Asakiyume mita

When we went to the Amazon in July, we took shelter from a downpour at the Instituto Amazónico de Investigaciones Científicas SINCHI--the Sinchi Amazonic Institute of Scientific Research, "a nonprofit research institute of the Government of Colombia charged with carrying out scientific investigations on matters relating to the Amazon Rainforest, the Amazon River and the Amazon Region of Colombia for its better understanding and protection." There we met Dr. Clara Patricia Peña-Venegas, who gave me a copy of her extremely informative dissertation on cassava.

When I went back in March, I met with Dr. Peña and asked her what new things she was working on.

WELL. She's working on developing biodegradable, sustainable packaging alternatives to plastic for Leticia and the surrounding communities. Plastic trash is a huge problem for Leticia because (as noted in the post on the world's smallest Coca-Cola bottling plant) everything has to be shipped in and out of Leticia, but that's very expensive, so plastic trash just... piles up.

So she and other researchers at Sinchi have been working on various substitutes, using, among other things, cassava starch--and they have prototypes! These samples look a little battered, but that's because they've undergone various stress tests.

tray made from a palm leaf:



tray made from plant fibers:



Stiff-plastic substitute made from cassava starch. This could be used for things like cups:



5-second video of a flexible-plastic substitute, also from cassava starch:



She said they've tested various different types of cassava, and the starch from all of them works equally well--which is good, because it means that local farmers could keep on growing whatever they're growing now, but some of their produce could go to make these products--assuming there's a way to produce these materials affordably for local hotels and businesses. They have a test plant in the nearby town of Puerto Nariño to try to make this happen.

What's cool about this initiative is that they're not trying to find THE ONE TRUE PLASTIC SUBSTITUTE or dominate the world packaging industry: on the contrary, they're trying only to develop something that will work in this immediate region. This is important because it means it would be self-limiting: you wouldn't get people clear-cutting vast swaths of the rain forest to grow cassava for plastic substitutes, which would be a terrible unintended consequence. But if it's solely for local businesses to use, then it would provide farmers with additional income without too much damage to the forest, it would provide job for people in manufacturing, and it would provide hotels and businesses with an environmentally friendly alternative to plastic, one that would biodegrade and wouldn't clog and pollute waterways.

... On our (motorized) boat ride back from the flooded forest, we were moving through large patches of water hyacinth, and floating in the water hyacinth was... lots of trash. At one point the engine stalled out. Why? Because a plastic bag had wrapped itself around the propeller. That experience highlighted just how bad a problem plastic trash is.

I would love to see other hyper-local plastic substitutes developed. Cassava starch doesn't make much sense for my locale, but maybe potato starch? Things that can be locally produced, so there's not the pollution and expense of shipping. And things that biodegrade. (And of course they need to be produceable without huge amounts of petrochemical inputs, or that, too, defeats the purpose....)

This tweet contains a longer video from SINCHI, where Dr. Peña talks about the program (in Spanish).

This morning, since I have a dearth of paid work, and since the topic is tangentially related to something I'm writing, I watched a simply fabulous 47-minute video on Singapore's transshipment port.

I've always been fascinated by ports--or as fascinated as a person can be who's never actually hung out at any. They're such complex systems, and so important! So much going on. And the port in Singapore is especially so--the video claims it's the world's busiest.

Oh man, the video was just so well done. It starts with the arrival of a megaship, a giant container ship, and periodically it comes back to that ship to check on how things are coming along, and even though that's artificial--the filming isn't happening in real time (and the ship is in port for close to 24 hours)--it gives you a sense for how long it takes to unload and then reload it. And meanwhile it's talking about things like the Vessel Traffic Information Service (like air traffic control, but for the ships), or how they use gamma rays to check for bombs and things, or the car jockeys who have to drive the cars on and off the ship, or how they deal with VLCCs (Very Large Crude Carriers)--or how they deal with pirates! And they have historical footage of the port in the 1970s, and lots of interviews with various people in various roles, and always with this narration that knows how to play things for drama, e.g.:

It’s a wonder this megastructure doesn’t fall apart. The secret is Big Brother: Computer Integrated Terminal Operation System, code name CITOS. And this is central command. CITOS is a supercomputer whose fiberoptic tendrils reach every corner of the port. It orders, it controls, and it’s always watching.

Or:

The megaship will guzzle in just one day enough fuel to run an economy car for more than 150 years ... The fuel runs the largest diesel engine in the world … with more power than 143 top-of-the-range Ferraris.

(You have to love the comparisons--the wackiest was this: "100,000 boxes are stacked in the yard on any given day. Over 10 years, that’s enough to build a container beanstalk to the moon.")

