TH #11 One Small Year
Towards Home #11
One Small Year
January, 2003
It’s never clear what will come next
But that’s the risk and that’s the test
And you were the only one so far to follow
No one talks about when one might stop and need to rest
Or how long you sit alone before you stop looking back
Like you’re waiting for Godot and then you
Pick your sorry ass up off the street and go
-- Shawn Colvin, “If I Were Brave”
For much of 2002, it did seem that I was waiting for Godot. And I’m quite sure that many among my friends and family wondered when I’d pick my sorry ass up off the proverbial street and head back to the States. Through luck, force of will, divine intervention, diligence, fortuitous star alignment, good professional connections, or some combination of these and other factors, I did figure out a way to continue working on transitional justice with people from Burma in Thailand.
I spent the first chunk of 2002 without an income, fretting over alternative plans A, B, C (and sub-plans A-1 through C-5) in case funding did not come through for the project I launched in June, 2001. Financially, I exhausted my savings and probably the good will of friends and family who helped sustain me while I waited to hear about pending grant proposals. I earned some income and honed my own writing skills a bit by doing a short stint with a shady on-line editing company, “cleaning up” (i.e. re-writing) college- and graduate-school application essays. (Check out http://www.cyberedit.com/.) To counterbalance my vulnerability and accompanying moodiness, I leaned quite heavily on the good nature of friends and colleagues here in Chiang Mai. I also enjoyed a 2-week trip to Vietnam with my older siblings, Stacy and Mark. Emphasis on older. Upon arriving in Saigon, many of the Vietnamese we met remarked that the three of us looked alike, to which we routinely responded by confirming that we were siblings and asking them to guess who was the oldest, who the youngest. When I consistently was chosen as the oldest (I was 33; Mark, 45; and Stacy, 39) I knew the waiting had taken its toll.
The two weeks in Vietnam removed a few years’ worth of lines from my face, but the grant confirmation letter from the U.S. Institute of Peace (USIP) that I got in April de-aged me by about a decade. Their letter was the start of my triple-play: within the space of about 3 months, I secured funding for three of the project’s components for the next year from three different sources – USIP, the Open Society Institute (George Soros’ foundation), and the International Center for Transitional Justice.
Well, “secured funding” is a bit of a stretch. Being told I would receive grants is one thing; securing those grants another. All of those organizations committed to providing some funding for my project. The logistics of wrangling the money from them has been another story entirely. One funder sent money soon after reaching an agreement with me; another took four months and a half-dozen office visits to figure out how to transfer the money; and after eight months, I’m still waiting for the funds from the third.
Waiting. In many ways the personal discipline it has taken to wait, prod, and politely request the status of my grants, has been my own personal interregnum. In some way, perhaps a long liminal stage between the planning and the implementing of a transitional justice project is apropos.
The term, “transitional justice,” is fairly new in the lexicon of social science, politics, and international relations. The field deals with the societal and political changes that happen when an authoritarian regime falls, replaced by a new (presumably better) form of governance. In particular, it deals with what happens about past human rights abuses – what to do about the perpetrators as well as the victims and survivors.
The term came into common usage only recently, but post-World War II Nazi trials at Nuremberg and the reparations to survivors and families of victims of the Holocaust fall within the purview of transitional justice. A more recent example is the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission which provided a mechanism for victims of apartheid to learn the truth about the abuses they or their loved ones suffered. It gave perpetrators an opportunity to apply for amnesty in exchange for the full truth about their crimes. Over the past twenty years, people in countries as disparate as Ghana, East Timor, Bosnia, Guatemala, and Chile have created such mechanisms – everything from South African-style truth commissions, to criminal tribunals (e.g. the trial of former Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic at The Hague), to commemorative ceremonies and museums about the abuses suffered under authoritarian rule. José Zalaquett, a Chilean lawyer, has suggested that transitional justice reveals the essential distinction between knowledge of what was suffered (which the victims are already well aware of) and acknowledgement of that suffering.
The project I am working on aims to lay the groundwork for such acknowledgement in a future, democratic Burma. One of our activities is to bring together all the data about human rights abuses into a common, standardized format with collaboration from all the groups collecting that information. The other activities – trainings and publications – aim to educate people about how that information could possibly be used in the future by introducing concepts like “truth commission” and “reparations” to people from Burma and providing comparative case studies.
