Finding cross-cultural reality in a sweet pea

When I was young, my grandfather kept a large garden at the end of our yard. He grew many things, but my favorite was the sweet peas. They ripened in early spring, usually just before Easter, around the same time daffodils were sprouting bright and yellow among the spring greenery.

By the time I was eight or so I learned how to tell when the pods were just ripe. I wandered through the long, carefully-tended rows picking perfect specimens as the soft dirt, heavy with Virginia red clay, stained my bare feet a deep, earthy red-brown.

Dewy spring grass would wipe away the worst of the dirt as I headed back to the house, leaving a trail of pea-pods in my wake. Growing up, there was hardly anything better about spring than those juicy, crisp, fresh sweet peas straight out of my grandfather’s garden.

It’s been years since I was home in the spring to raid pea-pods from those carefully tended rows. I’ve lived many places during those years and I’ve spent the past two in Cairo, a sweltering city of cars, pollution, and some 20 million people.

Living in a different culture, sometimes the simplest things remind you of ‘home,’ alternately highlighting the similarities or the differences between ‘here’ and ‘there.’ I seldom find similarities between Cairo and small-town southern America, although they’re there: a genuine and humble hospitality, for one, and tea with mint, for another.

Yet this morning I sat in village an hour from Cairo with a pile of fresh sweet pea pods heaped on the table in front of me, popping the peas from their pods in preparation for tonight’s dinner. Each time one of those succulent fresh peas found its way into my mouth instead of the bowl in front of me, I was reminded of that old memory.

Sometimes those quiet, mundane tasks remind you that, wherever you are, there are intrinsic similarities among humans. Sure, this morning I was sitting in a rural Egyptian village with palm trees and fields of chamomile out the window, neither of which I ever saw growing up in Virginia, and the majority of the peas ended up in a bowl rather than in my mouth, but even so the similarities seemed more stark than the differences.

I once spent a week living with a family in a tiny community in Brazil’s southern Amazon basin. It was starkly different from anything I had grown up with: they had no running water, most of the family slept in hammocks, they washed clothes in a spring, and there were mango trees everywhere.

But even there I found familiarity: an elderly man in a t-shirt and baseball cap bouncing his grandson on his knee, everyone gathered around a (generator-powered) TV to watch a soccer match, each child expected to help with chores and the youngest crying when her mother left the house without her.

As scholars debate theories of globalization, giant multi-national corporations search for cheaper labor and politicians’ rhetoric expounds the virtue of “us” versus “them,” sometimes all we need is to take a step back.

Consider, for example, the simple joy of one fresh pea: surreptitiously pilfered from the pot before it is cooked, it is just as sweet in rural Egypt as in small-town America.

Who's burning the rainforest?

Many people believe tropical rainforests, in the Amazon and elsewhere, are being destroyed by poverty-stricken people with no other means of making a livelihood or providing for their families. The sad truth is that very seldom is rainforest cut or burned by those with a genuine need.

In Brazil, 200 people own 90% of the cattle ranches in the country. Those ranches, mostly located in areas where there used to be rainforest or on clear partches within the Amazon, provide over four million head of cattle each year. These ranch owners are the ones responsible for a large part of the deforestation of the Brazilian Amazon.

Logging is another major cause of deforestation, and here again the situation is one of the rich getting richer, not of the poor taking advantage of the vast resources of the Amazon basin. In addition, many of the trees destroyed for logging purposes are neither useful nor desired - they are simply in the way of the valuable hardwood trees, many of which are sold with falsified approval documents.


Photo: A truck loaded with logs
on the Trans-Amazonian Highway.
September 2009

Until recently, I was one of the many who believed that most of the deforestation of the Amazon was being done by people, indigenous or not, who had no other means of survival. This was something I had been taught somewhere along my education, and it was a fact which seemed to make sense - but the reality is very different.

When the Brazilian government begain construction of the Trans-Amazonian Highway in the 1970's the road was intended to encourage settlement in the Amazon, particualrly by poor Brazilians who had nowhere else to go. The government soon realized that the settlement plan was not bringing the results intended. Instead, the "highway" - a narrow, barely two-lane dirt road which turns to a sloppy, muddy, dangerous mess in the rain - was allowing penetration of the Amazon by cattle ranchers and loggers, among others.

