Killing a Turkey

When I was about 12 or 13 years old, I took a course in hunter safety and received my hunter’s safety license so I could go hunting. Only one small problem: I didn’t believe in hunting. I had a problem with the idea of killing an animal to eat it. Yet apparently this problem wasn’t big enough to keep me from eating meat, I think I simply didn’t think about it. My brother went hunting one year and bagged a buck. I was morally opposed but secretly fascinated to sneak down to the garage where dad was working with our neighbor the Game Warden to skin, gut, and butcher the deer carcass. Somehow it took me another 10 or so years to realize that my moral objection to personally killing an animal was just plain hypocrisy and denial.

I had learned much more about our food system and how it abuses, mutilates (both genetically and otherwise), then slaughters literally billions of animals to provide us all with our meat cravings at a cheap price tag. I had to confront my hypocrisy face to face. How could I judge hunters then walk to the freezer and pull out a bag of Tyson frozen chicken strips (boneless of course!) to eat for dinner? So, Ash and I became vegetarians, mostly. We only ate meat when we could verify where the meat came from, the conditions in which the animal was raised and slaughtered, and what it was fed. Since arriving in Moldova, I have, rightly or wrongly, let go of this distinction. Mostly because almost all of the meat Moldovans eat comes from their backyard or that of a neighbor. Yet every time I eat meat, I think about the animal it once was, and wonder, where and how did it live? Did it know it was going to be eaten? Did it understand that it was only fed in order to become food?

Then Ash signed me up (ok, I also volunteered…) to help kill the Thanksgiving turkeys with a few other volunteers and then help prepare them for the big volunteer meal the Saturday after Thanksgiving. Although I jumped at the opportunity, I did so with an understanding that I would again have to confront my beliefs, thoughts, convictions, feelings, and motivations for eating meat. Yet this time I’d be doing it with an ax in my hand.

So I travelled to the volunteer’s village in which we’d be doing the deed on Thanksgiving and helped him start to prepare pumpkin pie filling and crust as well as cooking a vegetarian chili to eat with his host family and the other volunteers who would be joining us that night. Friday morning we awoke early and, with Grișa, the host dad, hopped in the car and drove across the village to pick out the turkeys. The sun was setting the strips of clouds on the horizon afire and making the backdrop of sky appear a deep purple as we got out of the car and walked through the gate to greet the family who had agreed to sell us six of their turkeys. Us five Americans were obviously clueless as to how to carry live turkeys as we struggled to hold onto their wings and carry them over to the house from the massive yard in which they lived with their about thirty or forty fellow gobblers.

Soon we were on our way back to the house, six live turkeys, incredibly docile, occupying the trunk of the aging white Lada. Back within the confines of the low green wooden fence of Grișa’s house, we carefully unloaded the live cargo, which, with their legs tied, simply plopped down on the grass quietly. We then worked together to start the fire which would boil the water to loosen the turkey’s skin’s hold on their feathers. Soon came the time. Grișa took hold of the first turkey, saying he would show us how then we could each have out turn. Holding the wings together in one hand with the feet looked simple enough. He held the bird upside down like that with his left hand, slowly and gently placing its head on the small block of wood before picking up the small ax with his right. The bird was completely calm, not making a noise nor moving at all as the ax came down perfectly on its neck, severing everything but a tiny bit of skin. Grișa held the body upside down to let the blood come out, then handed it to me to hold until it stopped twitching, at which point he showed me how to dip the whole bird in the boiling water quickly before pulling it out and tasking a few of us with the tedious job of plucking.

Each of us went in turn, and suddenly it was my turn, the last bird a pure white turkey weighing around 6 kilograms. It was quickly obvious that the skill of holding both wings and both feet in one hand firmly enough to not let a wing erupt was a skill Grișa had acquired over many years. I managed to get the grip, and to place the birds head on the block. As I reached for the ax, I thanked God for the turkey in my hands. I thanked him for making it, for the life it had lived, and for the nourishment it was going to provide our bodies. Then the ax fell and I was again holding a twitching body.

The experience was one which I would not have missed, and, if given the chance, will do again. I don’t enjoy killing things. To the contrary, I take the deed with the utmost responsibility and seriousness, knowing that what once was living is now not because of a movement of my arm. It makes me confront profound questions about the meaning of life, humans and our place on this Earth, and how we should be filling our role as stewards of the ecosystems on which we depend for life. We are indeed a part of this world, not separate from, above, or below it. Yet somehow we are apart. We have the power to take a life and to reflect on the life we took. Because we have this power, we have the responsibility to use it. To reflect on our impact on those around us and the world in which we live. To reflect on the consequences of our actions, both large and small. Will you reflect with me?