In June, having commitments from two of the funders, I knew I had a project to work on as soon as the money arrived. So with visa card in hand I flew back to the U.S. for a six-week trip, the first time I’d been back in a year and a half. My first stop was Indiana, where the potential for reverse culture shock is perhaps greatest and for which I was in no way prepared. One of the first social events I went to was the annual Catholic Youth Organization buffet dinner and raffle. Having spent much of my young adult life involved in CYO in one way or another, I naïvely was expecting to feel at home and perhaps run into some friends I had lost touch with. As I sat down and took in the setting, I realized I had not been in a room of only white people for a very long time and the phenomenon sparked all kinds of revelations. I wondered why this should make me uncomfortable; it’s the experience of most people in the world. In most Thai villages, all the social gatherings are attended by Thais, not by some diverse mix of ethnicities. And it’s similar in Ghana, Bolivia … most places. But uncomfortable I was.
As I walked across the room to check out the buffet, I heard a loud voice call out, “PAT PIERCE!” A woman I didn’t recognize had recognized me. It was Anita, who had been a junior counselor at the camp where I worked for five summers.
I should have been more prepared for her next question, “so … what are you doing now?”
I responded without any cushioning, “I’m doing human rights work with people from Burma who live in Thailand” which I imagined sounding to her like, “I live in a jungle treehouse and pick small insects off the scalps of natives” or “I search for ancient life forms on Mars.”
Recovering briefly, I attempted to change the subject and find some common, un-awkward ground. “Enough about me, though. How about you?”
“Oh, I’m a liquor distributor on the East Side.”
The chasm widened, and I murmured something like “speaking of which” and headed to the bar for a drink.
For readers in Indiana, and any liquor distributors among you, I realize that with this story I’m running the risk of self-righteousness. But that’s not it, or at least not all of it. Not even most of it. It’s just that with 18 months away, there are certain social skills that grow moldy with neglect. Dizzy with culture shock, I couldn’t gather the concentration necessary to step out of my own reality and enter someone else’s, so different from mine.
After the CYO buffet, the dizziness subsided (and re-emerged only occasionally) and I quickly started taking advantage of all of the Hoosier benefits I had been missing. I discovered that public libraries not only have free internet access now, but also have coffee shops in the corners. I spent hours in bookstores, scouring the racks of magazines on topics like literature, the politics of hip-hop culture, feng shui, and anthropology as well as novels that haven’t made it to the used bookstores in Chiang Mai. Best of all, I was able to soak up friends and family, including being reunited with my friend Cori from high school, whom I hadn’t seen for probably ten years. The highlight of the Indiana leg of the trip was attending my oldest sister, Lauralee’s, wedding, meeting new family members, and seeing my nieces, grandma, and other extended family.
The other stops on the trip – Washington, D.C., New York, and San Francisco – were filled with much of the same (visa card still in hand): reunions with friends (and my cousins in Richmond whom I hadn’t seen for seven years), movies that will never make it to Thailand, CD shops, and more bookstores. Each trip to an airport entailed repacking bags to meet weight requirements, delirious negotiations at ticket counters after getting little sleep the night before, or misplacing transfer tickets. But there were no disasters or missed flights; I’ve always been a chaotic but lucky traveler.
Arriving back in Chiang Mai in July, the transitional justice project took a back seat to what became a gargantuan task: moving out of the house I had lived in for three years, determined to get my full $750 deposit back. My first obstacle was my own absent-mindedness – I had misplaced the lease, and the broker lied to me about the deposit amount. However, I eventually found the lease on the night I was moving out, but it still took another month and a half to arrange a meeting with the landlady. I finally had to hire a lawyer to threaten the landlady that we would go to the police at every step: if we couldn’t get a meeting, couldn’t agree to the amount of the deposit owed to me, and couldn’t actually get the money. This process entailed a series of tense encounters, the landlady always showing up in a huff, usually an hour late, declaring that despite the evidence in hand (I had miraculously saved all of the bank deposit receipts for my monthly rent payments), she knew that I had skipped one month’s payment. I now believe she just didn’t have the cash available at the time and out of some combination of culture, pride, arrogance, and evil-heartedness she would not admit it. Again, leaning heavily on the good nature of my friends, I prevailed with all of the deposit money, in need of therapy, and with the poorly-constructed house and evil landlady in my dust.
In the immediate aftermath of that battle, taking on the military rulers of Burma did not seem so daunting. Over time, though, I realized that my image of the landlady as mother-of-all-evil was perhaps a bit overblown and the tasks at hand fell into proper perspective. I spent the rest of 2002 getting started on the transitional justice project. I set up an office and hired two staff, both from Burma, who had been fellows on a transitional justice project in Cape Town, South Africa, for the first six months of the year. We have been busy revising the training curriculum, writing publications explaining the basics of transitional justice, and conducting trainings. At the end of the year, we mapped out our plan through mid-2005: more trainings, more publications, a research project, and a pilot of the collaborative database project. We need to double our staff and double our budget. So the fundraising begins anew.
