Snow Bike Tires, Robotics, and Inadvisable Trekking

Winter's now covered the un-raked leaves with snow and I find myself with jars of home-made crab apple sauce, studded snow tires on my (mom's) bike, and a job teaching at Pacific Northern Academy (PNA), a private K-12 school in Anchorage, Alaska. I teach dance two days a week after school and substitute teach for PE (run around! now do it again!), Math (rise over run), Science (you're supposed to kill all these fruit flies?), Music (recorders!), Spanish (se habla español?), and whatever else they call me for. The whole school thing is all rather strange to me, but I'm getting used to the constructed format, classroom management techniques, and imposed social standards. Then the Robotics teacher quit at PNA. Knowing nothing about robotics or the devious nature of my 4th and 5th grade charges, I was happily coerced into that job too.

My Robotics kids will (hopefully) compete in a Lego sponsored competition called First Lego League that has two parts:
Part 1: Research Presentation. Learn about different forms of energy (all over it), do an "energy audit" on a building in their community (check), figure out a way to make that building more energy efficient (they're pretty excited about destroying the building to reduce its energy consumption to 0), create a presentation about their solution (ummm), and present to the community (great things take time...).
Part 2: Get quirky Lego-loving kids to program uncooperative Lego robot to complete 13 energy related tasks, like replace a red Lego truck with a cool black and yellow bumble-hydrogen-car, not spill oil into the ocean (40 point deduction), and collect all the Lego coal from the mine. With creative classroom management techniques in place (Robotics Bucks!), which my robotics masters briefly allow me to coerce them with, we've figured out how to launch the solar powered satellite, place the wind turbines, and get our wave turbine stuck on the red truck. Not bad.

To fully complement my opposite-normal-working-hours schedule, I'm taking evening EMT classes at the University of Alaska, Anchorage (UAA), learning all sorts of ways to get people from injury to ambulance in a fashion that hopefully lets them survive all the way to the hospital. However, I rode around on an ambulance a couple weeks ago and saw far less emergencies than I'd expected. The EMT on duty growled that most of his patients need social services more than emergency medical services, and I think I'm inclined to agree. I'm also curious and concerned as to what happens when the couldn't-afford-a-cab-so-called-an-ambulance folks get an emergency medicine sized bill.

Grand Canyon from the South Rim

In pursuit of my own ambulance ride, my family (and pretty much family) reunion-ed at the grand canyon to hike rim to rim in September. Serious Advisory Notice: DO NOT hike in the Grand Canyon without a whole lot of water and snacks, as even beautiful, young, athletic folks die from trying. As Mom, Chris, Chris Loken, me, Uncle Kim, and Lucille didn't resemble any of the beautiful, young, athletic people on the warning pictures, and came fully equipped with about a gallon of water each, tasty vittles, and enough energy bars to fuel all the unprepared individuals we could find along the way, we set out before the sun rose from the North Rim.

Uncle Kim Living Dangerously

Down through the layers we plunged, stopping for a lunch of smoked salmon, cheese, and chocolate at the bottom in 101 degree weather (melty). Then along the Colorado river, and up towards an increasingly distant South Rim. Soon the sun set and our pace slowed from dawdle through trudge, verging increasingly on stumble. Our courageous Dad and Jim support crew patiently watched our headlights inch closer until we emerged from our marathon-length journey with water still on our backs and enough energy to swap exhaustion-enhanced tales of inadvisable trekking. Only a day's drive away, we next re-visited my childhood hiking grounds, where support crew and all wandered into the Havasupai canyon for a three day trek full of fry bread, mule manure, and green waterfalls.

Dad at Mooney Falls

Chris Playing in Havasu Falls

My exercise regime has continued in the great North with daily bike rides towards a more sustainable planet and an increasingly aware Katie. I've moved from my folks' castle on the hill to a flat in the low country that's complete with Dustin Madden, golden retriever Aurora, roommate Derrick, and a close enough proximity to bike where I need to go. I'm beginning to understand how zoning effects transportation (no light commercial in residential areas makes for a long ride to the grocery store), socio-economic stresses (how could anyone without a car get any sleep with a full time job and Anchorage's roundabout bus system?), and weather effects (leaving freshly washed hair outside the jacket induces freezing).

