Arriving: Asuncion, Paraguay

Our layover in Buenos Aires wasn’t what I would call welcoming. Sure, we did not have time to get to know Argentinean culture in any real capacity but, other than the delicious espresso, the whole experience could have been much better. There was an overwhelming feeling of being labeled and judged as foreigners, not in an observational sense (for I am sure it was more than obvious) but in a very condescending manner instead. I am used to the whole ‘American’ stereotype and honestly, I pretty much agree with most characterizations of ‘Americans’ traveling abroad but, here was a group of Peace Corps volunteers and still, no mercy. It didn’t feel so good--trying to stumble through my Spanish to order a sandwich from a waitress who just didn’t seem to have the time for our ineptitude at all. There were a few old women remarking quite blatantly how we smelled (of course, anyone would after three straight days of plane hopping). And then, after some problems processing our sketchy Peace Corps visas, our flight attendants (who were Brazilian actually) did little to hide their annoyance at our obviously inferior Spanish speaking abilities.
    But in the end, I did hear 4 languages in under 4 hours. It was English, the Spanish, then Portuguese and then finally, I hear my first words of Guarani. It was a little much to take in all at once. Once leaving Buenos Aires, we flew northwest for a short ways before reaching Asuncion, the capital of Paraguay. The plane rolled to a stop and a couple from the back of the plane sprinted to the front, obviously in a hurry to get to wherever it is that they were going. As it turns out, the woman in the couple was actually a famous Paraguayan model/actress who made quite an international name for herself during the last World Cup due to her particular choice of cell-phone placement (search ‘Paraguay’ in Google and you’ll see what I mean). Welcome to Paraguay.
    As I get off the plane, the humidity and heat settle calmly over my body. Its less intense than in Miami but its also different. This evening heat seems to be the fading effect of an extremely hot day (the daytime temp hit 100 degrees for the first time in a few months--and this is still springtime in Paraguay). The group loaded onto buses to take us across the city to a small conference center/‘compound’ to spend the night. The sun was setting and the smog was smoldering over the poorly labeled streets with a combined effect similar to having a foggy lens being pulled over my eyes. Cars seemed haplessly oblivious to road signs--they drove up one-ways, across medians, or just fearlessly at merging traffic hoping that the opposing driver won’t call a bluff. Compact little coups and rusty old sedans jousted for position with over-sized and unbelievably overcrowded Mercedes buses while motorcyclists and mopeds weaved in and out at will. A police man was parked on one corner with his lights flashing but made no efforts to intervene; his presence, if actually intended as a deterrent, was in reality little more than a gesture of authority. This was motorized anarchy.
    And as street lights cycled through their colorful displays, it soon became obvious that these too were arbitrary in meaning. Not only was I in a country where I did not know the language, I now realized I did not even know how to interpret the road signs. As the bus sat waiting at a green light, several people started to shuffle past the bus. A few in military uniforms, a few kids trying to throw themselves on windshields and clean them for a few pesos, a few joggers. And then, an old woman walked past. Propped up on her hip and dangling over her shoulder was a small boy. He was emaciated--atrophied legs, swollen joints, a head that lolled aimlessly from side to side in concert with the bump-bump-bump of her hips--resembling someone suffering form some sort of muscular dystrophy. And she just carried him, seemingly with no particular destination, walking slowly along the median between two maddening sides of opposing traffic. She was unfazed, he was expressionless, and that’s just what it was. The light turned red and we drove on. Both were quickly swallowed by the smog.
    We drove through streets of a city unlike any I have ever seen before. There was a certain feeling of colonial architecture but underscored with an overwhelming feeling of passing time. It was almost as if each building were unusually prone to gravity and were therefore, slowly being pulled underneath the earth. There is nothing new here. No new cars, no new houses, no new sidewalks. Even the trees seem burdened with time. Shrubs hold precariously to a very dusty, iron-rich and blood-red soil that seems libel to blow away if one but breathes too heavily. Garbage itself constitutes its own unique feature in the cityscape. There are no large buildings, no skyscrapers. The few vestiges of American consumerism remain isolated and contained in small islands, each erupting upward with 4 or 5 billboards stacked together like sardines. The soccer fields display their true colors as the grass has been kicked away leaving behind only a large patch of red earth flanked by white-stained-red goal posts.
    Asuncion is a city with a flavor, and not in the figurative sense (although it does also have plenty of cultural flavor as well), but in a very literal sense. Farms just outside the city spent the day burning off brush from their fields, presumably to make room for new crops but also to recycle nutrients to the soil. The entire city smells of burnt rubber. The flavor of Asuncion today is ash. Tomorrow it may well be flowers and lavender, but today the air tastes like a city of coals.
    We arrived in our compound, were warned not to stray outside the gates, and spent the evening eating and relaxing from several days of travel. Showers were quite a welcomed treat as well. Tonight is the last night we spend alone. Tomorrow we move in with host families. Seeing as I might not get a good 8 hours in a while, I shut my eyes and roll over, sleeping sound with the knowledge that the guards at the gate, armed with a shotgun apiece, should take care of any troubles we might have. Till next time.


