. Before I left in February of 2007 this blog got a lot of attention after I posted a video of my friend's waterboarding me. This didn't sit well well with the PC administration in Washington and I was deemed a safety and security risk. We reached an agreement that I would be allowed to serve in Uganda on the condition that I wouldn't post to this blog.
However, these last few years have been fruitful and creative. While I lived in primitive conditions in a village in Southern Uganda without electricity, I kept a thorough online account of each day's adventures using my mobile phone. My work was also recognized by the Peace Corps and the American government on numerous occasions.
I can't say that I wasn't dreaming of this moment when I was out in the bush. I'd been sitting on an ever-growing number of cache of videos. Now I've finally got access to first-world broadband that's fast enough to upload them. I'm hoping that the collection of African media will bring better exposure to the marginalized populations that collaborated with me to make them.
Awareness and advocacy are some of the ideas behind this blog. Media literacy and empowerment are equally relevant. Now that I'm back, I'd like to tackle some of the big themes of "media for social change" by creating applications and platforms for greater community interaction at a global level. Some of them, for example, are leapfrog technology, viral marketing, and social networking. Rather than follow the conventional trend of making these functions push OS land speed records for high bandwidth, I want to go lo-fi. I want to target a population that wouldn't normally have the means to access the Internet. I'm interested in emerging communications technology at the rural level.
The following is a guest entry from Trent Toulouse which addresses his experience and the lessons learned as the torturer in the now infamous waterboarding video.
In 1961the Israeli government tried Adolf Eichmann, the architect of the holocaust, for crimes against humanity. The trial was broadcast by all the worlds major news stations live and the world tuned in en masse to see what had to be one of the most monstrous humans receive justice. However, rather than revealing a demon the trial revealed a man. Eichmann did not deny any of the facts of the case or the holocaust but insisted repeatedly again and again that he was merely following orders and signing paper work. “Just following orders” has become known as the Eichmann defense and it brings up disturbing questions about what humans might be capable of under the right conditions. Was it possible that the monster in Eichmann is in all of us?
This question was put to the test in 1963 by Stanley Milgram in the now infamous Milgram's obedience study. Milgram was a social psychologist at Yale who wanted to explore more deeply the implications of the Eichmann defense. A series of randomly selected subjects were instructed in administrating a basic learning task to another participant. The task included giving a progressively more severe shock for wrong answers.
The subject was under the impression a real electric shock was given each time. But in reality no shock was ever administered. Instead an audio clip was played that gave more and more distraught responses. The participant that was suppose to be receiving the shocks was behind a screen and was actually a member of the research team. They would, after a few shocks, pound on the wall and complain about a heart condition. Then a few shocks later they would cease all communications.
Many people when they first hear about the experiment predict few people will proceed to the maximum voltage. In fact, Milgram asked a group of psychology majors before the experiment what they thought would happen. It was predicted that barely over one percent would go all the way.
The results are often surprising the first time you see them: 26 out of the 40 participants (65 percent) administered the full shock, and not a single subject stopped before 300 volts. All the subjects, at one point at least, expressed concern, many offering to give back their compensation if they could quit, but with the single sentence prod from the researcher they continued. Of the subjects that did stop early, none checked on the learner, or inquired about their welfare.
Milgram's work forces us to realize that Eichmann is human just like any of us, and all of us are capable of horrific acts when following those we see as authority figures. But how is this possible? What is the psychology that allows people to perform these heinous acts? I had personally never been in a situation like the subjects of Milgram's experiment and so any of my guesses were academic. Enter the waterboarding experiment.