In dancing, Dustin and I teach a weekly social dance class (this week, Argentine Tango!) where we laugh and move around a bunch, although we took a break last week to guest instruct Lindy Hop at UAA, where there's a dance floor and mirrors and very dancer-y students, oh my! The teenagers of the Society Working to Improve Negative Grooves (SWING) jive and jump on a monthly basis, while the die-hards also show up on Thursdays for their fix.

Move Your Story!

And I got psyched about dancing with purpose and organized a movement and story-telling workshop ("Move Your Story") for women at UAA, which helped me figure out how to teach a movement and story-telling workshop, and how to get a group of folks to create a dance about something specific. Awesome. Also at Move Your Story, one of the dancers shared a story of a Dia de los Muertos party where everyone brought the favorite food of someone who'd died that they wanted to celebrate. My Mom and I shared a mischievous look, and schemed our own Dia de Los Muertos party last weekend!

Dia de Los Muertos is a Mexican tradition where folks believe that the dead come back to party around Oct. 31 to Nov. 2. We had some trouble with planning so our dead folks had to stick around a little longer for the party. We celebrated by bringing the pictures, stories, and favorite foods of our esteemed post-life guests to the party. However, after a dinner of tortillas, salsa, hard-boiled eggs, sour cream and herring, mashed potatoes and corn, carameled apples, and creme de menthe parfaits, I think I need to make some dead friends who liked more tummy-agreeable foods.

Planning for the future, I'm awaiting numerous conflicting opportunities to unveil themselves to me. I applied for the Artist in Schools program and if they like my poor-quality dance video, I might be able to guest instruct in schools around Alaska. The principal and staff at PNA hint at future teaching opportunities, potentially in writing, after school care, and Spanish. The Anchorage School District is set to give me my substitute teaching number sometime last week so I teach in Anchorage's public schools. And my Tanzania/China friend Dan Tuttle is currently feeding the insects of the Solomon Islands and constructing an HIV/AIDS prevention program from the ground up with SIC, who I worked with in Tanzania. Depending on how effective Dan thinks I could be there, I may head down in January to dive back into HIV/AIDS Prevention and language acquisition (pidgin!).

Until then, the banana bread is on the stove and Dustin and I are dancing tango in the kitchen.

Fishing in Prince William Sound

Goodbye Whittier!

Good times out of Whittier with Mom, Dad, and Sue in the beautiful, beautiful Prince William Sound.

One little otter...

Sea Otters!

Because of the amazingness that is Alaska, we found more sea otters than I've ever seen in my life... perhaps close to 100, with 10 or 20 together at at time, including little pups!

Dad and Glaciers

The silvers graced us with their presence, and we eagerly reeled them in. To keep them fresh, Sue pulled us close to a glacier and we went iceberg fishing with the net... icebergs really are bigger than they look. Only the smallest possible chunks were things I could haul aboard, while the rest were subject to mine and Dad's heckling (aw yeah? you think you're too big and heavy for my net now, huh? global warming is so taking you down! yeah... that's right, I see you melting in that sun...)

The Freshest Salmon

The evenings marked fish cleaning time, where I am rather less than skilled. To not waste the extra meat, Dad and I experimented with sashimi.

Playing with Shrimp

And Mom, Dad and I got to try our hands with shrimp pots...under the guidance of Captain Sue we caught over 100 on our first try!

Where Glaciers Meet

I'm always amazed by the beauty of Alaska... the black bears on shore that came out to fish, the glaciers that flow to the sea, and the spectacular mountains. Not bad for home.

Long Walks and Movement with Munchkins

Another month's gone by since I last wrote... hard to believe. My days are full of new ideas, employment-commitment-anxiety, dancing, and the great outdoors. A few weeks ago I attended a graduate seminar on Learning for Change - an introduction to the field of Adult Education and what it means, taught by my Mom's old professor from Chicago. I learned that "Adult Education" isn't necessarily just for grown-ups - it started as education for democracy, and for empowerment. Sweet. It made me think more about what I'm doing and how it does and doesn't empower people become who they'd like to be. And about who I'd like to be. My brother sent me an email the other day that says "Our goal should be to relate with others in such a way that they become stronger and more aware of how beautiful and valuable they are, and more able, when they take leave of us, to go out and powerfully express their love with others." I like it. I think I'll try it.