In way over my head,
-little hupo

Arriving: Miami

    If anyone believes that sea level rise won’t really effect the United States, they have either forgotten about Hurricane Katrina or have never been to Miami. It is a city that doesn’t seem to rise out of anything--no great land mass defiantly projecting itself out of the ocean--just a mass of dark water, then lights and there you have it, Miami. The lights of the perfectly linear boulevards twinkle amidst great swaths of seemingly abysmal water, like a perfectly-architectured galaxy among the endless of expanse of deep-space. The absolutely perpendicular streets hint at an alarming degree of premeditation underlying the construction of this city; even from a plane at night I get the strong impression that there is not much of nature to be seen here. It’s almost as if a huge extension chord runs from underneath this city to an enormous plug somewhere in for less-glam regions of our country (perhaps the midwest). Some far away place that faithfully pumps electricity into these streets where it is illuminated, projected and then hopelessly swallowed up in the black-hole ocean that surrounds it. I find some sort of mechanical, almost industrial beauty in the site of the sprawling, well-planned switchboard that is Miami. Still, I don’t hold my breath.
    When I get off the plane the humidity hits me in the stomach. Its like a clamp has been placed over my entire body, each endplate has been padded with down pillows, but it applies considerable pressure all the same. I hear a man say to his friend, “In Miami, if you don’t e-speak e-spanish, forget about it,” and he is not mistaken. It seems that all I hear after I de-plane is rapid-fire Spanish. Even the Bangladeshi cabbie and the African doorman ‘e-speak e-spanish’. Tomorrow I am gonna buy me a Spanish-English dictionary, which should serve well until I get into my local village in Paraguay where they won’t be speaking much Spanish at all, but instead Guarani (a language I have no familiarity with). So it goes.
    This is the first leg, among the centipede that will be my journey, in my travel to Paraguay with the Peace Corps for the next 2 years and 3 months. I am currently staying at a hotel by the Miami airport. I have two days here, a brief training session on Wednesday, followed by a midnight flight to Buenos Aires, Argentina. Then it’s onto Asuncion, Paraguay where I will be living with a host family for three-months of cultural, lingual, and just general immersion into Paraguayan culture. On December 15th, I will be moving out to my host village finally where I will spend the next two years doing agriculture, educational, subsistence and development work with a local community. That’s the plan at least.
    Well, my mind is spinning with emotion--I can’t tell if this is me slowly loosing my grip (which may not be such a bad thing considering I am about to be thrust into something entirely foreign and unknown) or if this is just the result of several days of sleepless nights. To all my freinds and family at home, I love you and I will miss you, but I will keep in touch. To my love, Jacqueline--see you out here in the South American wilderness in 8 months, I can’t wait! And to everyone else who might unfortunately stumble across this blog, I hope you follow along with my adventure as well.

with love,
little hupo

My new, new Peace Corps assignment

Hello friends,
     Strange news from the "trying to plan my life" department: As of two weeks ago, my Honduras assignment was canceled by the Peace Corps due to budget issues and, presumably some large-scale cuts. Since then, I have been offered a variety of new positions from Sub-saharan Africa, to West Africa to South America. I have chosen the South American position and will now be serving for 27 months in Paraguay starting on September 25th.
      In the meantime, I have had to find a bunch of other endeavors to occupy this seeming "dead time" between returning from South Africa and leaving for the PC. For now, I will be volunteering several times a week at the Rodale Institute, an organization that works with organic farming and development initiatives. Also, I am working with the infamous Professor Petra Tshakert from Penn State (also part of the team in South Africa) to co-author a paper (or two) on gender/climate change issues. In additions, I will be working on a research proposal with Petra and several other professors in the coming months. In my free time, I should have some room for free-lance landscaping (the Plantique gig has run its course), and probably hanging out with my beautiful girlfriend Jacqueline. Life is crazy, but good indeed. Here's to budget cuts, bureaucracy and yet another gorgeous country. Paraguay, here I come...just not quite yet. In the meantime...

