If looks could kill

Anyway you look at it, I was a bad student; my commitment was atrocious, my marks terrible, my conduct inappropriate and my attendance either tardy or non-existent.  By the time final year had rolled around, there was little to save me from the end of a dole queue.  But after a stern chat from one of my more conscientious lecturers (at the pub, as I recall) I was left with no allusions about my future, “Lift my game, step-up my commitment, or I was out”.

The message must have been delivered with considerable fire and brimstone as it cut through my inebriation sufficiently that upon sobering up, I tidied-up my act and set about trying to catch-up on years of missed learning.  At about the time my commitment started to kick-in, I recall having to work with a group of my fellow students to research and deliver an instructive presentation on the role of body language in practitioner-patient communication. 

I remember finding it surprising at the time that this concept of non-verbal communication embodied a significant breadth of scientific sociological and anthropological research, and some kind of academic curiosity deep within my semi-functioning brain was momentarily tweaked.  Still, old habits die hard, and I took to the assignment with the derision deserved of any un-graded elective.  Together with my fellow indifferents, I delivered a puerile, immature but amusing role play about young, drunken students trying to pick-up in a bar (fertile ground for yer old mate, Donkey, as you can imagine … aside from the picking-up part). 

Perhaps you’re thinking that this was yet another squandered opportunity for me to learn something new and to get serious about my studies.  But let’s face it, it wasn’t as though being able to read and understand body language was ever going to save my life, right?

True enough, I’d say … that is if I had knuckled-down and studied my nuts off, in which case I would have been making mega-squillions right now cutting the toenails of bored millionairesses like all my former peers, and would never have needed to understand body language to make my way in the world.  Given the choice, I would happily succumb to deafness induced by the substantially more boisterous language of money, rather than having to strain every fibre of my impoverished being to catch the allusive whisper of the body. 

The bitter irony is that because of my academic laxity, I was denied the moneyed path, and instead ‘chose’ the more modest pursuit of saving the world, within which one’s success, and indeed one’s very survival can at times rely on one’s ability to recognise and respond appropriately to people’s non-verbal communication.  If only I’d studied!

Anyone who’s ever travelled to a new country will know how it feels to have accidentally committed some cultural faux pas such as shaking hands, walking through the wrong doorway, helping oneself to a meal reserved for someone more important, grabbing your host’s wife on the arse and so-on.  More often than not, these innocent mistakes are taken for what they are, and usually the most adverse outcome is simply a sense of shared embarrassment amongst all parties.

But here in the highlands of Papua New Guinea, I’m discovering that recognising and responding appropriately to the signs and signals of people’s bodies, facial expressions and actions is my only defence against finding myself as the main ingredient in a pot of Highlands Donkey Stew.  In particular, one thing I have learned pretty quickly, and which is a significant departure from other Melanesian cultures, is that looking a stranger directly in the eye is not a chance to exchange a friendly smile, but rather a challenge which can generate an extreme response.

Jared Diamond, in his laborious Guns, germs and steel, explains that when highlander strangers meet, a lengthy discussion ensues, sometimes lasting many hours, during which the strangers attempt to identify whether they are related to, or know anyone in common, simply in an effort to avoid having to try to murder each other.  So ingrained in their culture is the mistrust of strangers and non-kin, that they will kill out of obligation, rather than to simply pass each other by.

What Diamond failed to cite is that their patience and ability to engage in such detailed and lengthy familial exploration are significantly diminished by the presence of two unrelated factors, both of which are found commonly in the highlands these days.

The first is rugby league.  Papua New Guineans are mad for it.  During the recent State of Origin match between Queensland and New South Wales, every woman, man and child in the country did whatever they could to get to watch the game on TV.  In the villages of the eastern highlands, satellite TVs aren’t that easy to come by, so that means getting to the nearest big town before the game.  Goroka is one such town, but as the transports only come to town in the morning, literally hundreds of thousands of highlanders had descended upon the two-block municipality by mid-morning, to watch a game that was not due to start until 6pm.

All day long, scores of people thronged the pavements in large, protective family groups.  Many of the men and women had painted their faces, admittedly in either NSW-blue or QLD-maroon, but utilising traditional, highlands war-paint designs which further increased their menace.

The other factor set to strain inter-clan tolerance in modern-day Papua New Guinea highlands is alcohol, and with nothing better to do for eight hours in the lead-up to the game, SP beer was flowing out of the bars and bottle shops of Goroka like a monolithic highlands god suffering from chronic, supernatural incontinence.

As I wandered through town on my way home that afternoon, I glanced at the menacing, slurring, war-painted faces of the highlands warriors crowding around me, and despite my incomprehension, I felt both fear, and the stirring of something unfamiliar in the pit of my brain.  I meandered cautiously through the crowds and noticed that groups of angry men were moving towards me.  Suddenly, as if a chamber opened in my mind to release latent information from the distant past, I became acutely aware that these hard stares and menacing faces were telling me something.  They were telling me that there was no need to sit and work out who we both might know, because clearly I wasn’t related to any of them … and they were telling me without words, but in no uncertain terms, to get the hell out of there.

I hurried through the crowd and made it home just before the sun went down … just before the game started … and just before the highlanders started burning everything in town. 

So to my stuck-up alma mater I say, “Screw you and your exams, your supplementary exams and your withdrawal of enrolment notices”, it looks like ol’ Donkey learned a thing or two after all.  It just goes to show that there is no need to concentrate all the time at school, and that you really can learn more in two hours at the pub than you can in a whole life time in the classroom.