I spent last week teaching dance to kids ages 7-14 at a folk arts camp in Wasilla. Since learning more about this "adult education" business, I've tried to come up with new plans on how to make dance an empowering experience. So, amidst movement games and "formal" dance instruction, I had the older kids class make up their own "favorite" moves, and then we put them together into a dance that got extended throughout the camp - which the class decided to call "The Coolio Dance." They even got so excited about their dance that they performed it at the final concert, although I unfortunately wasn't there to see it (I was watching Bela Fleck... bad teacher). For the littler guys, we tried to make up our own dance, but they didn't like it, so I dropped that idea and we played freeze dance instead... I did have them all "perform" for the class at the end though, and they really like it, so cool - validation of the way they move/dance, if perhaps not empowerment. In addition to attempts at empowerment, my classes were full of laughter and silliness, as well as plenty of classroom management learning opportunities, so all in all, they made me pretty happy.

Because the "create your own move" game worked so well in my Movement for Munchkins classes (I don't think that was the official name, but hey), and with Dustin's suggestion (he's home in Nome... I have to teach all alone now...), I had the teens in my SWING class make up their own East Coast Swing moves, with the conditions that they had to be both rhythmic and leadable. The teens got into the creating dance moves idea, and, although most of the moves that came out of it may fall a bit short of the conditions I set forth, I think we all had a pretty good time.

Mom, Dad, and me in Crow Pass

Between dancing, I've gone on a couple long walks with my Mom and her friends. First, we hiked Crow Pass - a 26 mile journey up to a glacier, through two rivers, and down into a beautiful valley. I hadn't agreed to go on the full marathon with them at the beginning - Dad and I planned to hike up to Raven Glacier, then turn around and come on back. But, the crew was going at a pace I could handle, and I felt pretty good about my food, water, and energy supply. So, in front of the glacier, I agreed to go on.

The Crow Pass Crew in front of Raven Glacier

Down into the valley we slipped, stopping only to change shoes and wade across our first glacier-fed river. As we ventured onwards, the scenery was beautiful, and my snack supply was filled with chocolate-covered-ginger. By the time we got to the second river, my feet were ready for some cold-water therapy. After our group effort to make it through the 40' wide, thigh-high flow of icy water, I gained a new appreciation for how crazy Alaskans are. We just think the strangest things are great fun... Mom, the eternal optimist, told us all how athletes pay lots of money to put their sore muscles into cold temperatures to rejuvenate them, and all we have to do is wade across a river... well, my muscles did feel surprisingly rejuvenated. And to ensure that we had plenty of water treatment, the last 12 miles or so rained pretty consistently... After a few hours, Mom said she wasn't sure if leaving her pants up to use the bathroom would really make any difference in her soggy level. Onward and through we continued, making it to the other side of the pass in about 14 hours, which isn't bad. But... every year people run the Crow Pass race in about 3 hours... crazy Alaskans...

Luckily, after 7 days of rest, we all suffered from hikers' amnesia, and decided that going on another long walk would be great fun. So, off to Lost Lake, which we did eventually find. I invited my friend Hiroko, the local Argentine Tango teacher, and goodness, she's speedy! However, the weather was much sunnier than our Crow Pass experience, the miles only numbered 17, and Hiroko even made rice balls with sour plum inside for our lunch break. Tasty.

"The Mill" at Kennicott

In lieu of more walking, last weekend Mom and Dad and I headed up to Kennicott (of Kennecott, or Kennycott), an abandoned mine about 8 hours drive from Anchorage. In the early 1900's, a phenomenal copper deposit was found next to a glacier in the middle of nowhere. So, an enterprising and wealth-seeking man named Stephen Birch went about getting financial backing from the Guggenheims and Morgans and Havenmayers and built a railroad and the most technologically advanced city in Alaska at the time. Then he shipped in a bunch of foreigners seeking to immigrate to the States, worked them hard, paid them decently for a depression-era job, and built lots of fancy gadgets for getting high-grade copper to be shipped off to Tacoma for smelting (the park ranger told us that Tacoma is now a Superfund site because of the arsenic involving in the smelting process... interesting). I learned that the copper that's currently mined is pretty good at about 5% copper... while the Kennicott stuff was about 70%. I guess, when the mine was no longer economically viable, they shut it down in 1938 and abandoned it, leaving all their equipment (is that's what going to happen with all the other oil and mining stuff in Alaska? What about leave-no-trace?).