There are clearly differences in the circumstances of what I did and the others that I have illustrated but there are also strong similarities. When all the planning was done and everything setup I stood above one of my best friends prepared to administer what has been labeled again and again as psychological torture. What were my thoughts? What was the internal conflict this produced? Not much to tell the truth. I simply switched gears into what I call a procedural mode. I had things to monitor, such as water level, flow rate, response of my friend, etc. The in-the-moment needs to measure and manipulate the situation allowed me to completely divorce myself from any of the higher questions and problems about what I was going to do. I had no major internal struggle because I wasn't focused on the questions or issues that would create it. I found it very easy to switch into this psychological state. Humans are animals and animals are primarily designed to be able to accomplish goal-directed tasks. While we maybe capable of setting up a much wider variety of goals once they are set we just fall back into getting from point A to point B.
Ever driven home after a long day arriving in your driveway with no real memory about how you got there? All of us should be able to come up with examples of using procedural goal-directed behavior that is relatively divorced from any sort of higher order moral or ethical element of our psyche. When I decided that the goal was to administer the waterboarding treatment for the video camera I was able to move smoothly into my goal-directed neural pathways and didn't have to worry about the wider questions until the goal was accomplished. The subjects of Milgram's experiment, while occasionally expressing concern over what they were doing, were essentially just headed towards an assigned goal and moving through motions and actions needed to get there. Perhaps this is what Eichmann faced. Every day he woke up and had to perform a series of actions to accomplish a set goal. Rather than tapping into a dark evil psychological state Eichmann was simply using the same part of the brain that allows us to drive through a yellow light without an intense moral debate about whether we should have stopped or not.
These same questions of what we are as humans has come forward once again as questions arise about treatment of prisoners in the war on terror and the war in Iraq. In 1971 Philip Zimbardo from Stanford did an experiment where a group of randomly selected undergraduates were split into groups of prisoners and prison guards. For several weeks the basement of the psychology department was to be a prison while Zimbardo studied the psychological dynamics of what occurred. Instead the experiment revealed how quickly out of control humans can get in the right circumstances. Zimbardo has created a great on-line resource to study just how bad things got but suffice it to say that the experiment was halted early and once more it was demonstrated how easily we as humans can fall into the traps of committing heinous acts in the our goal-directed behavior. Zimbardo's work hit the forefront of attention once more after the Abu Ghraib prison disaster. Abu Ghraib is not an isolated incident it is the by-product of our basic human nature.
What is the take home message from all of this? I have learned through my studies and now first hand experience that the psychology that allows us to do terrible things is not the exception but the rule. Rather than needing just the right circumstances, or some terrible random act, each of us is inclined to fall back on it rather than rise above it. But I also know that most of us manage to live our lives as good people. We are perfectly capable of rising above our evil but we can give ourselves no excuse and no lee way. The question of whether waterboarding is torture misses the point. Maybe it is a gray area maybe it is not, but if we allow ourselves this one exception we will loose control of ourselves. We must stand firm and give no opportunity for the monster in each of us to emerge. We must always be the better person we must always be prepared to rise above. Rather then seeing how far we can push things till we become the next Nazi Germany and finding the line to walk between war crimes and interrogation we should push ourselves to be more humane than ever. We as a people must stand up and say that things like waterboarding will not be tolerated there is no gray area in torture.
On June 1st 1962 Adolf Eichmann was executed by hanging. His ashes were spread over international water so that no nation could build a monument to his passing. No tears will be wept as the man clearly exemplified the horror that we are capable of as humans. But that's the lesson, as much as we would wish to deny it, Eichmann was human and each of us must choose not to be like him. Each of us must actively work to rise above the inner monster or it will win and what happens next I don't want to know.
Yesterday, my waterboarding video caught the attention of the Wall Street Journal and a pointilized rendition of my face wound up on the front page. Good Morning America called at 9 AM wondering if I was interested in an all expense paid trip to New York. The media circus continued throughout the day and night and I basked in my 15 minutes of fame. If you haven’t seen the video here is a repost:
In my original blog I was only interested in the experience of waterboarding. In this post I would like to discuss whether or not this is in fact torture.