Urban Agriculture

“Urban agriculture is an oxymoron. People that believe in that are just fooling themselves.” This was the response of a man who was presenting to my Peace Corps program group during a training session recently. He had asked for us each to say our name, where we were from, and if we had any experience with agriculture. Given my experience with Revision International’s program Re:farm Denver, I said that I have some experience in urban agriculture. The man, we’ll call him Bob, was a Ph.D. biologist who specialized in high-output greenhouse vegetable production. He had been brought to Moldova by an amazing program that brings experts in different agricultural fields from the States to consult and help Moldovan farmers for usually around 15 days.

Although his session was extremely informative and it was obvious he had an abundance of knowledge about how to get the most production out of any given greenhouse setting, I couldn’t help but ponder his somewhat upsetting comment about urban agriculture. Indeed his sentiments are nothing new. I’ve seen the same thoughts tracking across the faces of most farmers whom I’ve told about the work we do with Re:farm Denver in the city; they simply think we’re not doing real work. Their looks say that if we’re serious about feeding the world, we’d go lease 1000 acres, get a John Deere tractor, sprayer, and combine to plant, inundate, and harvest a single commodity crop which would then more than likely make its way into the stomachs of animals who weren’t meant to eat that kind of food anyway before the fat on their bones makes it to our mouths. The only exception to this has been my father-in-law, a South Dakotan farmer who has shown a genuine interest in my work with food in the city.

Don’t misunderstand me, large-scale farms (perhaps not as large as today’s farms though), technical equipment like tractors, ploughs, combines, etc, do indeed need to play an important role in the future or our food. Yet, with the global population creeping (read: racing) away from the rural lifestyle and toward the urban and suburban cityscapes, we must engage those settings with the question of how to feed themselves. Oil is dwindling worldwide; fossil-fuel based fertilizers, pesticides, herbicides, insecticides, are growing ever-more expensive; and the transportation to fly, ship, and drive food from the farm to the table is today longer and therefore requires more inputs than ever before in history. All this put together means that using the spaces which are available to us in the urban setting to grow what we can is more than simply not an oxymoron, it is a vital component of creating a future for our children when oil runs out.

It is also important to remember that we (most people in ‘developed’ nations) are forgetting both what real food is, and how to grow it. With grocery stores packed with tens of thousands of combinations of the compounds thought up by food scientists, and an increasingly urban population, we’ve firmly lost touch with where our food comes from. Unlike here in Moldova, where every family has a garden as well as a small plot of land on which they grow corn, grapes, sunflowers (for the seeds and the oil), having a garden in the States is largely considered a luxury or a hobby. Less than 2% of our population are farmers, and that number is still shrinking as my generation grows up and wants to leave the small towns for the big cities. Programs like Re:farm Denver are reteaching people about food. Reshowing people what it means to eat healthy. Reminding people that growing food is always cheaper than buying it.

All the families Revision works with for establishing household gardens are living at or below the Federal poverty line. They also live in food deserts, areas of the city where there is no grocery store. Where the only option for food is the junk food at the cornerstore. These families can’t afford to eat healthy thanks to our current national food system and policies (a topic for another blog), so they have higher rates of Type II diabetes, heart disease, and obesity. I have seen the difference a backyard garden can make in these families’ lives. When a family of four living on a household income of less than fifteen thousand dollars a year saves $40 per week by having a household garden, that is real. When kids are involved in growing their own food and now are excited to eat the vegetables they have helped grow, that is real.

So, urban agriculture can’t be an oxymoron. Cities can, do, and need to continue growing as much food as they possibly can within their own city limits. A very viable path for low-income families toward a healthier lifestyle is through relearning how to garden, which not only connects them with the Earth which sustains us, but also, inevitably, with their neighbors as they search for venues to share their surplus harvests.

Join the movement. Grow some of your own food next year and volunteer or donate to an organization like Revision which helps low-income neighborhoods do the same.

We are all pro-life

It’s a shame the terms ‘pro-life’ and ‘pro-choice’ have been co-opted into the narrow-sighted and polarizing argument about the morality of abortion (and, by the way, they are not, by definition, opposites; if you really oppose pro-life, doesn’t that mean you’re pro-death? And if you oppose pro-choice, are you pro-indecision?). In reality, there is so much in this world in need of our attention, that perhaps its time we expand the scope of these terms. Indeed the leaders of two of the largest branches of the Christian church, have already expanded the idea of what it means to be ‘pro-life’. In 2002, Pope John Paul II and Ecumenical Patriarch His Holiness Bartholomew I (leader of the Eastern Orthodox church), after concluding a symposium on religion, science, and the environment, together signed a statement detailing a code of environmental ethics.