It’s never clear what will come next
But that’s the risk and that’s the test
And you were the only one so far to follow
No one talks about when one might stop and need to rest
Or how long you sit alone before you stop looking back
Like you’re waiting for Godot and then you
Pick your sorry ass up off the street and go
-- Shawn Colvin, “If I Were Brave”
For much of 2002, it did seem that I was waiting for Godot. And I’m quite sure that many among my friends and family wondered when I’d pick my sorry ass up off the proverbial street and head back to the States. Through luck, force of will, divine intervention, diligence, fortuitous star alignment, good professional connections, or some combination of these and other factors, I did figure out a way to continue working on transitional justice with people from Burma in Thailand.
I spent the first chunk of 2002 without an income, fretting over alternative plans A, B, C (and sub-plans A-1 through C-5) in case funding did not come through for the project I launched in June, 2001. Financially, I exhausted my savings and probably the good will of friends and family who helped sustain me while I waited to hear about pending grant proposals. I earned some income and honed my own writing skills a bit by doing a short stint with a shady on-line editing company, “cleaning up” (i.e. re-writing) college- and graduate-school application essays. (Check out http://www.cyberedit.com/.) To counterbalance my vulnerability and accompanying moodiness, I leaned quite heavily on the good nature of friends and colleagues here in Chiang Mai. I also enjoyed a 2-week trip to Vietnam with my older siblings, Stacy and Mark. Emphasis on older. Upon arriving in Saigon, many of the Vietnamese we met remarked that the three of us looked alike, to which we routinely responded by confirming that we were siblings and asking them to guess who was the oldest, who the youngest. When I consistently was chosen as the oldest (I was 33; Mark, 45; and Stacy, 39) I knew the waiting had taken its toll.
The two weeks in Vietnam removed a few years’ worth of lines from my face, but the grant confirmation letter from the U.S. Institute of Peace (USIP) that I got in April de-aged me by about a decade. Their letter was the start of my triple-play: within the space of about 3 months, I secured funding for three of the project’s components for the next year from three different sources – USIP, the Open Society Institute (George Soros’ foundation), and the International Center for Transitional Justice.
Well, “secured funding” is a bit of a stretch. Being told I would receive grants is one thing; securing those grants another. All of those organizations committed to providing some funding for my project. The logistics of wrangling the money from them has been another story entirely. One funder sent money soon after reaching an agreement with me; another took four months and a half-dozen office visits to figure out how to transfer the money; and after eight months, I’m still waiting for the funds from the third.
Waiting. In many ways the personal discipline it has taken to wait, prod, and politely request the status of my grants, has been my own personal interregnum. In some way, perhaps a long liminal stage between the planning and the implementing of a transitional justice project is apropos.
The term, “transitional justice,” is fairly new in the lexicon of social science, politics, and international relations. The field deals with the societal and political changes that happen when an authoritarian regime falls, replaced by a new (presumably better) form of governance. In particular, it deals with what happens about past human rights abuses – what to do about the perpetrators as well as the victims and survivors.
The term came into common usage only recently, but post-World War II Nazi trials at Nuremberg and the reparations to survivors and families of victims of the Holocaust fall within the purview of transitional justice. A more recent example is the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission which provided a mechanism for victims of apartheid to learn the truth about the abuses they or their loved ones suffered. It gave perpetrators an opportunity to apply for amnesty in exchange for the full truth about their crimes. Over the past twenty years, people in countries as disparate as Ghana, East Timor, Bosnia, Guatemala, and Chile have created such mechanisms – everything from South African-style truth commissions, to criminal tribunals (e.g. the trial of former Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic at The Hague), to commemorative ceremonies and museums about the abuses suffered under authoritarian rule. José Zalaquett, a Chilean lawyer, has suggested that transitional justice reveals the essential distinction between knowledge of what was suffered (which the victims are already well aware of) and acknowledgement of that suffering.
The project I am working on aims to lay the groundwork for such acknowledgement in a future, democratic Burma. One of our activities is to bring together all the data about human rights abuses into a common, standardized format with collaboration from all the groups collecting that information. The other activities – trainings and publications – aim to educate people about how that information could possibly be used in the future by introducing concepts like “truth commission” and “reparations” to people from Burma and providing comparative case studies.
In June, having commitments from two of the funders, I knew I had a project to work on as soon as the money arrived. So with visa card in hand I flew back to the U.S. for a six-week trip, the first time I’d been back in a year and a half. My first stop was Indiana, where the potential for reverse culture shock is perhaps greatest and for which I was in no way prepared. One of the first social events I went to was the annual Catholic Youth Organization buffet dinner and raffle. Having spent much of my young adult life involved in CYO in one way or another, I naïvely was expecting to feel at home and perhaps run into some friends I had lost touch with. As I sat down and took in the setting, I realized I had not been in a room of only white people for a very long time and the phenomenon sparked all kinds of revelations. I wondered why this should make me uncomfortable; it’s the experience of most people in the world. In most Thai villages, all the social gatherings are attended by Thais, not by some diverse mix of ethnicities. And it’s similar in Ghana, Bolivia … most places. But uncomfortable I was.