You can imagine how exciting things get when it's talking about pirates:

It was almost midnight. The men were creeping in with pistols and long knives ... There was one chance the ship could be saved--but there was not a moment to lose ... Both the captain and the pirates were now racing to the bridge--racing to seize control of the ship. At stake? The lives of his crew.

But honestly, it was just as fun to see the car jockeys parking the cars within a hand's width of each other, or seeing a crane operator talk about his son wanting to go up in the crane.

I was thinking I would happily, happily watch a long serial set in a port, with the port master and the captain in charge of maritime environment and hazardous cargo, and the ship masters, the CEO of port security, and the car jockeys, and of course the pirates. Or even better, could I secure some grant to go live there and interview people and shadow them at work and create the serial myself??

I don't imagine my gushing can induce you to settle in for a 47-minute documentary video unless, like me, you're already interested in the topic, but I can promise you that it's an excellent ride if you do watch!

On this day in Pen Pal, nothing particular happened, but in the note that Kaya wrote her mother on July 4, she mentioned the research station in W--, where she used to work. At the research station, they test and develop new strains of cash and subsistence crops, as well as work on plants for soil replenishment, etc.

In Timor-Leste, Seeds of Life does this work. Here are two crops that were developed in Baucau, Timor-Leste, and that are among 11 being tested with local farmers:


"Deep purple" sweet potato; photo by Alexia Skok


Red rice; photo by Alexia Skok

“[These] varieties are locally sourced and already popular among farming families for their taste and colour,” says Research Coordinator Luis Almeida.

Photos and quote from Kate Bevitt, "Music to the Tastebuds: Deep Purple Sweet Potato and Other Varieties Coming Soon" June 26, 2014.

Near me, similar work goes on at Cold Spring Orchard, which is a test orchard for the University of Massachusetts. Sometimes when you go there in the fall, you can taste-test new varieties of peaches or apples--sometimes they don't even have names yet, just numbers.

. . . has surely got to be working in the sulfur mines in the crater of Kawah Ijen, a volcano in East Java, Indonesia. Stop and think a moment. Sulfur mining. In a volcano.

It's a world of fire, acid, and poisonous gases.

(There is an acid lake in the crater.)

Molten sulfur is blood red, but it burns with a blue flame. The photographer Olivier Grunewald took these photos, which ran in the Boston Globe on 8 December 2010. (Source for the entire photo essay here.) (Hat tip to yamamanama for showing me these!)

sulfur flames

image © Olivier Grunewald


image © Olivier Grunewald

molten sulfur

image © Olivier Grunewald

( hard work )

In conclusion. If you want to do a Cracked list about working in actual hellish circumstances, don't leave out the sulfur mine of Kawah Ijen.

Among the many good things Mandela did, he advocated for the release of Timorese freedom-fighter Xanana Gusmão from prison:

Mandela not only called for the release of Xanana Gusmao, but also insisted on meeting with the latter – and got his way […] Soeharto at first refused Mandela’s request to meet Xanana with the question ‘Why do you want to meet him? He is only a common criminal.’ When Mandela responded by saying ‘that is exactly what they said about me for 25 years,’ Soeharto promptly and magnanimously responded by arranging for Xanana to be brought from prison to the State Guest House for an intimate dinner with Mandela.

--Jamsheed Marker, East Timor: A Memoir of the Negotiations for Independence, quoted in Aboeprijadi Santoso, “Mandela, Indonesia and the liberation of Timor Leste,” Jakarta Post, 22 July 2013

Linguistically, East Timor is an interesting place. Portugal was the colonial overlord for centuries, so Portuguese was the language of higher education and opportunity. Then from the mid 1970s through 1999, Indonesia occupied the country, and Indonesia was the language of classroom instruction. Meanwhile, there are several mother tongues spoken by different populations. Tetun (Tetum) is the mother tongue of a large plurality of people, but there are other first-languages spoken, too.

( map of the languages of East Timor )

This being the situation in East Timor, there's apparently debate over how much to promote mother tongues and how much doing so is destructive of national unity.

From the Minister of Education:

The Ministry of Education fully supports the use of the mother tongue to serve as a bridge and facilitate the students during the initial years of scolarity, notably at the pre-school and basic education levels, thereby establishing a solid foundation for the children to pursue their studies at a higher level.

Several commenters argued against this, saying things like Mother tongue is important but not priority or maybe priority but not urgent and Nation building means exactly that; constructing with the glue that unites. Not dividing with the wedges that divide.