The unfortunate unwillingness of the majority of Christians worldwide to engage our responsibility to the environment as a mandate from God the Creator is amazing. Not only does this ignore the teachings of Jesus, but it also ignores the entire of purpose of our lives, as Bartholomew of Constantinople and the late John Paul II so eloquently articulate.

“A new approach and a new culture are needed, based on the centrality of the human person within creation and inspired by environmentally ethical behavior stemming from our triple relationship to God, to self, and to creation. Such an ethics fosters interdependence and stresses the principles of universal solidarity, social justice, and responsibility, in order to promote a true culture of life.” (emphasis mine)

They are calling all of humanity, every person of every faith to join together and become pro-life and pro-choice. We must realize that this ‘culture of life’ cherishes the inherent value of all life. To be pro-life should mean that we all “…think of the world’s children [indeed all future generations] when we reflect on and evaluate our options for action.” To be pro-choice should mean to choose to allow this “… love for our children [to] show us the path that we must follow into the future.” So in reality, if we step back and reflect rationally, we should all be pro-life and pro-choice. Yet reason and logic only take us so far in this quest to rethink how we live together with each other and with the Earth that sustains us.

“The problem is not simply economic and technological; it is moral and spiritual. A solution at the economic and technological level can be found only if we undergo, in the most radical way, an inner change of heart, which can lead to a change in lifestyle and of unsustainable patterns of consumption and production.”

Let us deepen our definitions of pro-life and pro-choice. Or perhaps, let us take our eyes off the symptom that abortion is and commit ourselves to addressing the actual illness. We have, as humanity, stepped away from the original purpose we were given; to be stewards of creation, working it and keeping it for our children.

What is your contribution?

We walked into the Sala de festivă, the all purpose room of the school. Its recently rehabbed interior buzzing with tens of different conversations between the hundreds of townspeople seated on the cold, metal and fake-wood benches which were positioned in rows facing the stage. Women of all ages, most of them wearing basme, head scarves, each folded in half to form a triangle and encircling its owner’s face and covering their hair, the other two ends tied loosely under their chins with the knots struggling to hold onto themselves against the constant motion of the women’s chins as they talked. Almost immediately we realized the people had segregated themselves by gender. The women sitting toward the front, the men either sitting in the couple of last rows or standing in the back in pairs, hands in their pockets as they discussed whatever it was that Moldovans seem to be able to talk about for hours on end non-stop.

We had come to the general parents’ meeting of the school (serving 1^st grade through 12^th) out of interest, to see what would be discussed, and what a mass meeting in Moldova was like. We sat down, still bundled in our jackets against the chill of the room, on an empty bench two-thirds of the way back on the right side of the auditorium behind our host mom Tania. As we looked around, it seemed most of the teachers were already present and seated in a loose group in the front right, furthest from entry door.

The meeting actually started almost right on time (highly unusual), even though stragglers kept streaming in every few minutes until the room was filled to standing room only. Doamna Maria, the school director (principal as we would think of it) called the meeting to order by thanking the parents for being there and inviting the mayor, Domnul Petru, and the vice-mayor, Doamna Nina, to sit down at the table at the front of the meeting, facing the crowd. She also asked for a volunteer to be secretary of the meeting, and asked for another community member to volunteer for something else that Ash and I didn’t catch.

Though the format of the meeting was brutally boring (Doamna Maria or another woman simply standing at the front and speaking into the microphone for what turned out to be two and a quarter hours), trying to understand their Romanian and being curious about what they talked about kept Ash and I focused for most of it. Soon, the speaker was asking for input from the parents on different needs/issues/ideas for their school. In the ensuing yelling match, two parents in particular offered complaints which drew heated sounds and responses from other parents and from the speakers. One main issue which Doamna Maria had raised was about the veceu (bathroom) situation. The current ‘bathroom’ for over six hundred students plus teachers, is an outhouse with two holes, no lighting, and no heating, situated about a hundred yards from the main school building. With help from the parent’s association – parents can voluntarily give money which goes into a pool for clubs and small projects for their kids – a small indoor bathroom (one stall for girls and one for boys) was recently installed on the first floor, but the sewage system can’t handle much usage, so its only open for the 1^st grade to use.

So in response, a man in his late thirties sitting against the back wall, stood up and said that the school director should simply apply to a fund somewhere to get the money to rehab the sewage system and install more bathrooms on the other floors of the school. Simple enough, right?