Picture this, in a hue of blue or maroon, and fueled by alcohol and boredom … and then run!  

Pic:  http://www.pinterest.com/edstok/body-art/

Aversion Therapy

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Fighting the good fight

A rare encounter with truth and honesty.

Isn’t it amazing how much more difficult it is to try to do something properly, compared with the relative ease of simply shooting one’s mouth off with whatever vacuousities pop into one’s cavernous skull at any given moment?

Such as it is that this year’s World AIDS Day post seems to have taken me quite a few weeks to write.  The reason being that for this year’s post, I’ve decided to hold-up on the belly-aching introversion and soul-searching from years gone by, and instead focus very much on the here and now.  This year I am going to come clean on a whole chapter of my life which certain, pretty awful circumstances demanded I kept secret from this blog, and the internet generally.  I’ll leave it up to you and yours to decide on whether action is required.  But in short, for this one-post-only, never-to-be-repeated occasion, I am going to have a go at using this blog for good, rather than evil.

Most of you will know a little something about Tibet; maybe you’ll be aware of the chuckling fat statesman living in India’s hilly north, and perhaps you’ll know that he’s there as a result of an invasion of an ancient kingdom by a now-great superpower some sixty-odd years ago.  If you know that, then you’ll have heard that many countries (a majority of those being ‘Western’ ones), while verbally condemning said super-power for its continued occupation of Tibet and rumoured oppression of its people, have never once made a substantial attempt to moblise international, diplomatic, political and/or military pressure towards the exiled leader’s return, nor the restoration of Tibetans’ religious, political and civil freedoms.

This is the stuff which makes the news (albeit still a long way from the headlines), but what is not so well understood outside of the politically secluded and media-shrouded Tibet Autonomous Region,  is some of the very real vulnerabilities which the average Tibetan faces on a daily basis.

A rough business.

Within what I could only, honestly describe as a pretty fortunate life, I consider one of my greatest fortunes to have been the four and half years I spent working with an amazing, dedicated group of young Tibetans who, every day for the past eight years, have taken to the streets of Lhasa to provide educational resources and condoms to young Tibetan women and men who work in, or live on the periphery of the Tibetan capital’s thriving sex industry.

This might seem a little surprising to the reader who knows Tibet only as a seat of Buddhist enlightenment, but it’s not uncommon in societies whose culture and practices have not been influenced by conservative Christianity, to have fewer hang-ups when it comes to handing over a tenner for a quickie on the way back to the office after a heavy lunch of soup and wontons.

But despite the remarkable client through-put, one shouldn’t go mistaking the commercial sex scene in Lhasa as akin to the seemingly sexual enlightenment of say, Bangkok or São Paulo.  On the contrary, this is an industry whose continued existence is very much driven by the political, social, religious and economic oppression of these unfortunate people.  The reality for Lhasa sex-workers (and their clients) is gritty, grubby, dangerous and (in terms of health, well-being and life-expectancy) very, very dire.

Tibetan sex workers are young; they hail from rural areas, and in most cases, have never engaged in sex work prior to arrival in the city.  They were drawn to sex work as the only alternative for survival, due to a variety of factors which severely limit their opportunities for formal employment.

First and foremost, the majority of Tibetan sex workers have little or no formal education (a few might have completed the poor standard of primary education available in their home county), so literacy is low.

Many of them are also non-citizens.  While there is some relaxing of China’s One Child Policy in the Tibet Autonomous Region, larger, traditional Tibetan families are penalised such that the third, fourth and fifth children are not registered as citizens, and therefore are ineligible for government work, housing and all other state-run services (healthcare, education, social welfare etc).

But one government service that Tibetan sex workers, be they registered citizens or otherwise, are all too familiar with, is the security service.  As the Central Government decrees quotas for city clean-ups, sex workers are systematically and regularly harangued, harassed, locked-up, exploited and abused by the civil and military security forces, of which there has been a dramatic increase in recent years.  Since the civil unrest in Lhasa in March 2008, poor and hungry sex workers have had little alternative than to risk incarceration by working the streets during regular security crackdowns and week-long curfews.  With military foot patrols working day and night and perhaps one of the most sophisticated closed-circuit TV camera networks in the world operating on every street corner, sex workers are regularly caught and/or extorted by the authorities, and incarceration is common.

Added to this, their state-supported, Han-Chinese bosses further exploit them by taking the lion’s share of their meagre earnings, and are complicit in the government’s regular rounding-up of sex workers for enforced blood tests; a human rights violation in itself which is further compounded by the authorities rarely bothering to communicate the results to the frightened sex workers who have unwillingly contributed to meeting government HIV testing quotas.

These young women work out of grimy, confined, poorly-ventilated, unsanitary spaces designed for shop store-rooms, seeing upwards of ten clients a day.  With few exceptions, these Tibetan women had no awareness of sexually transmitted infections (and certainly not HIV) before commencing sex work.  Most had never seen (or even heard of) a condom.

Tibetan sex workers are frighteningly vulnerable to the short and long term effects of sexually transmitted infections; their poor knowledge of these infections and how to prevent them makes them vulnerable, as does their limited literacy, which excludes them from accessing safe sex messages within information booklets and pamphlets.  Added to this, they have few resources with which to obtain condoms, and even if they can buy them, they have little power to negotiate safe sex with their clients.  In the event of contracting a sexually transmitted infection, many have limited legal opportunities to access the government treatment and counselling services, and are forced to secure health care services from exploitative private providers who peddle questionable treatment regimes.

