There's no such place as home!

This is a personal story, based on conversations with my school friends from a very far away place and a very long ago time. Midge, Pat and I were children together at Woodstock, an international boarding school in Mussoorie in the state of Uttarakhand, 6,600 ft up in the Indian Himalayas, while our parents lived in India, Pakistan or other countries.


We didn’t know we were third culture kids until a few years ago in a presentation at a school reunion we were introduced to the work of two sociologists, David Pollock and Ruth van Reken, through their book “Third Culture Kids.” The audience erupted into a series of “ah-ha’s”, giggles and whispers. “So that’s who we are,” a woman said, smiling, nodding her head. Her spouse grumbled: “So that’s why you’re like that.” For us in the audience, everything fell into place: now we had a name, now we could recognize ourselves and each other.


Also referred to as global nomads, third culture kids are people who’ve spent a significant part of their developmental years outside their primary culture, the culture from which their parents came, also referred to as their home or passport culture. In the case of my school friends, this was the United States. My home culture was less clear since my parents were refugees and had neither passports nor a home culture to which they could return.

The second culture was where we actually grew up--in this case, India. The third culture was an interstitial culture, the culture that grew up between the first and second cultures and the one that we inhabited. Although my friends were mishkids, the children of missionaries, other parents worked in the diplomatic or military services or in the business sector.

This third culture is highly mobile: its people are always coming and going, their lives marked by arrivals and departures, creating a child and teenager who become skilled at developing relationships.


If you are a third culture kid, you might jump into a new relationship quickly and deeply, with an urgency born of knowing the next move is always on the horizon. Or, you might prefer a casual, superficial friendship, shying away from closeness because you already anticipate the loss as departure time looms.


If you are a third culture kid, you might feel “wrong” or out of place a lot of the time, not knowing the ropes, because you are always learning a new culture, including your home culture. Returning to America from India, my friends remember how they did not understand its popular culture, its slang and social rules, how things work, what was expected of them. Because they looked like everyone else in their home town, they were expected to behave the same too, even though they thought and felt quite differently. They felt “other” but didn’t look it.

At the same time, in India, they looked “other” but did not feel fit, leaving them confused when their second culture responded to them as though were foreigners or strangers. Feeling different wherever they are, third culture kids tell their childhood stories not realizing they may come off as arrogant or boastful to those who don’t come from a third culture.


Given this strong but sometimes murky identity, one can understand why my classmates and I have a strong attachment to our past and to each other, with connections that last for decades and that assert themselves with special strength at school reunions. You can hear us confess that other third culture kids are the only ones who “get it” and are therefore the only ones among whom we can feel truly at home. It takes one to know one; it’s a precious and enduring recognition.


The mobile third culture child can grow into a restless global nomad adult, unable to escape the need to be on the move, to always have another place in mind which can be very disconcerting to other members of our families. I call this place elsewhere.

Mobility, restlessness, a certain detachment--and it’s no surprise that some third culture kids harbor an eccentric view of home and an odd way of describing what home means to them. In his book, Paper Airplanes in the Himalayas: The Unfinished Path Home, Paul Seaman describes what home meant to him, growing up in Pakistan:

Like nomads, we moved with the seasons. Four times a year we packed up and moved to, or back to, another temporary home. We learned early that ‘home’ was an ambiguous concept, and, wherever we lived, some essential part of our lives was always someplace else.



You can hear Midge, Pat and me talk about what “home” means to us, along with fragments of wonderful Indian music.

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“There’s No Such Place As Home” was broadcast on WPKN on February 10, 2010.

Tidings from Hazel Kahan, can be heard on the second Wednesday of every month at 12:30 pm on WPKN 89.5 Bridgeport, WPKM, 88.7 Montauk and streaming on wpkn.org. Tidings is produced by Tony Ernst.

UPDATE: Should we all be vegans-PART II?

The interviews, with Paul Shapiro of The Humane Society and Lauren Ornelas of the Food Empowerment Project, conducted in July, 2008 have been updated and the program rebroadcast on December 16 on WPKN and are available as a podcast.

Lauren reports:
This year we began our first effort to work on the importance of access to healthy foods in low-income communities. Using over a dozen volunteers in Santa Clara County, CA we surveyed over 120 grocery stores, liquor stores and convenience stores regarding access to fresh, frozen and canned fruits and vegetables, as well as vegan options.

FEP have also completed the first three issues of the newsletter Food Chain—linking the issues to "help you go and stay Veg."

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Through Erin Williams of HSUS, Paul reports some of this year's major accomplishments from The Humane Society:

We have a major corporate campaign asking IHOP to start moving away from eggs from caged hens. It’s a big organizational priority now. Some other updates:
· October 2009—Michigan legislature approves bill to ban battery cages, gestation crates, and veal crates (with a phase-out).
· May 2009—Maine legislature approves bill to ban gestation crates and veal crates (with a phase-out).
· May 2009—In response to an HSUS-led campaign, Wendy’s starts using some cage-free eggs.
· November 2008—Nearly two-thirds of California voters pass the Prevention of Farm Animal Cruelty Act (Prop 2), which bans battery cages, gestation crates, and veal crates throughout the state (with a phase-out).