Then the prime minister's wife¹ (who also has the title of "Goodwill Ambassador for Education") joined the conversation, saying,

The suggestion that promoting local languages and culture threatens national unity is ludicrous. The true threat to social cohesion and stability in any country lies in the promotion of practices and systems which discriminate against certain sections of the community on the basis of their socio-economic circumstances, ethnic background or home language . . . the huge body of international research and national evidence-based studies show unequivocally that giving children a chance to build a solid foundation of literacy and cognitive development in the language with which they are most familiar helps them to successfully acquire a second, third, fourth and subsequent languages.

All of which is very interesting to me as I contemplate the nation of W-- and think about its future.

¹We've already established that Xanana Gusmão is super cool. Well, his wife, Kirsty Sword Gusmão, is equally cool. How could she not be, with the surname Sword? She will be getting her own entry momentarily.

The turtle in search of immortality

On the beach my anxious mother lit the kerosene lamp and walked the whole length of the sands, lighting up the sea in search of the beiro that would take us to the island of Ataúro, visible hunched in the pitch-dark night like a giant turtle which, in search of immortality, had turned itself into land.

By days rather than hours

Our family solitude was soon broken by the arrival of an African cipaio, the descendant of former deportees from Mozambique, the famous Landins, now employed as dogs of war and pacifiers of native uprisings. I could only see his white teeth and hear his gruff, loud voice, as he laughed and gave embarkation orders to a prisoner, either a political prisoner or a common criminal--at the time it came to the same thing, for they all shared the same destination and fate . . .

He put his hands into the water to wash them, but also perhaps to assure himself that the sea provided as solid a barrier as any prison walls. He shook of the drops of water, wrapped himself in a sarong and asked, "When do we arrive?"

"Tomorrow."

"Tomorrow! Does your clock tell the time by days rather than hours?"

The voice like a ship's wake

Simão listened to the sound of that silence. The sound of people falling asleep. Magnificent and terrifying, as at the very beginning or at the very end of time. He took off his sandals and held them in his hand. He wanted to see the face of the big land as he said goodbye to it. To see if it was laughing at him, weeping for him or about to kill him . . .When he could no longer make out the details of the city, he looked at the lights approaching the boat, the gleaming eyes of the fish, the young tuna and the sharks that rubbed against the wooden hull. Then the steersman saw his face fill with fear . . .

"It's all right," said the old man.

Simão started at this interruption to his thoughts. The old man's voice fanned out beneath Simão's gaze like a ship's wake.

"They're less dangerous than men. They know everything. They're the ones who guide the boat. They follow the sea currents. We learn how to navigate from them."

---Luís Cardoso, The Crossing (London: Granta Books, 2000), 11-15.

Fan Chengda (1126-1193), a government official of the Chinese Song dynasty, made observations of the people on Song China's southern frontiers. They're recorded in Treatises of the Supervisor and Guardian of the Cinnamon Sea, which wakanomori happens to have borrowed a copy of.

Fan's notes are fascinating:

( on pearl fishermen )

( the Ziqi people )

( embroidered faces )

Tune in next post for more ethnography, from a more recent era.

Those of you who know Alabama history may already know about Africatown, but wow. The discovery of it blew my mind.

It seems that in 1860, some brothers in Mobile, Alabama, got the idea to send a ship to Africa and bring back a bunch of Africans as slaves--although importation of slaves had been illegal in all the United States for 52 years. A ship called the Clothilde brought 110 people, aged 5 to 23, secretly to Mobile Bay, but the crime was discovered, and the brothers were prosecuted--though not before several of the young people had indeed been sold as slaves. Then the Civil War came along, the case against the brothers was dropped, the slaves were emancipated, and those who had been brought to America on the Clothilde found each other again. And then?

Well, The Encyclopedia of Alabama reports that

In 1866, they established the settlement of African Town as the first town founded and continuously occupied and controlled by blacks in the United States ... The residents appointed Gumpa, a Fon relative of King Ghezo known as Peter Lee or African Peter, as their chief. They also established a judicial system for the town based on their own laws, which were administered by two judges, Jaba Shade—well versed in herbal medicine—and Ossa Keeby. They also built the first school in the area to provide their children with better opportunities. Their school teacher was a young African American woman ...

By the 1880s, African Town was home to a second generation that had never been to Africa, but had been told repeatedly by their parents that it was a land of abundance and beauty. Many of the youngsters had both an American and a West African name, knew the geography of their parents' homelands, and those who had two African parents, also spoke their indigenous languages. Many of these second-generation residents lived into the 1950s, and thus some African Americans whose origin was in the international slave trade spoke African languages well into the twentieth century

Is that not amazing?

And in a few short days I can go look at that place.