A glimmer of hope.

So you see … not a feel good story this year.  But there is hope, and that hope lies in the hands of that dedicated team I mentioned earlier.  They have been working with young women and men from the Lhasa sex industry for nearly a decade, educating them about the dangers of sexually transmitted infections, both in terms of their immediate health, and their long-term opportunities to give birth to healthy children.

The program works hard to assist young women and men to remain disease free and healthy long enough for them to reach the inevitable end of their sex work careers.  In the meantime, the program staff engage with the sex workers to foster an understanding of, and promote healthy sexual relationships and gender equality with a view to their contributing to a family and/or community in the future.

Sadly, the program is in danger of coming to an abrupt end early next year.  Since the civil unrest in Lhasa in March 2008, China has made it very clear to the outside world that it will not tolerate political dialogue from other nations on Tibet.  It has closed ranks on the issue and shut international tourist traffic down to a well-muzzled trickle.  As such, governments and other international donors who used to support HIV prevention programs in Lhasa, are now too scared to do so for fear of damaging those all-important trade relationships.

And so it is not even a slight exaggeration to say that without support from interested, non-government donors, the vulnerable young women and men of Tibet who find themselves with little alternative than to work the Lhasa sex trade, will soon lose one of the last vestiges of support open to them.  And without this support, they could well be denied the opportunity of reaching any kind of potential as citizens, or simply to dream for a healthy future.

Maybe you’d like to help?

This World AIDS Day, or perhaps this Christmas, if you really want to make a difference to someone’s life, get onto your local MP and tell him or her and their government to grow a pair.  Tibetans suffer some of Asia’s worst poverty, are poorly educated, have limited access to health care and suffer the ongoing physical and emotional abuse of systematic oppression.  The Australian Government should be doing more, and supporting non-political programs like the one I have described could well be a way to make a difference to Tibetans’ lives, without contributing to the propping-up of an unjust regime.

Thanks for remembering World AIDS Day, everyone, and Merry Christmas.

Ego: it is a dirty word

The lack of anything like it where I live was all the justification I needed while in the Regional Capital this week to take an hour out from the gruelling schedule of world-saving talk fests to go for a long swim in the National Olympic Pool.

Although I’d never been conscious of it before, I realised as I approached the ticket office that afternoon that visiting public swimming pools in developing countries is something I seem to have done quite often over the years … curiously, only ever alone. 

But despite the solitude, there is a great deal to enjoy about visiting the local pool.  First and foremost, it’s the colour.  Growing-up and living in Melbourne for most of my life means one usually only ever swam inside, in the dim, grey light emitted from heavy clouds through permanently condensed windows.  By contrast, I am always dazzled when walking through the gate of a local swimming pool in a foreign country, to see the sparkling, rich azure of the water as it reflects the tropical, midday sun.

These brilliant hues never cease to give me a tremendous, emotional lift when I first lay eyes on them, and so it was this week, when, drunk and distracted from the brightness and cheer of my first sighting of the public pool, that I completely ignored the attendant’s directions to the male change room and instead wandered over to the grassy square at the Southern end of the pool, where I disrobed and dove straight into the electric water.  One, two, three strokes and I was off in a reflective trance …

Another thing I love about swimming pools in developing countries is the chance to feel like a bloody world champion.  I am by no means a brilliant swimmer, but I can and do swim a long way, especially in comparison with local people, very few of whom have ever been taught to swim, or have attempted to complete an entire lap.  By contrast, Donkey, with his steady, relentless stroke becomes quite a point of interest for the local populace, and it has happened on more than a few occasions that on emerging from the water, Donkey has run a gauntlet of admiring, doting smiles, handshakes and back slaps from balding, pot-bellied, moustachioed men (and in some cases, women).  I guess it could get tiring, but I love it!

So it was that on this recent, sunny afternoon that something roused me from my contemplations at around Lap 14, and I noticed there were many young people sitting poolside and in the stands, admiring my stroke and appearing not a little impressed by this athletic new-comer.  Full of piss and vinegar at my own self-importance, I puffed my chest and poked my Speedoed arse a little higher in the water and ploughed on ahead, musing over what it was that had caught my attention.  Assuming it must simply have been the attention of the masses, I made the turn and headed back whence I’d come.  Before long, my mind was again trailing off …

The pool in India was by far my favourite; so busy and so well appointed in that country which was otherwise pretty filthy.  I had really been part of the furniture for a while, and I do believe some came there in the mornings just to watch me.  Why did I stop, I wonder?  Oh hang on … that’s right … phlegm!  After about 4 months of daily swimming, I came to learn that if I hadn’t had my head down in physical exertion, I would have noticed that the general populous of South Delhi used the facilities not only for their morning exercise, but also for their respiratory ablutions, and once I’d come to recognise the hoiking and spitting (even from the pool attendant), it became increasingly difficult to ignore the floaties getting caught on my goggles with each lap…

I was just coming around for another turn at the Northern end of the pool when I was again, suddenly snapped-out of my musings.  “Whoa!  What is that stench?  Good thing I hadn’t bothered with the male change rooms”, I thought as I executed another crowd-pleasing tumble turn, and pushed-on.

The Chinese hot springs, too, had emitted an odour that had been truly something to behold.  Not so much natural volcanic pool as power station cooling pond, and the toxic, green slime along the blue-tiled walls was only slightly less offensive than the truly disgusting latrines adjacent to the poolside, which hung out over a chasm onto what would have once been a pristine mountain stream.