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Link to VegGuide.Org to find a vegan or vegetarian restaurant or grocer near you.

Please stop and think before you buy bottled water!

See the facts!

UPDATE: Should we all be vegans-PART I?

The interviews, with Nathan Runkle and Nora Kramer, conducted in July, 2008 have been updated and were rebroadcast on December 9 on WPKN and are available as a podcast.

Nathan Runkle and Mercy for Animals
Overview in this end of year video report

Since we spoke last year, Nathan has much much more to be proud of: Through undercover investigations with hidden cameras, Mercy for Animals has released three new reports. The first about what is described as "shocking abuse" at New England's largest egg factory farm, Quality Egg of New England in Turner, Maine. The second tells of the "cruel and industrialized reality of modern hatcheries at the world's largest egg-laying breed hatchery", Hy-Line International in Spencer, Iowa. The third documents vicious cruelty at Fann Country View Family Farms, a pig factory farm in Fannettsburg, Pennsylvania.

MFA have also launched a new documentary called Fowl Play about egg factory farms which has been an official selection at more than a dozen film festivals and is available at fowlplaymovie.com I bought a copy and donated it to our local library.

MFA have also revamped their website, launched a new blog, launched ad campaigns in Denver, Toronto and New York and opened an office in New York City.

Nora Kramer and Youth Empowered Action

SInce we spoke with Nora, she has started Youth Empowered Action, vegan summer camps for kids in Northern California and Portland, OR, to support emerging young leaders who want to make a difference in the world. Their website is.www.yeacamp.org

Link to VegGuide.Org to find a vegan or vegetarian restaurant or grocer near you.

Why ISN'T healthcare a human right?

When I interviewed Dr. Sara Bhattacharji earlier this year, the great American health care battles had not begun in earnest and ‘health care as a human right’ was still an unfamiliar notion. Since then, I have tried to understand what it is that expectations of health care tell us about the obligations of a government to its citizens. Why, I asked, does our government not take for granted that its citizens are entitled to health care? Why is there so much argument about this fundamental question? Why is there any argument at all? I concluded that its people are seen as expense items on this country’s balance sheet. Quite simply, people cost too much.

I’ve just returned from Berlin where I learned that, along with education and an unconditional right to a basic living income, the right, that is, to live as a social being, healthcare is considered a mandatory necessity and premiums are determined by income.

What is the basis for such policies, I asked some German friends? Perhaps, one proposed, it originates in the feudal lords who considered it a matter of pride to look after their serfs and staff in a decent manner. More definitively though, we have to hand it to Otto von Bismarck. In 1883, in the first of many acts of social legislation, he was able to pass the Health Insurance Bill, followed by Accident Insurance and Old Age and Disability Bills. “That’s why we don’t have homelessness or people living in cars in Germany,” I was told by Denise Wade, who lives in Munich and who has experienced both German and US healthcare. “Everyone’s considered a valuable human being, she continued, reminding me that there’s no death penalty in the European Union. These programs she told, me in her words, “help create and maintain stability, the social tapestry is stronger and lasts longer. It’s the difference between capitalism and social democracy,” she concluded, pointing out that Marx and Lenin were alive when Bismarck was Chancellor.

We didn’t discuss other ways in which Germany has demonstrated the value it places on human life but please do rest assured that I don’t need to be reminded of post-Bismarck Germany, of the Third Reich and whatever its healthcare policies were.

Still puzzled by the moral vacuum at the heart of the American healthcare debate, I returned to the Tidings program broadcast in May of this year. Please listen or, if you’d rather read about it, you can return to the rest of the blog posting...

Why isn’t healthcare a human right? is also available as a podcast. In the radio series Tidings from Hazel Kahan, it is produced by Tony Ernst to be broadcast on WPKN on October 14, 2009. Tidings can now be heard streaming live on the second Wednesday of every month at 12.30 pm EST on WPKN.org, broadcasting from 89.5 Bridgeport, CT and WPKM 88.7 Montauk, NY. WPKN is an entirely listener-supported community radio station. Hazel Kahan is also the creator of leafages.

THE BODY TOXIC: interview with Nena Baker

To hear the podcast and to read the blog posting of this interview, please go to http://web.me.com/hzelkahan/Tidings/Welcome.html

TWENTY PERCENT ON THE OTHER SIDE

My first contact with Susan Nathan was seeing her book, The Other Side of Israel, in a Palestinian bookstore in East Jerusalem. After she agreed to meet with me, I traveled to Tamra, an Arab town in northern Israel where she has lived since 2003, the only Jewish woman among 30,000 Palestinian Arabs who are also citizens of Israel.

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Two years later, I called her again, this time from my home, to find out how things on ‘the other side of Israel' looked to her now, across, as the cover of her book puts it, ‘the Jewish-Arab divide.”

Susan Nathan has spent the last few years writing, cataloging, documenting, and speaking about the injustices and human rights violations imposed by the Israeli government on its non-Jewish citizens who account for 20% of the population. She has brought to the attention of a worldwide audience what it means to be a second class citizen in Israel, simply by virtue of one’s race.