Is waterboarding torture? Yes. While it doesn’t cause any lasting, physical damage in a controlled setting, it does trick the brain into having the sensation of drowning. I conducted my experiment in a controlled environment. It was my priority to foresee any health risks and minimize the endangerment to my body. The outcome of any waterboarding session is subject to the demeanor of the interrogator . He or she could potentially abuse the method and cause real drowning. Even if the interrogation only simulates drowning it still causes psychological stress on the victim. Therefore, according to International Humanitarian Law, waterboarding falls under the category of torture.
No physical or mental torture, nor any other form of coercion, may be inflicted on prisoners of war to secure from them information of any kind whatever. Prisoners of war who refuse to answer may not be threatened, insulted, or exposed to any unpleasant or disadvantageous treatment of any kind.
What did it feel like when I was waterboarding? I felt blind panic to breath followed by an even higher state of panic when I tried to inhale and realized I could not.
Would I do it again? No! It’s torture. I’m not some fat guy in the circus taking live cannon balls in the gut every night for applause. This isn’t a freak show. I created a spectacle to gather attention to a point. I’m satisfied that the point has been made. It’s torture.
Would I ever suggest using waterboarding to prevent a future 9/11, terrorist type of attack? I’m not a policy maker. I am only a layman who has subjected himself to the experience, but I've been getting this question a lot. My answer has been, "No." Torture is a technique of warfare. I believe that warfare is only wise if diplomacy fails. Even a brilliant military strategist like Sun Tzu hints at this:
For to win one hundred victories in one hundred battles is not the acme of skill. To subdue the enemy without fighting is the acme of skill.
If one comes into a position where torture is a necessary option, the problem is not whether the victim will suffer in that moment. That is just a horrible symptom of a deeper rooted, endemic issue of human relations that has previously gone unchecked. There will always be conflict between parties. The solution to the torture debate lies in how we address our initial discord with one another.
Why did I do it? I was tired of hearing politicians and pundits argue about whether or not it was torture when the materials were so accessible that they could do it without leaving home. I did it to show that it could be done. I wanted to add a visceral component to an otherwise abstract debate on the nature of human suffering.
Why did I make a waterboarding video and post it on the Internet? I wanted to document my experience as well as build awareness. The purpose of this blog is to create social change using media. I hope that by subjecting myself to waterboarding it has added a fresh perspective to the dialogue. What follows is a list of links that react to my video.
Military correspondent Yochi Dreazen's Front Page Wall Street Journal article started it all. I think that it's articulately written and the most true to my feelings on the subject of waterboarding.
My friend Trent Toulouse was the guy who poured the water on me. He's posted a guest blog on my site that looks at the experience from the point of view of the torturer.
Albuquerque's local CBS affiliate KRQE 13 ran Taste of Torture as the top story on their 10 PM news program. It was a classic, "If it Bleeds it Leads" story. The reporter Kim Holland's angle on the phenomenon was that we were just three dudes, kicking back eating pizza, drinking beer and looking for some fun. Fun that could've cost one local Rio Rancho man his life.
There are also a lot of blogs out there carrying my video. Reading some of the feedback coverage is like walking through a hall of mirrors. Dreazin's WSJ article was an analysis of my blog, the pro bloggers wrote a reaction to his piece, the amateur bloggers respond to the pro bloggers critique and the meaning of the story slowly gets diffused until eventually all that's left is a green image of me spitting up water and some troll in the comment section remarking, "Dumbass." That said, my favorite blog thus far has been www.gawker.com's Waterboarding... So Hot Right Now (The headline was probably inspired by a comment my sister made about puggles on my myspace acount). The comment section of the Gawker article is hilarious. I think they might've pioneered the inevitable waterboarding subculture.
Web 2.0 made this possible. My video is only a minute long. It took minimum production to construct and yet brought the issue to the interest of thousands of people. It just goes to show that anyone with a video camera and a free account to Blogger and Youtube can advocate a cause to a mass audience. This is a powerful medium.
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