Last turn before home; the foul smell from the men’s bogs threatened to eject my breakfast into the sparkling blue, but I ignored the gag reflex by fantasizing that all the staff in the office blocks overlooking the pool had stopped their productive work days to admire my shapely back.

And with that, I was done.  I came-up puffing and gulping-in lungs full of air, and once I’d recovered a little, I turned to notice that I was now the only person in the pool.  Everyone else had gotten out at some stage during my session, presumably to admire my fetching figure.

I emerged from the water, all glistening and triumphant, and towelled-off in the sun.  Realising I had little choice other than to enter the male change rooms to get dressed, I took a deep breath and trekked to the other end of the pool.  But just before I reached the end, I finally noticed the cause of that stench; not the change rooms, as I had assumed, but rather a toxic, floating scum of [at least] human excrement congealing along the wall and extending about half a meter towards the middle (just centimetres from where I had just swum).

What is it about swimming pools and body fluids in these countries?  And what is it about me that I can’t learn from my mistakes and take just a few moments to give the water a bit of a once-over in the interests of a hepatitis and tuberculosis-free future?  Once again, I had been lured into truly murky waters by the Siren of my athletic and aesthetic self-delusions. 

The Skyhooks were wrong; Ego really can be a dirty word, especially if it leaves a toxic residue on your skin that can only be removed with turps.

The Skyhooks clearly never found themselves in a developing country on a hot afternoon.  The Ego can really be dirty if it gets in the way of basic concepts of public health and just a little common sense.  Pic:  http://www.theaustralian.com.au/arts/review/ego-not-a-dirty-word-for-skyhooks-star/story-fn9n8gph-1226446754662

Relapsed Hoof in Mouth

T'wouldn't be the first time Donkey's been in the shit for cracking wise about serious and sensitive matters. 

Once, as an insecure school boy trying to generate some social currency, I loudly remarked to my sniggering peers how much of a shame it had been that the doctors had sliced off Sister Kathleen's huge knockers because now there was nothing good to look at during Geography.  This appalling remark had been delivered whilst the Mother-Superior smouldered silently, menacingly, behind me.  When I'd finally noticed that the cackles of my peers had exceeded even my comedic abilities, I spun around and flinched at Sister Sophia's detesting face protruding from forbidding, mission-brown from eyebrows to 'obnails.

The hectic confusion of the school corridor suddenly plunged into silent slow-motion.  I cowered pathetically as her piercing stare damned me to the eternal inferno with a hatred one wouldn't have thought possible from a woman of the cloth, and after a deliberate, seemingly endless breath, things sped-up very suddenly with her launching into a violent rage of verbal abuse which actually damned me to the eternal inferno.

More recently, it has been my recent, blasé spray about escaped convicts in Vanuatu which has sent me diving for the self-flagellation stick.  Despite my treatment of the subject as just a big, harmless old joke, things have taken a nasty turn around these parts recently with the severe beating of a long-term, well-known and respected expatriate by intruders in his home, followed the next night with the brutal murder of an elderly expatriate couple in their beds.

It was immediately, generally understood that the perpetrators of both incidents were none other than six of the twelve escapees which, everyone soon discovered, were still on the run, some two months later. 

Confirmation of this fact from the sheepish Correctional Authorities a couple of days later saw egg on both their and my ugly mugs, but the latter was soon sizzling away fit to explode when it was confirmed by the police that the escapees really were the prime suspects in both incidents.

The town went into lock-down as the rumour mill, known locally as the 'coconut wireless' went haywire.  Everyone's brother's friend's dog had seen the escapees hiding-out in the bush behind their homes, and every other punter's house had been burgled in the space of a week as bored young people took advantage of the e-scape goats at large to break into the homes of every expatriate in their neighbourhood to make off with those enormous TVs they'd been eyeing off for the past year and a half.

Amidst this genuine fear and panic, the additional, extraordinary rumour went out that someone's husband/brother/aunt works in the Ministry of Internal Affairs, and the Minister had just issued an edict that the Vanuatu Mobile Force (VMF) – the poorly-trained, trigger-happy paramilitary arm of the Vanuatu Police Force – had permission to take up arms after dark and to shoot anyone on suspicion.

You can just imagine what that led to; better six nut-bags with knives moving through the night than 70 with officially sanctioned automatic weapons! 

Crikey!  I'll know never to take the piss out of a serious situation again.  I never could have believed that this tuen of events could have become this dangerous.  I've definitely learned my lesson; there's nothing ... absolutely nothing funny about living in fear for your life every night.  No more making light of such issues ... ever ... again!

Oh by the way, on those first couple of nights during which the VMF were on the loose, only a few gun shots were heard, but they appear to have been well wide of the mark, 'cause a few days later the Government issued a warning to the (now seven) escapees – "Turn yourselves in by midday on Saturday, or else...". 

Or else what?  They've been on the run for two months! ... and judging by the location of these two crimes, they've not been very far away from the cops that whole time.  "Turn yourselves in by midday on Saturday, or else ... we're really going to start looking for you"?  Hmmph!

 

Vanuatu's 'coconut wireless' works even faster these days with the aid of Facebook and email.  These pics (2 of the 6) were in Donkey's inbox accompanied by versions of the murder long before any official news of the incident were released.

You live and learn

Not being the most hirsute Donkey in the barnyard, it stands to reason that I'll rarely be spotted out in daylight without a hat.  Currently I'm sporting a pretty awful, woven straw number which makes me look like the scariest, pig-rooting yokel in the County, but better that than a scone coated with weeping sores and liver spots like C. Montgomery Burns.