Seeing life from 'the other side', understanding the Palestinian narrative, meant she had to unlearn her lifelong Zionist training, to acknowledge that the flip side of Israel’s triumphant independence in 1948 was the suffering of the displaced, uprooted and terrorized Palestinians whose historic land was seized to enlarge the UN-mandated borders of the new Israeli state. For the Palestinians, this was the Nakba or catastrophe, which today, under the new Israeli right wing government, they are forbidden by law to commemorate or to mention in school curricula.

While considerable attention has been paid recently to the plight of Palestinians in the occupied territories of West Bank and Gaza, less is known about the situation faced by Palestinian Arabs within Israel.

One in five Israelis is a second-class citizen
In her book, Susan Nathan makes vivid how these realities on the ground translate into second-class citizenship in Israel. The list of injustices has grown since her book was published and builds from the small to the momentous: identity papers coded to differentiate Jew from Arab, intense airport security including the removal of every item in the Arab traveler’s suitcase, demolition of Arab homes, refusal of permits to rebuild them, prohibitions on Arab land purchases and the resulting overcrowding in towns such as the one where Susan lives. With the loss of agricultural land outside the town, Tamra has run out of space for 'natural growth' which means the residents must build multi-story homes and keep livestock next to their houses.

The list runs on to a re-architecting of the roads and bridges so that only Jews can travel on them; gross neglect of infrastructure and services such as water, electricity, clinics and schools, especially in the Negev; exclusion of Arab workers from wealth-generating sectors of the economy at the same time that they are disconnected from their traditional agricultural economy; employment practices that include the firing of workers who speak Arabic on the job; diverting or manipulating water supplies; erasure of Arab presence and history by building parks and forests over Arab villages, removing former Arab place names from maps and roads and, as reported recently on NPR.org: When motorists head up the hill to Jerusalem, for example, the large green traffic signs say "Yerushalayim" in Hebrew, "Jerusalem" in English and "Ursalim al-Quds" in Arabic. But if transportation minister Israel Katz has his way, all three languages will spell out the word "Yerushalayim."

The use of erasure to replace one collective memory with another extends most egregiously to the school system. Palestinians Arabs have no real voice in formulating the curriculum in Arab schools which re-educates the student to accept the erasure of his own history and identity replacing it with understanding history from the Zionist perspective and sympathizing with Jewish suffering.

Activism 2.0
Since the publication of her book, Ms. Nathan has spoken at numerous events in Europe, where she reports that awareness and information levels among Europeans have increased considerably and continue to grow. At the same time, her energetic public presence have transformed how she sees her role as an activist:

There's a huge division now coming between Jews who've understood the reality of Israel and what's going on here and those who've yet to understand the reality of what's going on here, who can't accept it and find it very frightening and threatening. My role is not to continue to bash away at Israel how terrible Israel is...it's very important I've realized by being in Europe to show compassion towards Jews who are not yet able to accept that this country has turned out to be the way it is; it's very frightening actually to see Israel the way that it really is. My own position has started to evolve to understand you can't frighten people into accepting the reality here...It's important to acknowledge and understand that I was once in their position...I was very much the victim of the Zionist education which hundreds of thousands of people around the world...but the Zionist position is weakening...

Instead of the 'barrage' that characterized her earlier public presentations, Susan now prefers 'fierce criticism of our people mixed with compassion':
I've changed how I present (my argument): I'm far less aggressive but at the same time I'm far more dangerous...I have a far better view of what's going on..that's the only way you can get Jews to take on board what's happening here...a continuous barrage of criticism will not make the changes we need. I'm very fiercely critical but I'm also very compassionate. It's very difficult for people to accept that everything they've based their life on has been based on a sandcastle which is now being swept away by a wave.

Susan Nathan's new credo resonates with some of what I heard from Philip Weiss in last month's Tidings blog post and podcast. Perhaps we are witnessing the emergence of a more mature, a kinder left-wing Jewish voice, one that forcibly identifies with being Jewish, that wishes to look unflinchingly at the reality of what Israel is today and that accepts as progressive Jewish responsibility the holding up of a mirror to let Israel see what others see. Perhaps this will modulate the dialogue from invective to conversation, dial down the tone from rabid to calm and, perhaps it will lead, as Susan fervently hopes it will, 'to another country, not the country we have now.'

Comment

After reading her book and interviewing Susan Nathan I wondered if we understand the price we pay for identity, identification and identity cards. How easy would it be to create second-class citizens without ID cards?

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The Other Side of Israel: an interview with Susan Nathan is also available as a podcast. In the radio series Tidings from Hazel Kahan, it was produced by Tony Ernst and broadcast on WPKN on August 6, 2009. Tidings can be heard streaming live on the first Thursday of every month at 12 noon EST on WPKN.org, broadcasting from 89.5 Bridgeport, CT and WPKM 88.7 Montauk, NY. WPKN is an entirely listener-supported community radio station. Hazel Kahan is also the creator of leafages.