Nature's Work in Kennicott

Nature seems to be starting to do her work on the equipment though, taking out buildings and decaying wood and rusting old metal parts... Until, of course, the mine became a tourist attraction that's now owned by the National Park Service, as it's in the largest National Park in the country - Wrangell-St. Elias.

Dad and Mom dancing on Kennicott Glacier

It seems that Kennicott has kept the tradition of importing non-local residents to work... The National Park Service evidently has a policy of hiring locals (yay!), but also of not running out previously established businesses (makes sense). However, when patronizing these previously established businesses, it seems that the young people guiding tours and taking tourists ice climbing and working in the lodge were all up in Alaska for their first time. Sounds like a great experience, but makes me curious... are the locals just not interested in being summer tourist guides? Or is there no advertisement to Alaskans? No one seems to be offering a guiding job to any of my friends here... I went out kayaking a few summers ago in Whittier where the girl running the kayak rentals hadn't been in a kayak until she got the job. I guess I go to plenty of places where I don't know anything and seem to be able to find work... but it'd be nice if the Alaskans who know stuff about guiding and ice climbing and kayaking could also be offered those jobs...

Well, it sounds like there's a screech owl flying around the house, and I'm leaving in the morning to go fishing in Prince William Sound for a few days. Wish me luck with the fishing, as fresh salmon would make a tasty meal on the boat.

Denali, July 8-10, 2007

Mt. McKinley

Dustin in the Park

Katie and Dustin

Katie, Dustin, and Erika

Dr. Mom and Return to SWING

My Mom's a doctor! the week of June 16th, the family and I met up in Chicago to celebrate the passage of my Mom from her dent-in-the-couch thesis-writing phase, to her hooding as a velvet-capped wizard (I haven't seen a wand yet, but I keep looking...)! Dad and I flew into Chicago Tuesday morning, rented a car, picked up Uncle Kim, then headed over to Mom's hotel to get her and Chris, whereupon the five of us cozied into our rental car and began the drive up to Canada. Woo, road-trip! 8 hours later, we arrived at Poverty Point and the food-fest began. My great-grandmother's 99 years old now, and lives with her 68-year-old boyfriend Ram in Hamilton, Ontario. Ram tends the garden (he's planted grapes!), while Granny is queen of the kitchen.

Granny's Red Currant Pie

In anticipation of our arrival, Granny made us a red currant pie (for Mom and Kim), a chocolate pie (me and Chris), and a rhubarb/raspberry pie (Dad, connoisseur of all pies). Tasty...

Mom and Granny (making a chocolate pie)

Next year, in 2008, Granny will be 100, Mom will be 50, and I'll be 25... we're already planning the party. We're also on the look-out for any relatives that fall into the 75-year-old category, or the much-joked-of age 0 (not it!).

Chris and I also had a few interesting conversations with Ram this time, who I feel like I don't know particularly well... evidently he came to Canada 22 years ago, fleeing religious persecution in Iran (he's Baha'i) after being imprisoned for several years without being told why... he's not so excited about Islam... or about religion in general anymore. He told me that he hopes everyone will leave their religious "clubs" and learn to love each other. Hmmm... when I was in China where religion isn't so accepted, playing computer games seemed more prevalent than loving each other... but it sounds like a good idea...

Dad With the Chain Saw

Pulling Down Dead Branches

After stuffing ourselves full of Granny's tasty vittles, talking to Aunt Betty and Uncle Al (masters of quantum touch), and attempting to clean up Granny's pond through the use of brute strength and a chain-saw, we were off again to Chicago. There we met up with the the rest of the clan - Auntie and Jim, Grandpa and Arla, and "Aunt" Linda Curda. To continue our culinary adventures, we ate three solid meals a day, with desserts well-placed in between.. oooh...

Triumphant Ph.D.!

somewhere in there, we got ourselves out of the restaurant bench seats long enough to meet some of Mom's classmates, and see her get hooded as a Ph.D. in Adult Education, yay!

Don't Do It!

We also saw Cirque Shanghai, where small Chinese people bent themselves into uncomfortable looking positions to amaze the audience. Ooh! Oow! This inspired Chris and I to contemplate the pressures of modern China...

Back to Alaska, I had a few days off to play in the mountains, and succeeded in spending far too much time kayaking in Prince William Sound without sunscreen, giving myself bright red legs (they've faded into brown now) and a dizzying case of heatstroke. Oops.

