A couple of months ago, I made a resolution to make more margins in my life.
How did I do?
I missed the bus three times in six weeks.
But I also learned how to keep a tighter “no” filter, and that hurry is sometimes okay.
Totally Amazing Day today!
Guess what two weeds we pulled out of our yard and ate for dinner?
And even more amazing, guess what two children actually enjoyed eating them?
First we talked about the fact that some people around the world don’t have a lot of options of foods to eat, so finding food in the wild can be an important part of people’s diets. And we talked about how if we go back far enough in history, nearly all the foods we eat were once wild. There are some foods our family gets wild that don’t seem strange to our kids, like the wild asparagus patch we found down the road, or the venison Adam’s dad and our neighbors hunt and give to us.
So we talked about how eating what we can find around us reminds us not to be wasteful, to eat local instead of using fuel to ship out-of-season foods around the world, and to appreciate what we’ve been given.
Then we took it to a new level.
We cooked garlic mustard and burdock.
Garlic mustard is an invasive species, and we have pulled over 2,000 plants out of yard in the last three weeks. I know the number because we paid Zeke 2 cents for every one he pulled, and he earned $20 in a day. At the same time I pulled at least as many. And then again the next day and the next.
Turns out you can pull off garlic mustard leaves, grind them up in a food processor with garlic, olive oil, spinach, parmesan, and sesame seeds, and it actually makes yummy pesto. A little strong for kids, but I put in about a half cup of it along with a pan of spaghetti sauce tonight and they loved it.
Burdock is the stuff that makes those burs that inspired Velcro. If you dig out the young roots it’s supposedly a Japanese delicacy that sells for a few dollars a root in New York City. These were decent slow cooked and caremelized with a few carrots and tablespoons of butter. I think I had a little trouble identifying the young ones, because about half were too hard to chew. The rest tasted like carrots. Not a total win, but not a total loss either.
Oh, and for added fun, our housemate Becky suggested taking lasagna noodles and cutting them with cookie cutters into fun stars and hearts.
Yet another ordinary adventure.
Happy Earth Day y’all.
This week for a class, I read the book Conservation is Our Government Now, by Paige West, about conservation initiatives in Papua New Guinea. One quote that stood out to me and others in the class was by a man from the local area: “You people think you should come here and try to save our land because you have already ruined all your own land.”
I’m not saying the U.S. isn’t doing some excellent work trying to preserve natural resources in our own country, or that there isn’t something particularly valuable about saving virgin rain forests around the world, but I think often we think saving the environment is about “keeping some other people off somewhere else from wrecking their stuff.”
Sure, poor people cut down forests to burn wood into charcoal to sell, or drop plastic bags on the ground because there aren’t public trash cans or cleanup. Sure the factories and mines off somewhere outside our own yards are dumping waste in rivers and stripping mountainsides. But just because they’re “off somewhere else” doesn’t mean we have nothing to do with them.
Like the author of this blog, the more I travel around the world, the more I realize that one of the most impactful long-term things we can do to help people in poverty is to care for the environment.
I saw a billboard yesterday that said, “Save energy. Save date night.” The point was, saving energy saves you money so you can go on more dates. Cool. But we could also say, “Save energy, save someone’s home. Save someone’s farm. Save someone’s food. Save someone’s children.”
Maybe that’s a little exagerated, but when lots of small choices add up, energy saving goes a long way. Maybe you don’t think to yourself, “I’ll bike to work because then someone in India is less likely to get flooded out of their home if climate change is controlled,” but in many small good and bad ripples, we affect the world like that.
Finally, one more shout-out to this short and sweet Earth Day read of the season, a blog by Tim Hoiland.
And hopefully Earth Day isn’t just a season, it’s a lifestyle.
On average, one American consumes as much energy as two Japanese, six Mexicans, 13 Chinese, 31 Indians, 128 Bangladeshis, 307 Tanzanians, or 370 Ethiopians.
Yikes.
I read that (in Abundant Simplicity by Jan Johnson) and decided to read by a window this morning instead of turning on a light.
Ok, I didn’t talk with Donald Miller, author of Blue Like Jazz (which is newly made into a movie), but my husband did. Here’s what they talked about. Adam’s interview with Donald Miller.
Ah, Easter. I cracked more eggs this week than I think I ever have in my life. I baked up a sausage and egg dish and some baked french toast for a family gathering, plus the dyed eggs we’ve been eating for days now. We added every single leaf to our dining room table for the first time and managed to pack 16 family members shoulder to shoulder in our house. And for the six kids in the family, we did a last minute hiding of plastic eggs around the yard, filled with whatever we had on hand (peanuts, marshmallows, and 35 cents a kid–pathetic, but no one complained!) As lovely as the day was, I know the day is about more than just eggs and family.