This latest headdress is just another in a long line of amusing and sometimes controversial cranial garments that have become somewhat of a characteristic feature since my early teens (yes, yes ... the baldness started pretty early on).  Like most teenage boys, I too went through that phase of not washing my clothes, but I took the practice to a very unsavoury extreme by not cleaning or changing my hat for many years, and only swapping it when the dirt, sweat and hair gel (not a typo – my comb-over started early, too) no longer held the various panels together.

From dirty cap to dirty cap I went.  Over the years, I employed nails to hold various clips and visors on, which in turn went rusty and smelly and left ugly stains on my skin.  Sea salt crusted edges cut through my upper ear and bird shit was left to fester into blooms of new bacterial strains the likes of which modern science was yet to classify.  Put the pieces together and you're noticing just one more amongst the many reasons why young Donkey was never quite able to land a lady!

Anyway, it happened that after living in Solomon Islands for a couple of years, I managed to misplace my hat just before leaving the country, bound for India.  I'd loved that cap.  It had been with me on jungle hikes, mountain climbs, river crossings, open sea travel and more than a few torrential downpours, and each and every one of these was evident from the crud and muck casing every stitch and groove in the fetid fabric.

It was a great loss, and I was horrified that I was about to set-up a new life, in a new country, and attempt to break into a new social network wearing a BRAND NEW HAT!  Urgh – everyone would assume I was one of those wankers who would only be seen wearing a shiny new hat.  I'd be alone forever!  A social outcast.

There was only one thing to do.  If it had to be new, I was going to make sure my new hat at least had Edge.  So when I hit Kuala Lumpur for a 48 hour, en route shopover, I kept my eyes peeled for the prefect lid.  Things were looking pretty grim as I trawled through markets sporting nothing but knock-off Nike and Adidas caps, Department Stores with exclusive rights to Tommy Hilfiger and Gazman, and tourist centres with embroidered renditions of the Petronas Towers. 

I was desperate by the time I got to a food court for a final meal, just hours before we were due to take-off for New Delhi.  But as we pushed through a huge crowd amassed outside, I caught a glimpse of what they were all looking at, and my cold heart immediately warmed in a lovely, bright yellow and red glow – Maggi noodles!

In typical KL, gangbusters-market-economy fashion, some self-made entrepreneur had taken basic, poor-man's street food and was marketing the MSG out of Maggi Noodles through a massive, open-air gourmet cook-off, using a smorgasbord of fresh ingredients and Maggi noodles.  The noise was deafening as the crowd of onlookers ooh-ed, aaah-ed and cheered as the exuberant cooks served up dish after dish of Maggi noodle based delights for their consumption.

For me, it wasn't what was on the plate that I was interested in, but rather the Maggi noodle uniforms of the cooks and their assistants, and in particular, the sparkling, pale yellow caps adorned with the famous red logo.  I was over the moon with excitement and relief as I man-handled my way through the crush to one of the cook's assistants, and started waving handfuls of ringgit in his astonished face.  At first I was surprised at his reluctance to take me up on my offer, but by the time I was throwing the equivalent of about sixty Australian dollars at him, I was becoming both outraged and panic-stricken that I was going to miss this one chance at obtaining the object that would lubricate my introduction to New Delhi society.

As the crowd pushed past me to get their chopsticks into a plate of Maggi noodle-enriched Malaysian chicken, I was both fuming and perplexed at this young man's refusal to take my money.  He was clearly poor; he was skinny, dressed in pale, Maggi-noodle yellow from head to toe, and sporting a massive smile despite the physical and verbal abuse being showered upon him by his more senior counterpart demanding various ingredients and Maggi-embossed condiments.  I was perplexed, angry and dejected.

Within months – perhaps even weeks of living in India, I came to understand all too well why the young Malaysian man would not give-up his hat, even for the small fortune I was offering.  As I came to understand the way big business treats poor people in Asia, I realised the kind of retribution Mr Maggi would have dealt out to that young man, his family and perhaps his whole community if he'd so much as damaged his corporate uniform, let alone lost some of it.  My sixty bucks would have been nothing compared with his not being able to afford schooling for his kids, or fresh water for his family.

As embarrassed as I was to have been so aggressive towards him, particularly for something so frivolous, I was able to reflect on my changed understanding in such a short time.  It hadn't taken me very long to learn about this particular subtlety of domestic economics once I arrived in Asia, but it came as a shock to me.  I had been living in a very poor country for two years; living amongst malnourished, poorly resourced, rural communities, and observing the challenges they faced in accessing health care, education, livelihoods and cash.  I thought I had understood all these issues; I thought I was an expert; I thought I would have been doing this young man a favour ... but in fact I hadn't had the faintest clue of the issues at play during our interaction.

What I took from this learning was a very clear message; it is not possible, or at least it is extremely difficult for foreigners visiting and/or working in other countries to become experts on what local people think, feel, do and say.  This reflection taught me that every day, I learn something new about my surroundings, and everyday, this learning turns what I thought to be true right on its head.  It taught me that I am no expert, and I never could, or would be.

Which brings me to a recent, wholly unpleasant evening; just another in a series of difficult social interactions Mrs Donkey and I have experienced since we arrived in Port Vila and embarked on a quest for new friends we can rely on for a good 'bitch and moan' about poor plumbing, moonscape roads and the rising price of duty-free gin.

