Moving On

It's side war
from sidewalks to billboards and stores
tellin' all poor people that the world is yours
but this money is ours
you can get a little back
you start puttin' in hours
you can widen the gap
but you can see it in the towers
standing next to the squatters
who be wandering the city in search of a job offer
the first generation in the U S of A
to get paid less wage the ones who came before
the wicked waged war in a desert terrain
24 short bars couldn't measure the pain
so now I greet the neighbor daily
he's on his porch smokin' overhead thunderclouds
movin' slow motion
came across an ocean in hope of some better days
expatriated citizens of third world decay
where children translate for their parents sake
in a landscape where the workin' class can't escape
these languages twisted
tongues get unraveled
can't understand each other in this modern day babel
now we tryin' to get a piece of what the city broke down
barely claiming families but put the claim to town
recognize it's serious but ain't afraid to clown
trained for confrontation
there's no other way around
these sacred ground desecrators
they try to decimate us...
it's gonna take more than just rain to change this

-Blue Scholars, "Bayani"

I've started about a half dozen blogs since my last couple, never quite finishing them. Tom Perry (http://ublog.union.edu/perryt) and Monica Rowett (http://ublog.union.edu/rowettm) have taken over as the Minerva Fellows in the place of Becky and I. I have spent a lot of time doing web updates for Engeye (http://engeye.org) and have tried to be useful to the organization based on my experience there over the last year.

Next Steps

It's now crunch time with moving to Seattle. I fly out Saturday at 8AM and it will no doubt be a late night Friday saying my last goodbyes in Buffalo, NY. Unless I can get home for Thanksgiving I am on track to miss my third straight Autumn in New York (Australia, Uganda, now Seattle), though Seattle should have similarly cold, depressing weather that I have come to love.

In Seattle, I will be in the Department of Atmospheric Sciences doing something related to climate physics. Actually, I hope to tie in climate modeling, human impacts of climate change, and policy implications. That's a lot to work on. University of Washington is a trimester school like Union and I start off with four graduate level classes in a brand new place, though I am lucky to have Nathali Neal (Ozone House co-founder) and a couple other acquaintances out there helping me get going. Maybe even some visits from friends looking to explore the west coast.

Shock

Everyone asks me about the "culture shock" of being back in the US. I don't think I was shocked to be back in the US as much as I was calmly reflective. I do vividly remember looking up at a jet sliding across the sky, looking down at the perfectly manicured medium, driving on I-95 or maybe I-495 out of Boston and thinking that we are lucky to have all that we have as I drove away from Boston Logan Airport and my physical presence in Uganda. When I eat ice cream I am saddened to think that most of the kids I knew in Uganda will never have that experience in the same comfortable context, if at all. They will never go to the beach and lounge; most will never make it out of their village. These thoughts can hit fairly hard. They don't have these luxuries like this - they don't even have basic health care. I get worked up about the inadequacies of our government, our health care, our own failures as a society, but the contrast between our problems and problems in one of the least developed countries in the world is pretty distinct. It is often tough for me to understand and consider, because I don't know exactly how we are affecting the situation. I see that we are so much better off and that Ugandans are so much worse off and it is very unsettling, but it is tough to understand that relationship. It's one of those ridiculous things - a high rise with homeless people in the shadows; drinking coffee in a fancy coffee shop from someone that makes a dollar a day; someone receiving cosmetic surgery while another person dies of malaria. The people in the shadows must just not work hard.

But they do work hard. This is what I have been trying to wrap my mind around. There's no easy way to write about it, because it is tough to understand. There's a lot of ins and outs, aid money use and abuse and shortcomings, US weapons to East Africa, AIDS, globalization, WTO and World Bank monetary policies, US agricultural subsidies, Ugandan corruption, corporate corruption, environmental degradation, geography, ecology, natural resources, climate change, communications, education, etc. all play a role in this shadow cast over the impoverished.

For Now

So for now, I will probably randomly update this blog with thoughts and updates from my new home. Probably will put up interesting information from my grad school work. Interesting information from Seattle.

I miss Uganda very much and I miss my friends at Union very much. I miss the places, too. Walking the streets around the campus, the quiet deserted summer campus, the basement where I worked for two years on "scintillation" and "accelerator physics." I miss the dusty roads in Uganda and the constant presence of children. I miss the rainy season and the intolerable taxi rides to Masaka.

Not sure where the road takes me from here. Maybe back to Africa. Maybe the Antarctic. Maybe Australia. Maybe a basement in Seattle with really big computers and a bug-eyed computer programmer.

Feel free to shoot me an e-mail if you have more questions about Uganda (how this blog initially started) or for most of you, my friends who kept tabs on me during my travels (thank you) please feel free to keep this bookmarked and please keep in touch.