Then Dustin and I began to teach dance again, woo-hoo! We taught for a week at the Alaska City Folk Arts Camp, where the admirable and much adored Mary Schallert let us teach latin dance (merengue, Argentine tango, salsa), swing dance, and a pretty awesome introduction to dance class where I played a lot of movement ( i.e. interpretative dance) games with the munchkins... hehe.

Yesterday also marked the re-inauguration of SWING (Society Working to Improve Negative Grooves), the dance group Dustin and I are running for the third summer in Anchorage. Kids 12-20 come hang out, get a mini-lesson, then dance with each other, eat whatever tasty treats they've brought in, and have fun! We had about 40 kids turn up last night to jump and groove, and I'm feeling pretty happy with my dancing life.

There's always the future though.. summer doesn't last forever, and at some point I'll have to decide what I'm doing in the fall (where?) when the summer camp season of swing dance fades into fallen leaves and frost... Sometime soon, I keep telling myself, I'll look for something else to do (social justice work? a *gasp* job?), but at the moment, Mom's projects from work (editing! data entry!), dancing, and the great outdoors are keeping me entertained.

Dumplings, Singapore, and Planes That Bring Me Home

I'm back in Alaska! With the moose and the bald eagles and the sunshine and the carhartt's. Feels good. Except that I keep waking up far too early in the morning, despite my best efforts to sleep in. Oh well. I'm sure it will pass. As always when I come home, I get the chance to reacquaint myself with old friends and past-times, while looking for a new niche in my hometown. I've started practicing my violin again, looking for ways to infuse swing dance into Alaska, and seeing my theater people. But this summer I now feel a need to do something activist, something social justice-ish. I'm sure Anchorage has something like that going on... now I just need to find it. Also, in the way that I like to immerse myself in activity, I applied for a job helping with HIV/AIDS Prevention in Alaska, which would be awesome to help out with. I'm also looking around for a way to continue to use my Mandarin, so we'll see how that goes.

Before I left Taiwan, I made friends with a guy who makes dumplings. He makes tasty vegetarian ones, and him and his assistant are always nice and talk to me when I walk by, so I made a point of buying some of the cabbage or leek filled buns on the way to or from class. One day I told my dumpling vendor that I wasn't sure if I would come back to Taiwan because I wanted to find some work in an area I like, and he offered to teach me how to make dumplings. Awesome. Although I am still not anywhere close to being able to make pretty veggie buns, I did get to hang out at the shop and roll out dough and watch his impeccable skill at closing the dumplings and he even told me how to make soy milk... If I ever go back to Taiwan, I wonder if he really would give me a part-time job helping make dumplings...

I went to Singapore! My Taiwanese visa expired 5 days before I wanted to leave Taiwan, and to avoid over-staying and generating bad relations with the Taiwanese government, I took the opportunity to visit Song Toh and his bride-to-be, Grace! My experience in Singapore was a lot less up-tight than I expected... or at least, they don't make lines on the MRT nearly as well as people in Taiwan and Hong Kong do. And don't have the crazy spikes and perms of fashionable hair in Taiwan and mainland China, or the tailored clothes and American retro-80's fashion look (at least, that's what it reminds me of... :). I also got to hang out with a tango-dancing Singaporean friend I made in Argentina, and even Jon Pflug, flashback from freshman year, came to dinner! It seems that the Singaporean government has done an excellent job in marketing, as there are many theme-park like exhibits, each with their own narrative. Song and I went to learn about the history of Singapore, where evidently the Malays, Chinese, EuroAsians, and Indians got together in peace and harmony and constructed a community... until the Japanese came and there was war... but I think the story brought them back to peace and harmony and hopeful visions for the future. I'm not sure how that's all working out, but the Indian food was very tasty. I also learned, although it may have been recently appealed, that oral sex is illegal in Singapore unless it leads to intercourse... I wonder how that rule's enforced. Although, when I told my parents this new-found knowledge, Mom informed me that oral sex is illegal in several states in the US... uh-oh.

After successfully supervising Song and Grace's new purchase of a refrigerator, sampling their wedding banquet (why the shark fin Song?), and discovering that my stomach sweats when it's really hot, I returned to Taiwan. I flew in Sunday afternoon, and Sunday evening I went out dancing with my recently-met friend Willie, and an awesome group of his friends. The salsa dancing was fun, but afterwards, the club put on reggaeton, and my new Latin American friends started singing along and the happy dancing began! Makes me look forward to the hippie outside dancing in Alaska that will have to happen at some point this summer...