Here’s my husband’s thoughts from yesterday on what Easter’s really all about.
Want to see how much money you spend (through taxes) each year on foreign aid, military, social security, and other categories?
Here’s a cool new quick and easy calculator from the One Campaign showing where your tax dollars go. Check it out.
Over the weekend a couple friends razzed me because I never really nailed down what I think of the Kony 2012 controversy.
So after posting my 2-cents worth on the issue, which was mostly just raising questions and seeing both sides of the issues, here’s my 3-cents worth of what I think.
I’ll start off though by saying that I am not an expert on the LRA. I have visited Uganda for a total of about a week and a half. I have friends who have interviewed former soldiers in the LRA–I have not. South Africa where I lived is very far from Uganda and very different. However, I’ll do my best to offer thoughts out of what I know of development in general, and about some other issues related to this controversy.
1. Invisible Children should have done better. The film has been accused of spreading misinformation about the current situation of the LRA in Africa, underemphasizing more holistic approaches to the overall causes of the situation, and contributing to a demeaning picture of North Americans who can help/save/fix Africa. They did all that.
2. They’re not the first. Those who line up to be the first to throw stones at Invisible Children will have a hard time proving that they have no guilt. Mis-telling African stories and promoting “We’ll save you” mentality is what Westerners have done to Africa for centuries. Well meaning Westerners wanting to help have included doctors, missionaries, agriculture specialists, diplomats, volunteers, tourists, development theorists, journalists, and yes, (some of them worse than anybody), anthropologists. And yes, I’m sure I have done my share. And I hate that. It takes a lot of careful listening, humility, and sometimes intentionally stepping back when your gut says to charge ahead to avoid being ugly Americans who think we have all the answers. Did Invisible Children need to apologize? Sure. We all should.
3. Regarding whether Invisible Children misuses money by making films: Is making a film misusing a charity’s money? I say absolutely not. What more cost effective way could the possible have reached 73 million viewers and counting? This video is absolutely incredible in the speed of its reach. It will make history for that alone. Using communications through video (and every other media available) is an increasingly important role in development and advocacy work that I believe will improve the world.
On a personal note, when World Vision ACT:S recently asked me to take part in this video series they did, I asked them directly whether it was worth the cost of production and flying me and others to the film site. They said it was worth it. I trust that answer. Videos reach people at a heart level, and they reach a different set of people than other media, and at least some of those people doing something about the issue can add up to a lot of strength, and ideally they’ll be better informed than they were before they watched.
4. Does Invisible Children misuse money in other ways? This one I’m not going to take the time this morning to fully investigate, but I can tell you where to start. They’ve been criticized based solely on their score at a website called Charity Navigator, which was 2 out of 4 stars for a transparency rating and 3 out of 4 overall. I recently wrote this article for Reject Apathy about evaluation sites including Charity Navigator and the Better Business Bureau, in which I’m clear that these star-rating services can’t possibly give a whole picture of how effective an organization is with its money (Charity Navigator even says that). To get a more accurate picture, you can read through Invisible Children’s annual reports, or find out exactly why they scored low (seems like it was about having too few independent board members, which is a different issue than mismanaging funds). As for using only 32% of their funds for program expenses, whether that’s wise or not depends a lot on their mission, and they’re clear here about what their goals are. If part of their aim is to get North Americans informed and involved in this issue, spending a lot on travel is going to have to be a part of that. North American organizations working in Africa necessarily run into this problem: Americans cost a lot to pay and fly around. It’s not good, but it’s common.
5. All this doesn’t change the fact that there’s work to be done in Africa. The LRA has done terrible things. If you watch that video and don’t feel any twinge of energy to do something about something very wrong in this world, check your pulse. This LRA story is all interrelated with poverty, corruption, and a lot of other factors, and the LRA is far from the only threat to people’s lives, or even the biggest. Solving those problems is not easy at all.
There is a lot of room for error. Just this week I read about how Bill Clinton attempted to negotiate a peace process for the war in Sierra Leon in the ’90s. He was criticized for doing poorly. Bill Clinton, as you may recall, also considers it about the biggest regret of his life that he didn’t do something about the Rwandan genocide. If North Americans try to get involved in human rights abuses outside their borders, they will inevitably make some mistakes. Does that mean they shouldn’t try? I don’t think so. Being uninformed about an issue you care about shouldn’t stop you from caring–it should start you getting informed.
If nothing else, this controversy over Joseph Kony is driving that lesson home.
Don’t just take my word for it, read Invisible Children’s response to the criticisms. They’ve handled this P.R. mess very well, I think.
And if you’re still not tired of commentary on Kony 2012, here’s useful blog that connects to lots more writing about it.