Some of the burning which happens in the Amazon is done on the lands of indigenous tribes or by poor settlers. Much more, however, is done by a very different group of people. They use the "burning season" to exploit more areas of primary forest to enhance a profit which, usually, is already extensive.

Smoke over the Amazon

A few moments ago I was browsing the news in an effort to reaquaint myself with the happenings of the world after trekking the southern Amazon Basin with the National Outdoor Leadership School for the past 3 months. I came across a short piece on Al Jazeera which hit home - Smoke over the Amazon.

Over the past few months, I have often seen the same smoke Mr. Elizondo saw through the window of his plane, and occasionally from a much closer vantage point. I can recall seeing plumes of white or brownish-black smoke rising into the air and patches of blackened earth and trees where the fires had been. Once, while our bus was driving on the Trans-Amazonican Highway, we drove through a place where there were fires on both sides of the road. There was zero visibility within the haze. Neither we nor the driver could see the reddish ribbon of the highway for a few long moments. When we finally exited the cloud, the heavy scent of smoke remained with us.

Photo: looking back on a fire
over the Trans-Amazonica.
Nov. 2009

A few of the fires which occur in the Amazon Basin are natural, started by lightning. In the serrado (or savanna) environments, fires are part of the natural cycle. Most of the fires, however, are man-made. They serve as the first step in clear-cutting the rainforest for agricultural use or farmland. According to data from the late 1990's (I'll update with more recent data when I have a chance to find it), over 20,000 km2 (7,722 square miles) of rainforest are cleared per year.

Until the rains come, this is still the Burning Season in the Amazon.

Expect more on my Amazon expedition, and more about rainforest ecology and deforestation, once I'm back in the US.

Amazon Expedition - the first 40 days

29 September, 2009 - Day 23, 6:28am - The morning dawned bright and orange. At first, as I peered out of my hammock and through my bug net, all that was visible was a bright, vibrant orange ball, silhouetts of trees, brush and hills on the opposite shore, and the intensely orange reflection of the water. Slowly the sun rose into the sky and the world became visible - lively greeen leaves and sprigs pushing up from the brown dirt and dead leaves on the ground... rocks, trees, moving water - the rapid we descended yesterday directly across on the opposite shore. From somewhere, I seem to smell yeast bread - it must be coming from the instructor's campsite. It smells good. I could go back to sleep, but I think I'll get up and enjoy the morning.

I am currently writing from a small internet cafe in the city of Apui - smack in the middle of the Amazon Basin, on the Trans-Amazonian Highway. Today begins the second of three days of travel to reach a small, remote community on the Madera River, where we will spend the following 5 days. I don't have much time to write, but I will give you a taste of what has been going on.

During the first 30 days of our expedition, we (15 students, 4 instructors, and the director of the Juruena National Park) traveled 600 kilometers in open canoes down the Juruena and Tapajos rivers. We camped on rock ledges and sandy island beaches in the middle of the river; we ran Class 2 rapids, lined our canoes through shallow water, and portaged around massive waterfalls. We saw hundreds of birds of every shape, color, and size, and hundreds of thousands of insects. There were nights where the sky was so clear it seemed one could see every star in the sky, and nights when the mosquitoes were so thick you cold grab a hundred simply by waving your hand before your face. We've woken up to exquisite sunrises and to ants eating our tents in the middle of the night; to extreme thunder storms and calm, placid mornings.

After our river section, we traveled for about a day and a half further down the Tapajos River and then spent 7 days hiking along the river. Sometimes we were walking through relatively open forest under the canopy, and at other times fighting through unbelieveably dense tangles of vines and undergrowth in areas where the canopy had been disturbed and sunlight found its way to the forest floor, allowing green things to grow up in a dense tangle.

That is all I have time to write now... but I shall recount stories of stingrays and river dolphins, giant Suma Uma trees and armies of leafcutter ants, capering monkeys and all manner of other forms of life and nature once I have completed this Amazon Expedition.

Oh, and one last thought: "The Amazon" is everything you ever heard it was, and more.