On this occasion, the potentially warm, intimate dinner party conversation was violently arrested by a mouthy young woman who couldn't help chiming-in at every opportunity (and even sometimes when there was clearly no opportunity at all) to tell anyone within ear shot just how good she was at ... well, everything!  From varsity sports tournaments, to dating celebrities, to maintaining lifelong friendships, to being down with 'the youth', to being a damn fine crusader for humanity ... basically, albeit by her own admission, this chick was 'The Shit'.  Sadly, judging by their screaming body language, everyone else in the room considered this description an unfortunate typo.

Now at this stage, it's gotta be said that the Donkeys aren't the most popular animals in the barnyard, and as beggars can't be choosers, we are quite willing to put up with the idiosyncrasies evident within a small social pool in favour of spending yet another night alone together watching re-runs of Packed to the Rafters.  But there's only so much one can take when the (one-person) conversation shifts up a gear from single-handedly leading the world revolution against poverty, to that dangerous red zone in which they claim to be at one with those very same poor-folk they claim to be emancipating.

It was at about the time when this la femme expertista, her crystal goblet of expensive Bordeaux sloshing with each agitated gesture, launched into lengthy explanatory diatribes of what life is like for local women – "and I know because I have lots of local female friends and I have a really special, trusting and open relationship with my house girl, who shares everything with me" - that Mrs D and I began making noises about over-worked baby-sitters, early morning starts and even (without word of a lie) that we were planning to visit a Seventh Day Adventist church service at 10am (now if that wasn't a thinly veiled scream for help, then I'm walkin').

As we were beating a hasty retreat out the door, I threw a sympathetic look to our male host whose chest was being pummelled by a mood-ringed index finger jabbing-out a painful list of the crimes that local men inflict upon "us women".  His returned glance comprised a peculiar mix of lost-dog's-home imploring and explosive fury at my leaving so suddenly – he must have seen our escape as somewhat akin to that mountain-climber who cuts the rope on his dangling friend in order to save his own skin.

Mrs D and I drove home exasperated and fuming at the way our pleasant evening had been hijacked by this 'expert' who had lived in this country for barely 12 months.  She'd claimed, through her penetrating opinions, to have the definitive knowledge about every aspect of life here, and particularly, the good oil on all issues facing local women.  Her unsolicited lectures, apart from being annoying, were to my thinking, offensive to the very people for whom she claimed to advocate.  I know from bitter experience that her opinions are unlikely to be fully informed, and I am embarrassed for her at the effect they were having on those gathered. 

Most of all, I am pissed-off that she ruined what would have been a nice, pleasant evening comprising interesting and lively conversation.  Lady, if I want to know about issues facing local people, I'll ask them.

Expect to see this on the Milan catwalks this season as the new face of emerging street cred.  Pic: http://marketingstrategy-sai.blogspot.com/2010/03/maggie-noodles.html

They ruin your life

 Man, I wish I had a buck for every time a heated political argument amongst long-time friends was silenced with phrases such as, "Well that's all very well and good for you, but I've got kids, and I need to think about their future".

Compared with the majority of my peers, I was a bit of a late bloomer in the Family Expansion Department, and it always pissed me off when the same people who I'd grown-up with in the outer suburbs, who I'd gone to school with, who I'd rebelled against familial and social stereotypes with, who I'd moved into inner-city doss houses with, who I'd drank in the same inner-city pubs with, and with whom I'd debated politics and popular culture, would suddenly (coinciding with marriage, offspring and an exodus back to the Outer East) execute a complete 180 and change their age-old lines of argument and values in favour of bog-standard, Channel 9-like conservatism.

This particularly hit home to me about ten years ago when one of my friends who had pursued many social and environmental causes over the years (including a two-year stint being abused by errant teenagers while inside the Wilderness Society's koala costume) informed us all during one of his rare nights-off from familial duties, that he would be voting Liberal in the forth-coming federal election because only 'The Libs' were offering to extend the Eastern Freeway!

Of course, this ridiculous misunderstanding of state versus federal political responsibility was immediately and enthusiastically leapt upon by our gathering, and before long, this once politically-savvy and proud crusader for human and animal rights informed us that we all needed to grow-up and take some responsibility for ourselves if we ever expected to live in homes without cracked walls and warped floor boards.  He added that neither of us had any significant life experience upon which to make informed decisions about future generations, and until we did, we should keep our naive political opinions to ourselves.

Of course this aggressive challenge would never do, and the conversation became increasingly heated before it concluded with my old friend jumping to his feet, gathering his coat and letting fly with, "Until you guys have kids, and have to think about their future education and employment opportunities, you'll never have any idea about the political and economic realities of the Australian electorate".  Following which he stormed out of the pub.

So that's it, hey?  Kids change everything ... or is it just that the kids were the factor which 'forced' him back to his politically-affiliated, geographical roots?  Isn't it telling how your life circumstances can dramatically alter your values and beliefs?

It's true.  We all know the cliche of the mate who's out with you and your other mates six nights a week, getting drunk and trying to pick-up women, until on one rare occasion he happens to be successful with the latter and immediately his drinking pursuits are replaced by rom-coms and flower shows, and his mates never see him again.  Clearly that guy's circumstances changed his views on what was important; his priorities had altered from his mates and beer in favour of companionship, love or at the very least, getting his end away on a regular basis.