Thankfully, that’s when Doamna Elena, our next door neighbor and Romanian tutor, stood up from the front of the room and turned to face the hundreds of eyes now trained on her. She said something pretty close to the following (English paraphrase of Romanian…):

“I’ve been teaching here since 1976. How many years is that? A little math practice… 30 something right? 34 or 35 years. Every year, I have taught here, I have walked out to that outhouse to use it. Every year I’ve taught here, I’ve sat in a cold classroom [another note of the meeting was how the school hasn’t turned on the heat yet because gas prices are going up and they won’t be able to afford it in the middle of winter. Which means that its downright cold in the school all day.] and watched the kids bundle themselves up and still try to learn. Do you know, if every family gave 10 lei each month, 10 lei!, that is nothing, we can all afford that, that we could probably install bathrooms on the second and third floors? It helps no one to offer criticisms without solutions. What have you personally contributed sir [speaking to the man who suggested simply writing a grant]? Do not offer suggestions if you are not willing to invest with your own money and time.”

 As Doamna Elena sat down, applause swept through the room. She had made a powerful, often over-looked point, summed up with one question: what is your contribution? The more I learn about the problems of the world, the easier it is to point out more problems. The more often half-assed solutions touted by short-sighted politicians or businessmen fail, the easier it is to simply say no to whatever is proposed. Yet the Romanian teacher with 35 years of teaching in the same school in the same town in Moldova challenges that paradigm. What is my contribution? Have I offered anything of my own or have I simply shot down what exists? Have I put forward empty solutions (i.e. “just write a grant to some funder”), or have I invested my own time and money in the work of bettering this Earth and the people who live on it?

What is your contribution? 

365 Days of Peace and Friendship

A quick note... 

Peace Corps Moldova created a blog site in celebration of Peace Corps' 50th Anniversary and volunteers in Moldova have been posting a new blog about their experiences/thoughts every single day so far! I just posted an excerpt from a journal I wrote about a Moldovan funeral I attended. 

Check out my post and the posts of other volunteers here:

https://sites.google.com/a/365peaceandfriendship.com/365peaceandfriendship/events/pcv-event---october/october6th-amoldovanfuneral

Enjoy!!

Memories

Memory is a crazy thing.

There is a slight nip in the air. Just enough to signify the height of the rafting (read: tourist) season has not yet descended upon the valley, and that therefore the Eddyline brewery will be only normally crowded instead so packed as to make the comer second-guess waiting to be seated at all. We're riding down there on the townie bikes. Ash and I and mum and Mark. It's all downhill on the way so it's an easy cruise which only intensifies the feeling of serenity. The only thing on my mind is a half pound of grass-fed beef with hatch green chilies and black pepper mixed into the meat, which is topped with local goat cheese and sandwiched between two perfectly toasted buns, one smothered in house-made spicy brown mustard. Next in line in my mind is the dark and smooth porter, whose complex combination of chocolate and coffee seem to enrich the tastes of the burger even further. Holding up all this is the sense of belonging. The knowledge that I'm with family, who know me and love me and I know them and love them. All this in a flash of a memory.

The memory is one which at the moment - five months into living in a foreign land and trying to communicate in a foreign tongue - makes my heart ache for home. Yet when I try to dig deeper, to identify what I'm missing and why, I find that that memory only a part of a broader context. A context in which Ash and I were preparing to leave (again) on the journey of Peace Corps. We had a sense of purpose. We had direction. We weren't simply enjoying life, we were living with purpose, with a higher calling.

Other memories of the recent past again point to this larger context. The reality of the enjoyment of the moments I remember aren't diminished by the realization of this bigger picture, instead it is deepened by the awareness of it. Working alongside community members to get the community farm ready for the season, singing in unison with hundreds of others on Sunday mornings or being touched by a challenging teaching, or sharing a cup of coffee with my best friend and soulmate on a lazy morning. They are all extraordinary moments which weave together the tapestry of my life. Yet they are just that; individual threads. To focus on one or two or even a hundred pieces of thread leaves one missing the way in which those threads come together to form the whole work of art. To simply assume that missing home or a quality meal with family means that somehow my present circumstances are lacking or need to change is like unweaving an intricate tapestry down to a thread only to find that you have to then start over and make it again from scratch.

In this way I try to remind myself that though I may miss "home," would it really be the same as my memory if I went back right now? Would I really be happier to pursue the threads of the past or should I concentrate on weaving the tapestry of today? When I stop to put the memories in this light, I remember too that the memories I'm making now, many incredibly special in their own right, also have a larger context. And though I've never actually weaved a tapestry by hand, I imagine it's a slow and frustrating process, one which requires the utmost attention, perseverance, and patience.

