Category Archives: Travel and Culture

The Long-Awaited Beard Update

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While going through my normal Tuesday afternoon routine of looking at pictures of myself, I realized that it has been almost exactly one year since I began growing the beard. In fact, loyal followers of this blog know that regular updates on the progress of my unsightly (n. displeasing to the eye) beard were once a staple of the Journal. As I have grown more self-important, I shifted the focus to subjects that would make me sound like I knew something about international development, when, in fact, I do not. But, like the prodigal son, I will return to the low-brow self-criticism that was a hallmark of this blog one year ago.

Unfortunately, not much has changed.  Below is a picture taken last December on a trip down the Mekong River in Vietnam.  I’ve highlighted the problems I faced then:

As you can see from the picture above, I could have a rockin’ beard were it not for the bald spot right in the middle of my chin.  I suppose that, by that logic, bald people assume that they could have a rockin’ mane were it not for the fact that their scalp contains a circular area upon which no hair grows.  Sometimes life gives you lemons, so you make lemonade, except that lemonade has salmonella and you become sick.  This is what happened when I grew my beard.  I went to my father’s office yesterday to use the fax machine.  His office manager, who I hadn’t seen in a few years, pointed to my face and said “What’s that?”  “A beard,” I said.  “It’s a bit misshapen, I know.”  “Well, you know, it takes some time to grow.  How long have you had it for?” she asked.  “A year.”  Awkward silence.  Onto the next subject.

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Thoughts on Leaving

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I’m writing this on the plane from Bacolod, where I have spent that last 10 months, to Manila. [Note: I got back 4 days ago, and only now am getting around to posting this] Tomorrow I’ll get on another flight to Tokyo, then another to Detroit, and one more back to Boston to the home of my birth.  It is a good opportunity to write a stream-of-consciousness piece on leaving.

I’ve called Bacolod my home for the better part of a year.  True, I’ve used the Philippines as a hub for the rest of Southeast Asia, but Bacolod has been my home for seven of those ten months.  When I return home from Bangkok or Saigon or Hong Kong, it isn’t to Boston.  Home has been Bacolod.  That is no longer the case, and that fact creates mixed emotions.  But first, some background that place.

The Philippines is an archipelago with 7,100 islands.  Negros is located in the middle of the country, in a region called the Visayas, which also includes Cebu, Panay, Leyte, and Samar.  It is the divided into two provinces – Negros Occidental, of which Bacolod is the capital, and Negros Oriental.  It is called the Land of Sugar because it produces the majority of the sugarcane in the country.  In Bacolod, if you want to support local commerce, just pour out a couple of sugar packets.  Negros is also beautiful.  An active volcano, Mt. Kanla-on, stands prominently inland from the coastal city of Bacolod.  Get outside the city and you sink into miles and miles of sugarcane, standing about two meters high and very green.  When you aren’t surrounded by sugarcane, you might be looking out at lime green rice fields, low and vast.  Look to your right on the cliffside road to Dumaguete, the capital of Negros Oriental, and you see the coastline – blue meets green as you drive the dividing line.

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Introduction to a Series of Essays

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I am in my final month here, coming to the end of my road after a long trip.  I spent 7 months in the Philippines, two weeks each in Cambodia, Thailand, and Burma, a week in Vietnam, four days in Hong Kong, and an afternoon in Japan.  I am taking time to reflect on my time here and pull together everything I have learned into a set of coherent ideas of what it all means. I arrived in December of 2009 knowing next to nothing about microfinance, economic development, or the issue of poverty in developing countries.  I understood these things on a conceptual level, but, as faithful readers of this journal know, my views on what it is and what it does have changed with time.

I have come to the conclusion that poverty is a limitlessly nuanced and complex topic that only becomes more confusing as your understanding of its causes deepen.  It is the product of an interrelated confluence of factors that enable and exacerbate one another.  Everything is a chicken-egg situation.  Because there are no levers to pulls, there is no such thing as a silver bullet to end poverty, despite what some might have you believe.  Microfinance addresses a specific deficiency by increasing access to financial services for the poor.  Microfinance institutions use their position and reach to offer other services – healthcare, education, energy, etc. – but are limited in their ability to really make an impact in these areas.  That is because these services are the province of the state, and their deficiency is due to the failings of the government, whose politicians are democratically elected, but neglect to fulfill their promises of reform and development in the face of the promise of wealth.  Corruption is so deeply entrenched in the bureaucracy that it is immutable in the status quo.
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Colonizing Africa: The Video Game

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The other day I was researching the Berlin Conference for a post I am writing.  A couple of hyperlinks later, I ended up on the page of Henry Morton Stanley, the explorer who helped King Leopold II take control of the Congo Free State (now the Democratic Republic of the Congo and rape capital of the world) and inspiration for the lead character in Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness.  And this led me to an incredible discovery: among the thousands of games released for the original Nintendo Entertainment System, there is one very rare and little known game called “Stanley: The Search for Livingstone.”  Here is the description:

Stanley and the Search for Dr. Livingston (after “David Livingstone“) is a relatively obscure NES game that appeared in one of the first 50 issues of Nintendo Power magazine. It takes place in the “deepest and darkest” part of Africa in 1871. The player, as reporter Henry Morton Stanley (after Sir Stanley, 1841-1904), is exploring the last of the mysterious jungle regions for European colonization when his professor, Dr. Livingston (patterned after Dr. David Livingstone, with an ending “e”), gets kidnapped by some African tribesmen. Now, the player must explore one of the last uncharted parts of Africa to save his mentor and end an era of exploring Africa.

If anyone has this game or knows where to get it, please contact me immediately.

Develop Economies Goes to Davao

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I am going to a Microfinance conference in Davao in southern Philippines for the next few days.  The conference is called “Beyond Credit” and will feature speakers from the Philippines and around the world.  I will consider it a fact finding mission, which I will distill in the blog here at Develop Economies.

Pastor Rod: A Christian Evangelist’s Strange Role in the Sudan

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A month ago I got cable television for the first time in 8 months so that I could watch the World Cup, which airs in the Philippines at 2:30 AM.  And lately, I find myself stopping at Daystar – “faith-based TV for today’s generation” – for a lot of different reasons.  For one thing, it is difficult to comprehend just how easy it is for these guys to ask for huge amounts of money.  For another, whenever I see these guys I can’t help but think of Bill Paxton, AKA Simon, in True Lies (“let’s face it Harry – the ‘vette gets ’em wet”).  There is one in particular, a fellow by the name of Pastor Rod Parsley, who is particularly intriguing, in part because of what he is doing in southern Sudan. Continue reading →

Develop Economies Goes to Hong Kong

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I’m heading to Hong Kong for four days of hi-jinks.  In the meantime, I’ll take the opportunity to resurrect a post I wrote that mentions Hong Kong as an example of how a colonial power created a model for a city that was exported to the mainland and catalyzed the development of China.  Can it be done somewhere else?  I’ll try to find out.

“Neo-Colonialism as a Development Strategy”

Interlude: Cool Discoveries in Nature

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In nature news, there have been two major firsts discovered in animal kingdom.  In my previous life, I was a biologist, making this post a logical tangent.  An immortal jellyfish and a photosynthetic sea slug.  It is a banner year for fans of evolution.

1.  Immortality: Take It, It’s Yours

The turritopsis nutricula species of jellyfish may be the only animal in the world to have truly discovered the fountain of youth. Since it is capable of cycling from a mature adult stage to an immature polyp stage and back again, there may be no natural limit to its life span. Scientists say the hydrozoan jellyfish is the only known animal that can repeatedly turn back the hands of time and revert to its polyp state (its first stage of life).

The key lies in a process called transdifferentiation, where one type of cell is transformed into another type of cell. Some animals can undergo limited transdifferentiation and regenerate organs, such as salamanders, which can regrow limbs. Turritopsi nutricula, on the other hand, can regenerate its entire body over and over again. Researchers are studying the jellyfish to discover how it is able to reverse its aging process. Because they are able to bypass death, the number of individuals is spiking. They’re now found in oceans around the globe rather than just in their native Caribbean waters.  “We are looking at a worldwide silent invasion,” says Dr. Maria Miglietta of the Smithsonian Tropical Marine Institute.

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Dirty Politics: The Philippine Elections

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This is a campaign poster found plastered on a wall on the side of the road somewhere in Bacolod.  It shows Benigno “Noynoy” Aquino, the current frontrunner for president in the Philippines election, with Andal Ampatuan Jr., perpetrator of the worst election massacre in the history of the Philippines.  Above their pictures is the phrase “Patay Tayo Dyan!” – “We’re dead meat!”  Of course, they are not actually running together, but it is a good campaign trick for his opponents.  This is a recent addition to the campaign posters that line every inch of visible space in Bacolod and the rest of the Philippines.

The national election is a great time to be in the Philippines.  It happens once every six years, and the country fires up.  Tonight is the night before the official election, which means the candidates have their people in the streets handing out money – 500 pesos at a time, or $10 – in exchange for votes.  When the candidate cannot buy the voters, he rents a bus, fills it with beer and pork, and sends the people to the beach for a day of drinking, partying, and non-voting.   In America, we pay lobbying firms to bribe the politicians for us and use Karl Rove to divide up the electorate.  In the Philippines, they cut through the fat and shoot from the hip, if you’re pickin’ up what I’m puttin’ down.

Imelda Marcos, wife of the Ferdinand Marcos and owner of a lot of stolen Filipino money. Now Congresswoman Marcos.