I can relate to this a little (well, not that last bit, obviously).  I used to be right into outdoor packsports, and nature and wildlife conservation; for a good while I much preferred heading off into the bush with everything I needed for a few days and sitting alone on a rock all afternoon contemplaying myself and my surroundings, rather than attending garden parties and making polite small talk with friends and their new girlfriends.

When I finally did meet the love of my life, my rugged, outdoor pursuits were promptly replaced with rather more sedate, beachside loitering, and before long, I was no longer pining for the deep solitude of the remote wilderness.  So it would indeed seem as though chicks change everything!

Interestingly, in those days of being a vocal advocate for wilderness protection, I harboured a visceral hatred for zoos.  I recall being physically ill once while visiting the zoo with my nephew, and watching in horror at the dilapidated, Victorian-era surroundings that the seals had to parade around in before crowds of jeering, screaming children.

I stayed away for many years after this, and only recently returned to the zoo with my son, Hambones, thanks to one of these annual subscriptions which allow you to visit as often as you like.  I have to admit, I love it!  I find the enclosures much more respectful of the animals than I remembered, and as long as I don't think too hard about the climactic differences between a Bengal Tiger's natural habitat and Melbourne in May, I usually come away feeling OK about the experience.

So I guess it's not quite that cut and dried.  Is it chicks?  Or as stated by my friend of old, perhaps it really is kids who change everything.

In my newfound enthusiasm for caged and tethered wildlife, which has seen me visit the zoo about three times a week since we got the membership pass (gotta get me money's worth – my notorious tight-arsedness is one entrenched value I suspect is never going to change), I decided to take Hambones along to the Adelaide zoo over Easter, and there found myself almost winded by what I saw.  Clearly my decade or so of avoiding the zoo was time enough for the Melbourne zoo management to get their stuff together towards a more humane approach to caring and providing for their animals such that I am no longer horrified by what I encounter.

Not so the Adelaide zoo, at which some of the exhibits appear not to have changed very much since families ventured-forth on Sunday afternoons in top-hats, tails, bonnets and holding sticks with which to poke the frightened animals through the bars of the minute cages.  This place was terrible!  A real throw-back to a bygone era in which there was absolutely no ambiguity over who was the real king of the jungle.

To look at Adelaide zoo on its own, I would again advocate for the abolishment of such institutions throughout the world.  However I also understand the work that better zoos, such as Melbourne's, are doing to protect endangered species, and to educate the community about the factors which threaten their survival, and importantly, what can be done to address these.  I think zoos have their place, but standards need to be developed and adhered to.  And Adelaide, you certainly do not cut the grade!

What all this has taught me is that using kids, or partners, or indeed any other life circumstance as an excuse for changing your long held values and beliefs is nothing other than a selfish, ignorant and lazy sell-out.

I am working on a new bumper sticker, which at the moment goes something like this; "I have a wife, and a child, and I live where I want, and I believe in protecting human and animal rights, promoting social justice, and protecting the environment for my children's children's future".  The only catch is that I'd have to completely sell-out and buy a Merc with a bumper bar big enough to stick it on.

South Australia: A Brilliant Blend (of Dickensian animal rights and modern-day admission prices).  Pic: http://www.old-print.com

Zit Face: a heart-warming Christmas message

Call me an old, romantic idealist (oh, go-on), but what I love most about Christmas are not the massive haul of presents sitting beneath plastic pine trees, nor the mountains of land-fill generated by Chinese-made plastic crap, nor the crowded press of zombies wandering around shopping mauls (sic) at 2am just because they’re open 24 hours, but rather, what I love most about Christmas are the tales of love and hope; the celebration of solidarity, and the message that our loved ones, including ourselves, are the most important commodity in the world.

So I thought I’d dedicate this, pre-Christmas post to the message that no matter how down-trodden you may feel, or how abhorrent you think you are, there’s always someone who feels worse, or is more repugnant than you.

Over the years, I have gone to great lengths to make sure that this Blog maintains my anonymity, without outwardly telling any untruths (although that may be one of the few just there).  But I am about to reveal something about myself which could well oust me from my quiet, little, internet hidey-hole.

I suffer from disgusting, horrible, disfiguring acne.  It all started way too early, when I was 9 – just my luck getting acne at age 9, but my balls refusing to drop until I was 25! – and by the time I was 13, my doctor was scribbling down in his notes phrases like “visible lakes of pus” and “deep sinus fissures tracking to Norway”.

The awful thing about teenage acne, despite it leaving you looking like something which, in biblical times, would have seen you ejected over the city walls, is that the extent to which anyone really knows what to do about it is inversely proportional to the number of unsolicited opinions that are offered as to what to do about it.

The obvious approach one might have considered when, as a 13-year-old, one awoke to a pillow soaked in blood and pus for two-weeks running, would have been to consult a dermatologist.  However, due to the fact that every teenage kid in my school who had ever visited one of these witch doctors, while certainly having their acne cleared-up within a matter of weeks, was usually left with a face resembling The Somme in 1917, and thanks to the powerful drug regime they’d been subjected to, a bonus shoulder hump and a combination of breasts, falsetto and/or hairless groin (in boys), or no breasts, baritone and/or hairy arse (in girls).  So the dermatologist was never seriously considered as an option for me (I’ve never needed any help acquiring hair on my arse, thank you very much!).

What was considered, and adhered to for most of my teenage years, thanks to my parents placing stock in increasingly whacked-out opinions as to the cause of my acne, was a gruelling regime of either denying or increasing my intake of various food groups and “natural remedies”.

