In 2007, Kate and I were working in East Africa. We had heard that our friends had been involved in short-term foster care for special needs kids at a local orphanage and, after much thoughtful consideration, decided that this was something we were equipped to do. Though I didn't know it at the time, the decision to foster Luka has become a watershed moment in my own life. During the following months, we seriously considered adopting him, but due to several circumstances, did not. At the time it was a painful decision, not knowing our future or his, but the story has a happy ending. In the following years, we left Tanzania, and our friends decided to foster Luka on a long-term basis, partially resulting from discussions that stemmed from his time with us. This past spring, with all of the documentation finally lined up, Luka was finally adopted. Luka's parents can now tell him with certainty that he is secure as a member of their family. Since Kate and I left East Africa, we've added two little girls to our family through birth. All of us hope to add to our family in the future through adoption. We were able to visit with Luka and his new family this past weekend while they are in the US visiting family and friends. He doesn't remember his time with us, but he loved hearing the stories that Kate would tell him about his time with us ( check out the blog we kept about his time with us in 2007), and had a wonderful time playing with our daughter, Anna. So there is a happy ending--softened hearts, new friendships, and new families formed, all because of a little boy.  November 2007 - Iringa, Tanzania  May 2012 - Grand Rapids, MI, USA
Just Skyped with a good friend this morning who works for the International Organization for Migration (IOM) in South Sudan. He's been primarily located in Renk, in the northernmost part of the country on the Nile River and quite near the border with Sudan. Since gaining independence nearly a year ago, South Sudan has seen a steady stream of southerners returning and IOM is an office of the UN that works to organize and resettle many of these returnees. Because of it's positionality, Renk is a major migration center as people arrive from the north on foot, bus, and boat. Even now that the border is closed due to the recent conflict along the border to the west in Unity State, the north continues to allow returning southerners across the border. The photos below were taken by my friend, Aaron Adkins, within the last couple of weeks:  Mirgants arrive in Renk, South Sudan on buses from Sudan. (Photo courtesy of Aaron Adkins)  IOM trucks carry new arrivals and their belongings on toward their new homes in other parts of South Sudan. (Photo courtesy of Aaron Adkins)  Because of its location on the Nile, barges are also commonly used for transport. (Photo courtesy of Aaron Adkins)
Wordle is a great word cloud generator - here are the most common words on my blog.
Jonglei State in South Sudan, and Pibor in particular have been in the news recently due to a series of cattle raids between ethnic groups. The UN has recently stepped in as mediator in this centuries-old conflict between the Murle and the Dinka and Lou Nuer in the south-eastern corner of the world's newest nation. One of my undergraduate mentors spent over a decade in this area in between civil wars in the 1970s and 1980s and has written several books and articles on various topics pertaining to the region. He is currently working on the true story of the regional District Commissioner for the British who, when Italy entered World War II in 1941, put together a group of Sudanese men to harass the Italian occupiers of Abyssinia. Anyway, I promised to see what I could do toward putting a simple map together to illustrate the spatial relationships described in the book. This evening, a friend and fellow geographer (cartographer, actually) suggested that I try out www.indiemapper.com to see if it would fit the bill. It's actually a pretty simple program that allows the input KML files (that I developed in GoogleEarth) to do some basic graphic editing of colors, shapes, and fonts. The result is a pretty basic product that is simpler and more visually appealing than many others I've used. I used the Mercator Projection, which preserves shape and distance along the Equator well. There are lots of limitations to IndieMapper though, for example, since the basemap is global, there is no mechanism for automatically inputing a scale bar (such a feature would be wildly inaccurate at high and low latitudes), so I resorted to measuring a 50 km straight line in GoogleEarth on top of an area that was blank on my map. I then converted it to a KML file, imported it to IndieMapper, and added an annotation with the text "Scale Bar 50 km" below the line on my map. Addition: I've also noticed that IndieMapper's basemaps all cede the Ilemi Triangle, a contested border region claimed by both South Sudan and Kenya, to Kenya. This is just another reminder that map-making is an inherently political endeavor and that maps themselves are social constructions.
 "Let us not, however, flatter ourselves overmuch on account of our human victories over nature. For each such victory nature takes its revenge on us. Each victory, it is true, in the first place brings about the results we expected, but in the second and third places it has quite different, unforeseen effects which only too often cancel the first."
~Friedrich Engels, The Part Played by Labour in the Transition from Ape to Man
I always benefit when Kate can't sleep at night, because she usually ends up forwarding the most interesting articles for me to read the next day. Last night was one of those nights, but the article (written by Johann Hari and published in both the Independent and the Huffington Post back in 2009) turned out to be just as haunting as it was interesting. Read the article and the comments on the Huffington Post site as well. I feel like the writer picked Dubai because of its symbolic significance, and the fact that the supply chain is so condensed, but I also feel that the Emiratis who are incensed about the article itself also have a good point--the entire capitalist system is based on these terrible crimes and they feel unnecessarily singled out. I think that there is some weight in, 'How dare you come and tell us what to do when your countries are built on the same foundations,’ in the same way that there is weight in, ‘How dare you come and tell us to conserve our resources and environment when you’ve used your resources up and ruined your own environments.' This brings up questions of morality, ethics, and sovereignty and how to balance the reality that the above statements are true with the belief that continuing to encourage such practices is wrong. Maybe Emiratis sense an element of hypocrisy in the article as well, since the entire world is engaged in a very similar, simply more extended supply chain that allows consumers to consume without understanding (or caring about) the exploitation inherent in the system. Thanks Kate, now I can't sleep.
Now though the season warms
The woods inherits harms
Of human enterprise.
Our making shakes the skies
And taints the atmosphere.
We have ourselves to fear.
We burn the world to live;
Our living blights the leaf
A clamor high above
Entered the shadowed grove,
Withdrew, was still, and then
The water thrush began
The song that is a prayer,
A form made in the air,
That all who live here pray,
The Sabbath of our day.
May our kind live to breathe
Air worthy of the breath
Of all singers that sing
In joy of their making,
Light of the risen year,
Songs worthy of the ear
Of breathers worth their air,
Of workers worth their hire.
- Wendell Berry, A Timbered Choir
We finally managed to find the time to upgrade to the new version of StudioAbroad here at Penn State Education Abroad. I have been looking forward to this upgrade because of the new map search functionality that allows anyone to get a visual feel for where we have active programs abroad.
Click on the image below to go to the map search page:
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