Așa e viața. So is life.

Time is Nuetral

Impermanence. If there is another single word which conveys more profundity or captures more feelings or carries with it more insight, I can't think of it at the moment (which, granted, might not be saying much). What's more is that it is a profoundly spiritual word. We all pay tribute to the far off idea that change is the only constant in our lives, yet how often do we truly stop and ponder it? Everything changes. Everything. Even history changes depending on which historian you ask or which volume of the past you read. Our climate changes, our seasons change, our weather changes, our relationships are constantly in flux, our appearance, values, beliefs, priorities, emotions, they all change. Yet somehow, it seems it is human nature to fight that change at every turn.


We somehow kid ourselves everyday by buying into a myth that we can slow or stop change. Whether its the advertisements convincing us we can look young for longer, or simply our mis-directed attempts at control which lead us down the slippery slope of believing we can count on things staying as they are a bit longer. Even in daily life, if something 'unexpected' happens, we seem blindsided and often (at least I do), take it as a personal affront - how dare this happen! I wasn't ready for that. Why wasn't I told about this? Yet impermanence persists. In his book "Turning the Mind into an Ally", Sakyong Mipham puts it this way: "When a cup breaks or we forget something or somebody dies or the seasons change, we're surprised. We can't quite believe its over."


So why keep kidding ourselves? I think perhaps the strongest indicator of how much we grasp at the things which continue to slip through our fingers is worry. Worry is the litmus test which glaringly tells us we are trying to control the ever-changing circumstances of life. When we think about an upcoming event, or tomorrow, or a relationship or our appearance, the amount that we worry betrays how much we're really trying to control what happens. But if we become more aware of our worry, perhaps we could start to understand when we're trying to control the uncontrollable, make permanent the impermanent. Worry, identified through awareness, can become a valuable tool which helps us to let go of our constant pursuit of control and permanence. Again, Mipham: "As we relinquish our attachment to permanence, pain begins to diminish because we're no longer fooled. Accepting impermanence means that we spend less energy resisting reality."


Jesus uses the reality of impermanence to ask this question: "...I say to you, do not worry about your life, what you will eat or what you will drink; nor about your body, what you will put on. Is not life more than food and the body more than clothing?... Which of you by worrying can add one cubit to his stature?... Therefore do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will worry about its own things." (Mat. 6:25-34, NKJ)


So we need to let go of control. Of permanence. Yet there is danger in letting the pendulum swing too far the other way. Many people might reason that if everything changes and we can't control much at all, then why try? Why care? Why work for the betterment of society or others, or ourselves if it all will change anyway? We seem to be attached as a culture to the idea of either/or thinking. Indeed it is far easier to grasp something if it is either right or wrong, this way or that, black or white. 


Yet life was never meant to be easy, nor was it meant to be the comprised of simple extremes or opposites. Mipham speaks of a right understanding of impermanence in the context of a journey to become a warrior in the world who's sole purpose is to radiate love and compassion towards, and on behalf of others. Jesus says not to worry, but in the context of trusting that God will be with you through the inevitable times of struggle and hardship and give you the strength to minister (literally: to serve) to others in their hardships. The Prophet Muhammad spoke of the 'great jihad' being the struggle within oneself toward moral purity, the betterment of society and the plight of others. 


In my Christian spiritual journey for the last ten years, I have come to understand this struggle in my own words. It is one in which we are to never let go of nor let lie slack the cable of hope as we labor day in and day out towards justice in everything we do. We are to constantly extend ourselves out over the ledge of self and trust that God will catch us as we fall in selflessness for others. It is our work to continually examine how we affect others and the Earth which sustains them and to adjust our actions to lower our negative impact on both. Yet in all this, we cannot worry. We cannot attach ourselves to the results of our efforts, for those results are impermanent and out of our control. Instead of using the fact of impermanence as an excuse for inaction, we use it to better understand ourselves and our position in the world.


I will always be amazed by Martin Luther King Jr's gift of words and at how they often express my deepest feelings better than I can. He wrote in his famous Letter from Birmingham Jail:

"[There is a]... strangely irrational notion that there is something in the very flow of time that will inevitably cure all ills... [but] We will have to repent ... not merely for the hateful words and actions of the bad people but for the appalling silence of the good people. Human progress never rolls in on wheels of inevitability; it comes through the tireless efforts of men willing to be co-workers with God, and without this hard work, time itself becomes an ally of the forces of social stagnation. We must use time creatively, in the knowledge that the time is always ripe to do right." (emphasis mine)