A rather eventful day, around the world...

Diarrhea AGAIN!!!! Oh well. Someone used to tell me that shit happens, but I never though I would take them literally with that statement.

I began my day working at the YOUth LEADing India Congress. This program is designed to bring kids together, discussing major environmental issues. There are a total of 18 of these congresses happening all over the world. From India to Australia to South America, students are gathering in a hope to broaden their understanding
We focused today on the problems that these kids think should be on the top of our list to fix. With only the minds of young children, they came up with the number #1 problem that should be on the top of any list that is in regard to any problem: Lack of Responsibility and Awareness. If this issue were to be solved tomorrow, it would make solving all the other issues that much easier. Education is the fundamental element to our human existence, and these kids nailed it!
After a small lunch break where the kids were able to hangout and mingle, they calculated something called an Eco-footprint. This footprint shows how many planet Earths it would require to live sustainably if each other person on the used the same amount of resources. Calculate yours here.
Tomorrow we will begin discussion of how we can make changes to our lifestyles and what else we can do within our communities to make advancements in solving these problems. Our earth is a living creature, and we are slowly killing it. How slow is that though? Our children's lifetimes, grandchildrens? Look at where we have come in your lifetime. In you parents and their parents lifetimes.
Our world is moving faster and faster towards something, but what this is we don't know? Why not advance in a responsible state of awareness where we know where we have come from and where we know where we want to go? Do we really want to continue in the direction we have? Where some cities don't see the sun for weeks due to pollution? Or where billions of people do not receive adequate drinking water? We are smart enough to figure these problems out, yet why do they persist? Money. Plain and simple, it is greed. Enough of this though, on to other pressing events of the day.
Today news reached me that South Korea and North Korea have exchanged attacks. This is a signal to the rest of us that our world is still a dangerous place to live. America currently has troops on every continent in the northern hemisphere. These troops are a deterrent to what? Are they truly a deterrent or a fuel to fire? This will be seen.

These days, I find that if we connect through our common routes as human beings we will see past our useless national fervor and racist pride. Everyone is flesh and blood. Everyone lives and dies. Living in the City of Benares, a city where people come to die, has been a great learning lesson. I know we are flesh and blood. When living in Wisconsin, my father and I would cook up some meat on the grill. Oh how did I love the smell of that grill. I think a bit differently on that now. Last weekend I spent a night walking along the river. At around 1AM I approached one of the infamous burning ghats. This is where they bring dead bodies from all over the city to be burned and cast into Ganga Ji. Ganga ji will then take their soul off to heaven. Well, back on this plane of reality, the smoke and smell of burning human bodies is not so different from that of those steaks on the grill. Our flesh burns and gives off a similar smell of grilled meat. Wafting that in, I sat there for a minute perplexed at the similarity I was experiencing. This startled me, but not to the effect I had once thought it would. Seeing a dead body. Seeing a dead body floating in the river decomposing. Seeing a dead body being burned. This is not something poetic. Here, it is just another fact of life. This goes along with children laying in the streets covered in feces. Whether it is their feces or that of one of the numerous animals that lives in the same vicinity as them is undetermined. This goes along with the improper sanitation that is common and the lack of regular drinking water that the entire city experiences.
The water in the Ganga is so polluted, that it does not even meet the recommended water quality levels for agricultural use. Yet daily people bath, drink, and wash their belongings in this sacred yet sullied river. These are all just common facts of life here in the worlds largest democracy. Remember these things when you get in your car and drive to your families homes. So remember that as you sit down to your Thanksgiving Dinner, in your warm house, with your hot showers and baths. Remember that you are just 1:7,200,000,000 on this planet.

Eat, Enjoy, and God Bless us all. That is if God takes our prayer into consideration with the other 7.2 billion prayers being asked.
~Craig

December Plans, how do we know where to go?

Today I awoke to find about 50,000+ people out my window at 4AM. Today, the women of this region break the 3 day fast they have been holding for their husbands (Personally I don’t think men are worth that). Thousands upon thousands of people lined the Ghats performing many different rituals that would take a scholar quite some time to understand, and of which I humbly lack the patience for.

In the coming month I will be completing the proposal for my field research project. This project will mostly take place in the Spring Semester, and will focus on Waste Management in Benares. I have included my proposal for those of you who are interested: 

This project will focus on Varanasi’s public cultural perceptions of local solid waste practices. Although the local waste practices will be introduced to the reader, this research is meant to focus less on the waste management and more upon how the citizens of Varanasi understand their active role in the environment. Thru numerous interviews with local citizens in Varanasi’s haphazard modernization, I will search for any developing themes within my data to develop a formal thesis. By focusing on the cultural aspect of waste in Varanasi it will be my attempt disabuse international misinterpretations of a “dirty Indian society” and to show that India’s (specifically in Varanasi) practices of waste management are an implication of the Caste System’s inefficiency in a globalizing context.

This project will consume my spring semester which ends in the middle of April, and will prevent me from doing too much travel. 

So I plan on taking a vacation in the month of December. This vacation scares some, thrills others, and will give me the needed exploration my soul desires. I leave for Kathmandu, Nepal on the 4th of December (if all goes as planned, this is India). When I arrive in Kathmandu two days later, by bus, I will find a hotel and some warm clothes. Picking up the necessary supplies over the following days, I will be preparing an adventure. After collecting all of the necessities, I will leave Kathmandu, hopefully by a shared jeep for the town of Jiri. This town was the starting location for a very famous expedition 50 some odd years ago. This expedition was led by Sir Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay, his guide. Their goal was summit of the highest place on the planet, the Peak of Mount Everest. My goal is not quite so lofty (at this time...). Over the following few weeks I will climb through passes and up valleys with the goal of reaching Everest Base Camp on Christmas Eve. I will spend my Christmas this year on top of the world! After spending a few days on the top, I will hike down, fly out and spend my remaining holiday in Kathmandu. Celebrating New Years in Kathmandu.

While I know this trip is not exactly everyone’s idea of a vacation, and I will most likely arrive back in Benares more exhausted then when I left, I think I will be rejuvenated. Having received my dose of nature for the semester, I can then focus on my work. I have rediscovered my disdain for city living in my time here. Cities are dirty, busy, and filled with much too many people for my taste. This is the future for our Modern World? God am I disappointed! I need my commune with my God, Nature. Nature is the one thing that connects us to the roots of existence, and we will not find her in the concrete Jungles we build around ourselves (Human Ecology). Humans truly need to understand where they came from before we can decide where we will go in the future (History). This is key to our understanding of the relationship we have with the global environment, and the understanding that this relationship is not a one way street (Human Geography). We cannot continue to take from our environment in the manner we have done so, this is a closed ecosystem, and if we consume the entirety of one product we will not simply be able to find more, because there won’t be any more. We need to start developing new processes now that will lead to a sustainable future (Environmentalism and Sustainability). 

All of these things, human ecology, history, human geography, and environmentalism coupled with sustainability studies, drive my thinking. I always catch myself talking about politics and human to human interaction in regular conversation, but human-human interaction will always be a struggle. However, human-nature environment need not be forever. We are intelligent enough creatures to work within a global context of the human-nature relationship to preserve this relationship. I guess this is something I can strive for. Something I can put myself into with the hope of making some advancement. Humans, I fear, will continue to hate, continue to take advantage, and continue to fight even kill one another. How can we change human nature? 

Enough of my philosophical touting. I leave you with this quote I recently found: 

     Traveler, there is no path 

     paths are made by walking.  

                 - Antonio Machado, Cantores

I am walking...

~ Craig