Much love,
little hupo

Peace Corps Assignment: Honduras

Hello Friends,
     As of this week, I have accepted an offer to be a Peace Corps volunteer in Honduras for the next 2 and a half years. I will be serving as a Protected Areas Management Advisor somewhere within the cloud forests, or in the indigenous wilderness, or along the pristine coast. The assignment involves advising policy and management for protected areas as they interact and conflict with local farmers and livelihoods. It seems like I just got back from South Africa yesterday--certainly the entire experience is still reverberating in my mind--but its already almost time for another adventure. My current itinerary is as follows:

July 6th: Leave for Honduras
July 7th: In country trainging
September 23rd (2011): Project Assignment begins
September 20th (2013): Assignment complete

     Looking at the information I have received so far, I am not sure how much contact I will be able to maintain as Honduras is the 3rd poorest and least developed country in the Western Hemisphere (behind Haiti and Nicaragua). I may be able to keep the blog up (at best) and or may be limited to one or two phone calls home every month (or two), it really depends and I won't know till I am at "home" in country. Still, I will try to keep everyone updated as much as possible. Thanks for all the love and support.

excited, nervous and with no idea what to expect,
little hupo

Leaving home for home

    I am departing Africa, in love, in awe, in confusion, in inspiration, in happiness, in sadness and with a great sense of something. I am not leaving Africa, surely, this would be impossible, for a part of me will remain here forever. I have left a part of myself along the journey through times and places and peoples, across an entire country that I still barely understand. A part of my heart lives in a thatch-roofed rondeval in the Transkei, along the Wild Coast of the RSA. A part of me floats effortlessly in the seas of the Indian ocean, in the quiet forests of Dwessa, across the immense expanses of Mkhambathi. I have left a part of my soul in rural schools in the Eastern Cape, in Cwebe and Hobeni, and with the many other people we have met along the way. There is a saying among the Xhosa people, ‘If you meet someone for the first time, they are a stranger. But if you seen them again, they are a friend’. So many new and beautiful people have become friends and and entirely new place has become a new home. A part of me has returned to mother Africa, the place from where we have all come. A part of me is now more complete.
    My experiences here cannot be described adequately or conveyed properly. Hell, I, myself, cannot even begin fully comprehend everything that has happened in the past 2 and a half months. Processing is taking place and my mind has slowly begun to make sense of life in the South Africa. Leaving is bittersweet. Many more adventures still await me. I am now a college graduate. Life is changing. I am changing. The way I view and understand the world is changing. I grasp tightly to very little. I am floating through a beautiful world and I am at the mercy of its waves. There are forces far greater than me. I am stronger than I once thought. People are beautiful, so beautiful. The world is tremendous and unbelievably huge and wild and so worth saving. There are so many things worth fighting for. There are so many things worth living for.
    In the beginning of the trip a friend asked my why my blog was titled ‘Tones of Home’. At the time, I didn’t really have an answer, but now I do. This is a travel blog, of course, to document my life and journeys over the next few years of my life. But it is also a blog about home, finding it elsewhere, in the strangest of places with the strangest of people at the strangest of times. For a number of reasons, I have felt my notion of “home” gradually changing since I began in college 4 years ago. I have reached a point in my life where “home” is no longer defined, it is nebulous and shifting and it assumes many forms. In this sense, my home is where I am, with whomever I am there with. With strangers and friends and by myself. As I wander, home wanders with me. As I seek home, my home seeks with me. It is a strange feeling, but one that I am eager to embrace.
    At the end of this journey, I tip my hat and raise my glass to the beauty of South Africa and its people. I cannot wait for the next great adventure. Thank you for all that supported me in this endeavor and shared in it with me. And so now, I am leaving home for home and yet, I remain here forever. So it goes, life is good.