As I walked across the room to check out the buffet, I heard a loud voice call out, “PAT PIERCE!” A woman I didn’t recognize had recognized me. It was Anita, who had been a junior counselor at the camp where I worked for five summers.
I should have been more prepared for her next question, “so … what are you doing now?”
I responded without any cushioning, “I’m doing human rights work with people from Burma who live in Thailand” which I imagined sounding to her like, “I live in a jungle treehouse and pick small insects off the scalps of natives” or “I search for ancient life forms on Mars.”
Recovering briefly, I attempted to change the subject and find some common, un-awkward ground. “Enough about me, though. How about you?”
“Oh, I’m a liquor distributor on the East Side.”
The chasm widened, and I murmured something like “speaking of which” and headed to the bar for a drink.
For readers in Indiana, and any liquor distributors among you, I realize that with this story I’m running the risk of self-righteousness. But that’s not it, or at least not all of it. Not even most of it. It’s just that with 18 months away, there are certain social skills that grow moldy with neglect. Dizzy with culture shock, I couldn’t gather the concentration necessary to step out of my own reality and enter someone else’s, so different from mine.
After the CYO buffet, the dizziness subsided (and re-emerged only occasionally) and I quickly started taking advantage of all of the Hoosier benefits I had been missing. I discovered that public libraries not only have free internet access now, but also have coffee shops in the corners. I spent hours in bookstores, scouring the racks of magazines on topics like literature, the politics of hip-hop culture, feng shui, and anthropology as well as novels that haven’t made it to the used bookstores in Chiang Mai. Best of all, I was able to soak up friends and family, including being reunited with my friend Cori from high school, whom I hadn’t seen for probably ten years. The highlight of the Indiana leg of the trip was attending my oldest sister, Lauralee’s, wedding, meeting new family members, and seeing my nieces, grandma, and other extended family.
The other stops on the trip – Washington, D.C., New York, and San Francisco – were filled with much of the same (visa card still in hand): reunions with friends (and my cousins in Richmond whom I hadn’t seen for seven years), movies that will never make it to Thailand, CD shops, and more bookstores. Each trip to an airport entailed repacking bags to meet weight requirements, delirious negotiations at ticket counters after getting little sleep the night before, or misplacing transfer tickets. But there were no disasters or missed flights; I’ve always been a chaotic but lucky traveler.
Arriving back in Chiang Mai in July, the transitional justice project took a back seat to what became a gargantuan task: moving out of the house I had lived in for three years, determined to get my full $750 deposit back. My first obstacle was my own absent-mindedness – I had misplaced the lease, and the broker lied to me about the deposit amount. However, I eventually found the lease on the night I was moving out, but it still took another month and a half to arrange a meeting with the landlady. I finally had to hire a lawyer to threaten the landlady that we would go to the police at every step: if we couldn’t get a meeting, couldn’t agree to the amount of the deposit owed to me, and couldn’t actually get the money. This process entailed a series of tense encounters, the landlady always showing up in a huff, usually an hour late, declaring that despite the evidence in hand (I had miraculously saved all of the bank deposit receipts for my monthly rent payments), she knew that I had skipped one month’s payment. I now believe she just didn’t have the cash available at the time and out of some combination of culture, pride, arrogance, and evil-heartedness she would not admit it. Again, leaning heavily on the good nature of my friends, I prevailed with all of the deposit money, in need of therapy, and with the poorly-constructed house and evil landlady in my dust.
In the immediate aftermath of that battle, taking on the military rulers of Burma did not seem so daunting. Over time, though, I realized that my image of the landlady as mother-of-all-evil was perhaps a bit overblown and the tasks at hand fell into proper perspective. I spent the rest of 2002 getting started on the transitional justice project. I set up an office and hired two staff, both from Burma, who had been fellows on a transitional justice project in Cape Town, South Africa, for the first six months of the year. We have been busy revising the training curriculum, writing publications explaining the basics of transitional justice, and conducting trainings. At the end of the year, we mapped out our plan through mid-2005: more trainings, more publications, a research project, and a pilot of the collaborative database project. We need to double our staff and double our budget. So the fundraising begins anew.
2002 was just one small year, but one I feel quite good about. I came up with a plan to bring together my passion for anthropology and my passion for Burma, solicited the plan to foundations, received funding, put together a team, and started implementing the project. Whether the project will successfully lead to justice for people affected by human rights abuses in Burma depends on many factors outside of myself, but at the end of the day, the end of the year, I am happy to be doing something about it, not waiting.
posted by PeaJayPee @ 6:33 PM
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