For example, thanks to one of my father’s old cricket chums, I was urgently taken off dairy food for what would have been the best ice-cream-eating three years of my life.  During this horrible period, a new brand of Belgian Chocolate ice-cream came and went, but not for Donkey.  Instead, the only treat going around for this crater-faced barnyard beast was jaffa-flavoured soy milk (what is it about the latent heat properties of soy milk that no matter how many days you leave it in the fridge, it still comes out warm?!).

Needless to say, the “dairy-free” didn’t stop the pus pouring from my facial pores.  Next, one of my mother’s mid-week golfing “colleagues” heard from a “well-respected naturopath” that seaweed was the go.  For about three months, I was forced to chew on semi-dried, stinking kelp every morning for breakfast.  My pimples maintained their proud stance on my schnoz and chin, for which I must admit I was vaguely relieved, as I was certainly reaching the limit of how much kelp I could stomach.

And on it went.  Obviously chocolate was considered and denied me fairly early on in the process L, and even though the acne remained, chocolate was not returned to my needy bosom for many years thereafter.  Raspberry jam was out.  Honey was withdrawn for a while.  Potato chips (surprise! surprise!), Coca-Cola … ok, to be fair, my diet wasn’t all that great, but which teenage kid’s is?

Then there were the topical remedies that were applied to the skin daily, twice daily or even hourly, depending on which women’s magazine such-and-such was reading; thistle milk, Vitamin E cream, lukewarm rhinoceros semen, tomato paste … the thing was that all of these “cures”, according to the “experts” down at Centenary Park Tennis Club, were not to be rubbed-in until no longer visible, but lathered thickly onto the face and left for the duration of the “prescribed” regime. 

Fortunately this line of treatment came to an abrupt end after a work colleague of my father returned from Rotorua in New Zealand and suggested I try using this thick, black, sulphuric tar he’d acquired which, he assured my Dad, was a sure-fire remedy against skin ailments.  So reluctant as always, and smothered in thick, black paste, I made the trek to school one day and was immediately dragged to the principal’s office and given a week’s suspension on a charge of racial vilification (no doubt the matter wasn’t helped when, in a snivelling mess, I shook my hands in the air and asked to speak with my “Mammy … oh I want my Mammy” – visual gag there; you might need to work on it).

All this ridiculous hokus pokus, disguised as treatment and remedy, despite going on for years, never did anything for my acne, and really only succeeded in making me miserable.  The real cause of my acne, or at least one of them, was eventually discovered, like so many breakthroughs in science, by accident. 

One summer, while mucking around on my skateboard (skaters being the only social group who didn’t seem to care much what you looked like), I slammed pretty badly off a small flight of stairs and broke my arm in about 723 places.  Apart from the pain I endured, not to mention being ridiculed daily by my peers for having to get my mother to wipe my 16-year-old arse (and for the record, it’s not true, people!  A person can adapt to left-hand wiping!), I was also unable to get into a swimming pool, which had, for years, been my only competitive sporting outlet.  Within a week of no swimming; with no dodgily chlorinated water infested with infant-piss and used band-aids, I was cured!  No more zits!

Years later, I came to learn that times of stress were also a trigger for an outbreak of fresh facial pustules.  When I mentioned this to my mother, she scoffed, “Oh yeah, sure, stress.  Exactly what does a teenage boy know about stress?”.

Hmm, I dunno, Mum, maybe it is living with two chain-smoking, staunch Catholics who consider masturbation a mortal sin, and who denied me all of life’s culinary pleasures in favour of a daily intake of seaweed and public humiliation?

These days I try to manage my stress in various ways, and this seems to help my skin a little.  But unfortunately for someone whose career involves a lot of international travel, one of the major triggers of stress which is guaranteed to send my face into volcanic eruptions and release a massive miasma of rank body odour (I’ll post about that another time) is international air travel.

Today was a lovely day in Melbourne, and I took the rare opportunity of a late afternoon flight to go for a morning swim down at the local pool.  I was feeling great when I got the airport, and was wearing appropriate clothes for managing my body temperature.  But after all the check-in procedures, and immigration, and finding the departure gate, I nicked into Sunglass Hut to see what they had going on, and while trying on a new pair of sunnies, I glanced in the mirror and noticed what the cocktail of chlorine and internal body oils had done to my face.

Feeling too embarrassed to hand the glasses back to the smokin’ hot sales girl (although she saved me the problem as she’d noticed my face on the way in and was definitely putting some distance between us), I dumped them on the counter and bolted for the loo.

As I stood up close to the basin, ejecting great globules of yellow and red fluid all over the mirror, my self esteem had hit an all-time low.  Although I was scared witless that some poor schmuck would walk in any minute, see what I was doing and lose their lunch, there was nothing for it; I had to purge my face of this vile infestation.

And moments into the process, it happened.  “Oh my God!  That is disgusting!”.  I froze in mid-squeeze, and turned sheepishly to face my denouncer; a well-dressed, Business Class-type traveller, dressed ready to walk off the plane and into a high-powered board meeting.  But to my surprise, the man in the suit wasn’t pointing at me, but rather at another man, of South Asian extraction, who I hadn’t notice come in, but who was standing behind me changing his shirt; his 432 rolls of belly fat and man-boobs any female swim-suit model would sell her only brain cell to have, flapping around all over the place.

I grabbed a paper towel, wiped the mess from my face, and got the hell out of their with Mr Business Suit not far behind me.

See, there really is always someone more repugnant than you.  Merry Christmas everyone.

Welcome to my world.  Pic: http://t1.gstatic.com/images