from home,
little hupo

Sabonana Transkei

     This last week passed slowly and heavily with the weight of this morning’s departure ever present in my mind. We left the Haven, our home for the past 2 and a half months, in the early African dawn that peeked shyly through the trailing rain clouds. Our journey from this point will take us back along the coastal route of the N2, through the folded mountains and the tumultuous landscape, through the profound scenery and mosaic terrain that is South Africa, all the way back to Cape Town. This is not a journey out of Africa, however, and certainly not a trip back to the US only to leave this place behind. At this point, such a feat would be impossible. Instead, this is a progression (not a regression) throughout the continually unfolding contingency of my life. I cannot leave this place behind--parts of myself are held in the waters and soils and the woods and the people that I have seen and known and made a home with for the past months of my life. Regardless, the upcoming week still holds many adventures before we actually leave and many more stories to be told.
    Before leaving the Wild Coast and bidding a final goodbye to the Transkei, we made a serious point of making our farewell fittingly epic. After a few nights of “borrowing” canoes for nighttime river adventures and failed ocean excursions, after morning sunrises from the lighthouse, after bonfires and music and singing Xhosa songs on the beach, after fishing and tagging sharks in a storm, after crossing shark and crocodile infested rivers, after rum and local brews and dancing, we drove out through the same rolling hills and along the same dirt roads that had once taken us to this unfamiliar place. We now leave it as a home away from home, sometimes maybe even a home in its own right, with friends and people and stories and memories that will stay with us forever. To my new friends, I wish you all the love and happiness in the world. See you in time, surely, but not soon enough.
    This afternoon, we arrived just outside Ado Elephant Park, a national park on the southern coast that prides itself on housing the “Big 5” (that is white rhino, lion, jaguar, cape buffalo and of course, elephant) as well as a coastline with great whites and whales. Tomorrow, it is early morning and late night game drives through the park and relaxing in the beautiful aura of nature that has, at this point in human history, become exclusively confined to demarcated areas and national parks.

Contract Killing the Animal Kingdom: The Un-natural Nature of Modern Poaching

(written February 22nd, posting delayed due to issues with press statements and media release of information regarding the following incident)

            I wore shoes today for the first time in a long time. You see, unless one is trudging through the curious and unpredictable Eastern Cape forest, there really is no need for footwear in these parts. Today, however, this was not the case--shoes were required. As of 9 this morning, we were informed that the CEO of the Eastern Cape Parks Board was flying in by chopper and we were to meet him. The reason for his visit was two-fold: (1) to briefly meet and greet with us students and officially welcome us to the Eastern Cape nature reserves and (2) to deal with the white rhino poaching that was discovered in Dwesa (just a stones throw across the Mbashe) earlier this weekend.

            As I discussed in an earlier post, the white rhino discovered in Dwesa last weekend had been poached some months before. But between the large area of the park, the thickness of the Wild Coast forests, the relative elusive nature of the rhino, their small numbers and the reasonable limitations of constant patrolling, the carcass had gone unnoticed until just this Saturday afternoon while we were doing our field work in Dwesa. A forensic specialist was immediately flown in from Jo-burg in order to try and piece together the puzzle of how exactly these poachers got into the park, dodged the radar of the park rangers, and managed to get back out of the park with a rhino horn that could fill the back of a bakkie (that’s Afrikaans for pick-up truck).

            From talking to Park Ranger Jan Venter, I gathered several reasons as to how something like this might happen. Essentially, it has a lot to do with how the nature of poaching has changed over the past few decades. Since the infamous poaching of the 1980’s that brought the white rhino to near extinction, poaching techniques have adapted. As conservation management quelled the rhino genocide of the 80’s and gradually improved their numbers across the African continent in the 90’s, poaching efforts became much more organized and much more sophisticated. Even despite the great overhead costs involved in a rhino poaching operations, the money in this market has become so good that larger, well-organized syndicates are taking up the torch and bringing illegal poaching of critically endangered animals into this new century.

            The problem is an economic one: as the supply of rhino horns on the black market decreases, largely due to improved conservation efforts, the demand, and therefor the price, for the animal increases as well. Often times, this increase occurs exponentially until the cost/benefit equilibrium is thrown into another functional scale, one where the potential for profits greatly exceeds even the strictest penalties for such activities. The horn poached from Dwesa last week from one of the 3 remaining female rhinos on the reserve is estimated to fetch R500,000 (or somewhere just under $100,000 USD) on the black market (likely in China or elsewhere in Asia).

            No longer is it local people hunting for small financial benefits (as was largely the case in the 1980’s). Instead, it is now international cartels of powerful individuals with inroads into illegal markets--there is no point in killing a rhino unless one can get it to a willing buyer. These people have the capital to front the funding for the new-age technologies required to poach and transport these items. The players have changed, but, ironically, the game remains the same (pun intended). The money is just too good. At times, it almost seems that strong conservation might even be the worst fate to befall these animals, as very strict limitations on “wild animal harvesting” create such a strong demand and such an intense market for their goods.