The next day, Monday morning (ohh... too early...), began our final presentation, and last day of class. My class wrote a play about our experiences in Taiwan. Each of the five of us wrote a story about something that happened (or could have happened) to us here in Taiwan, writing in different characters to our story - I wrote about getting ignored ordering food because I'm too used to making lines, Roget talked about a cab driver shuttling him free of charge to school, Bao Zhu told of how people often think she's Taiwanese and ask her for directions (she's Vietnamese), and so on... Then we assigned parts, built a cute taxi and bus out of cardboard, and began blocking our play. We set it within the classroom, before class begins. Usually when we arrive early to class, we start talking, so we visualized our short plays as performing parts of our before class banter, with little sitting-around-the-table scenes between each play (to re-assure the audience of where we were talking). We performed for the other intensive class at our level, teachers, friends, and a video camera. Eventually I hope to get the tape of that performance, but I don't imagine I'll get it anytime soon. Afterwards, the revelry continued, and we went out to drink tea and then to dinner. After dinner our teacher said that one person would get to eat free (buy 10, get one free)... I suggested that we split the difference, but my old teacher mischievously said her heart was not nearly as good as mine, and we played a pin-ball like game to determine the lucky individual... and I got the highest score.. free pasta!

Tuesday I made Fish carry my box of books to the post office and back again (hey, postage is more expensive than I thought), went shopping with Roget and Fish to buy tasty Taiwanese treats for the whole family (dried squid, seaweed, pineapple cakes), and successfully crammed all of my things into an ever-fattening suitcase. Nothing to complain about, but people kept giving me stuff, including a whole calligraphy set, complete with a heavy ink-mixing-in rock, my name in Chinese on a stamp (chop?), and a globe clock where a space shuttle flies around and around to mark the time. And I didn't even break anything on my way back to the US.

Wednesday I head out of Taiwan, successfully arriving in Los Angeles before I left Taipei (time zones are weird), for dinner with the relatives and Chris Loken, and some quality sleep before going to Stanford to dance, discuss, and eat an enormous variety of pancakes with Chris, Ali, sparkly sexy deca folks, and anyone else around Stanford I remembered and could find in my short time. Then on the plane again, and here I am with the sun still out!

Sexual Health and Human Rights Theater

So much! As I'm heading back to the US in a little over two weeks, I've been scrambling around looking for a new path to life... and stumbling across lots of interesting projects in the process.

Katie in Commercial attire

Demure...

I was in a commercial! And a high-class commercial too... For diamonds... of all things consumerist and potentially harmful to the world... it was an experience. I got put into a nice dress and they gave me lots of make-up and a very large hair-do. Then I sat around all night (until morning) talking to an interesting multi-national crowd of folks at a table (think, elegant dinner party). Then, when the famous star lady walked down the stairs, we all had to turn and look at her. oooh... I haven't seen it on tv yet, but I'd like to, as I'm not sure how anything I did relates to selling diamonds. Let you know if I ever see it, but my not-watching-tv habit might leave me never knowing what the commercial is really like.

I'm getting more active with the Amnesty International group in town. For the teaching-human-rights-through-theater project that will happen at the end of this year, the AI folks are cooperating with a local theater group. So, we planned to go to one of their meetings and introduce ourselves and our topic, using theater. Everything was pre-discussed and agreed to by the theater group leader... To introduce the situation of foreign workers in Taiwan, we created an interactive drama, that may or may not have been a good idea... we arrived 15 min. late and asked the theater folks to help us move some benches up from downstairs, getting gradually more indignant about their inability to do what we wanted, compounded by the fact that we used more and more English, putting a confusing language barrier between us as well. Before we'd gotten very far into our interactive play, one of the theater folks started getting really angry and wanted to leave the rehearsal, so we called it quits early and sat in a circle to introduce ourselves and discuss the feelings that had been brought up in the exercise. After a very interesting discussion about race and attitude and language and interpretation, we talked about human rights in Taiwan and abroad, and ended the meeting with small groups each creating a scene to reflect our evening's experience. I think it may take us some time to regain the trust of the woman who we unfortunately pissed off, but that most of the group understood and appreciated what we were trying to do, and the director thinks that we allowed her group to finally step into the emotionally risky theater that they've talked about... Live and learn.