            And yet, the most disheartening part is this: the individual who pulled the trigger on this lone, docile rhino might have turned a profit of R3,000 (thats somewhere just over $400 USD). This individual was likely a local farmer trying to make some extra money to put his kids through school. The way the system works is as such: the large cartels often hire (for very little money, i.e. $400 USD) local people to stake out, gather intelligence and actually do the dirty work of poaching in the park. The operation itself probably lasts for several weeks or months even. It is well planned and executed, as the penalty for getting caught is becoming increasingly more severe. When the time is right, the cartel organizers give the go-ahead, the locals go into action, do as their told, and an endagered rhino gets killed. Big people make money, the locals think their getting a great deal and of this all happens within the context of a poverty ridden community sitting on the outskirts of one of the most biodiverse ecosystems on the planet.

            In a way, this entire system, in all its neo-liberal, top-down, hyper-capitalistic glory, is not only degrading to the environment but also to the livelihoods of people as well. The shortsightedness of poaching is this: a quick and big profit today looks great on the surface, but when considering how much revenue could be generated for a local community through a healthy rhino population within their community-owned nature reserve, it becomes evident that these people are getting exploited and robbed on a massive scale. This system circumvents local ownership of land resources and community investments into nature reserves in a very clever, extremely dastardly, but very clever way. Ultimately, it is only those already poor and marginalized populations that suffer.

            But this is not the only face of poaching--sometimes the facade is far more benign. For large, high-profile animals, poaching it is difficult. Often times, however, as with smaller animals (such as many antelope species), “poaching” is really just a conservationist word for “subsistence hunting” undertaken by local people to supplement their diet. One day, a person is a hunter on communal land. After the fences go up and the rangers come out, that same “hunter” has now become a “poacher”, but one with an absolute necessity to put food on the table for his family. The politics and intricacies of these issues are immense, and, unfortunately, it is often the local people that are caught in the cross-fire.

            The individuals involved in these problems--from the local people, to the cartel organizer, to the buyer, to the Parks Board, to the Parks Rangers, to all of us complicit in the same economic system--are extremely varied, making it so difficult, both legally and morally, to point the accusing finger. The tragedy is buried within the ambiguity, within the pervasive mentality of our profit-driven society (I don’t mean to sound so overtly like a Marxist, but the self-interests promoted by neo-liberalism might just be the root of the problem). In this situation, we are confronted by many issues: poverty, conservation, bureaucracy, equity, justice, and class-struggles, just to name a few.

            On a similarly sad note, this morning, just after the Parks Board CEO left Cwebe for Dwesa, we were informed of another tragic loss. Zebbie the trademark Zebra from the Haven (in Cwebe) was shot and killed somewhere in the local community. As the last of three Zebra that had integrated themselves into the horse herds here at the park, Zebbie had become the unofficial mascot of the reserve. He drank from the pool, grazed among his distantly related equestrian brethren and between the cotteges, and just last week, took a shit on the stoop in front of my rondevall. He had escaped several days ago through some holes in the fences of the reserve.

            The Haven staff, quite keen on Zebbie, sent out a call to the Parks Board for help in getting Zebbie back into the park. The Parks Board, already dealing with the rhino issue and with limited funds and resources, could not oblige. Zebbie was shot dead yesterday, the second casualty we have witnessed since we arrived here. Sobering, yet again, is perhaps the best word. So it goes.

            *Just as a final note, with the smoke clearing and the actual events of the poaching unfolding, the final death toll is as follows: all five remaining rhinos in Dwesa have been poached, sometime in the past year or so. It is not clear how this all happened, but somehow the remaining herd of these beautiful and endangered animals was systematically slaughtered without the Parks Board or the rangers having known. Also, Zebbie the zebra, as mentioned, was also killed. This is a truly unfortunate tragedy, that is striking very close to home for many people here at the reserve.

            These are the issues that modern conservation and development face. It is not as if these are solely animal issues or human issues, environmental or anthropocentric. They are inseparably both and undeniably intertwined. As humans on this planet, our fates are intimately interwoven within the fabric of the natural world. The future for our world is written in both tongues and we must learn to meander in both realms if we hope to thrive or even survive.

with love and hope from the still Wild, wild Coast,

-little hupo