Yesterday's Amnesty meeting was about Women's Rights in Taiwan, where we talked about foreign brides and domestic violence... Seems that there are lots of brides coming in from Vietnam, Mainland China, the Phillipines, etc... looking for a wealthier life-style, but usually not finding it, and sometimes ending up as sex workers. In addition, an increasing number of Taiwanese men on extended business trips to Mainland China find another wife and create a new family there - but not necessarily continuing the relationship or financial support when they return back to Taiwan and their family here. Taiwan has also passed a unique, but not necessarily enforced law - if in a marriage one person works while the other stays home, the working one is required to pay a salary to the one who takes care of the home. Interesting...

In another societal division, I recently became aware of a "young folks these days" attitude... not unusual if my grandparent's say it, but much more so when the 28 year-olds here freely use the term. It seems that there are at least two factors involved in this behavior (or at least that I've noticed so far): Taiwan's culture is changing, and changing fast. 15 year olds nowadays are truly doing many different things that 15 year olds were ten years ago. More on that in a bit. Taiwanese people are also very age-segregated. School is the primary function of people under 25, and in school classmates are your own age. If anyone in school is of a different gra jde, they're referred to as brother or sister... which sounds good, except that in Chinese there's "older brother" "younger brother" "older sister" and "younger sister." So, the people who graduated the same year as Fu are her classmates, but the girl who was a year younger in school is Fu's "younger school sister," creating a linguistic division between your classmates (same) and those who are older or younger (different).

And the behavior of those "kids these days"... The stereotypes are mostly negative - have more sex, are more preoccupied with consumerism, less polite. And at least the first and last have combined to make a dangerous habit...I have heard from several people now that a fair number of junior high/high school/college girls go to XiMenDing (where all the cool, hip, kids hang out to buy cheap clothes, people watch, be watched, etc.) and trade sex for clothes, money, or fashionable items. It seems the buyers are older men, who Fu says are some of the ones who came to Taiwan with Chiang Kai-Shek in 1949 - so, old. Also, I've heard from quite a few sources that this practice is from Japan. Hmm... the more I hear about Japanese culture the more complex I find it, and the more different it seems from my own... I decided to ask Satoshi if he knew anything about this and he concurred - evidently in Japan in about the last 10 years it's become increasingly common for young girls to leave home, sleep (or provide other sexual services) with older, rich, men, and get paid in brand-name items. I imagine this is compounded by an idea held in Japan that once women are mothers, it's no longer polite to sleep with them, so fathers look to other sources to satisfy their sexual desires.

In addition - I went to the HIV/AIDS association I mentioned last email, and the leader, Sister Teresa, sent a bunch of emails which have snow-balled. I met a HIV/AIDS researcher last week who gave me a research paper he hasn't quite finished editing, about college freshmen' attitudes towards HIV/AIDS. It seems kids are knowledgeable, but that knowledge doesn't translate in practice - the average age of first sexual experience is relatively late (17), but Fish tells me that Taiwan has one of the highest teenage pregnancy rates in Asia. Oops. However, the professor, and his student's, research conclusion is a need for HIV/AIDS education. Here's where I may fit in. The professor says that if I'm willing, he'll support me to write a grant to design and implement an HIV/AIDS prevention program in colleges here. I'm excited! Now I just have to write a grant and see what the Taiwanese Ministry of Education thinks...

And in dancing - swing may be coming to Taipei! Tonight was the second night of a hopefully weekly swing dance! Complete with live band, mini-lesson, and no cover charge, at least a handful of Taiwanese people now know what swing dance is, and even seem interesting in learning it! The newbies keep asking me where I teach swing, but uh, I don't teach swing here... Oh, the opportunities. I feel like I'm just starting to feel out where I might fit in, while I'm preparing to head back stateside in a couple weeks. Monday a bunch of friends and I went out to dinner to celebrate Vicky's coming birthday, and my imminent departure. After we had stuffed ourselves with dumplings and soup and tofu and everything else tasty, all of my classmates said a toast for me.. I don't know if anyone has ever toasted me before, especially not with cups of green tea... It reminded me that there are a lot of connections I've made here, that I hope will continue and develop, even when I'm back to mountains and clean air in June.