Planning:2012

Planning. Whats that about? We can try to plan but when your destiny appears to lay in the hands of others it is not so easy, you have to do what feels right, be courageous, follow your spirit guide.

In summary, our plan for the rest of 2012:

Boys (all 3)
10 July 
Beirut  - London 
(in Wales and England with Auntie Margaret, family, friends)
18 July 
London - Switzerland
(with friends from KL!)
22 July Switzerland - St. Pryve
(kids stay with les grandparents)
Daniel
25 July  - 13 August
on Elemental Yoga Therapy Course in Portugal*
Cecile
04 August - 20 August
On leave to France

Boys
20 August
Paris - Guayaquil
(inVilcabamba to Jan/13)
Cecile
19 August
Paris Beirut
(visit to Ecuador Oct/Nov)

Early 2013 we'll likely move to the next post destination which is for now an unknown. Read on if you have an interest in the why's and wherefores, otherwise, if your plans and ours coincide in dates and locations, let us know. All are welcome to the sunny south of Ecuador!

This year we knew we had to move on from Beirut with the expiry of Cecile's time here with UNHCR. The process requires her to apply for a new post and so she looks for family duty stations, where she can work as a Protection officer and at the appropriate P4 middle-management level and...there are other considerations, like good schooling, work opportunities for spouses (me), availability of skiing for spouses (haha, but a good bonus!), clean air, etc. Think of these as filters which in effect reduce the number of possible jobs to apply for. Add to this that UNHCR's staffing pyramid shrank by 30% in the past 5 years of reform and budget strife (even though the number of refugees and internally displaced has grown globally), and so the higher your grade level and filters the fewer jobs there are.

Finding a suitable post is much more challenging than for a young singleton and the competition fierce...permanent staff have to do this every 2-5yrs depending on the post duration (which depends on the country). Suffice it to say UNHCR staff fight the battle to find work against the demographic odds and economics of the times like everyone else. We are lucky in a way, Cecile has a 'permanent contract' so there is a certain job security in that and although the built-in uncertainty doesn't go away.

We knew from the get-go, the year of the dragon was was going to be an interesting year. Without being appointed to a post yet, Cecile will be on a temporary assignment (TA) until the next round of posts comes up for January. It was only earlier this month that the office in Beirut got around to offering Cecile a suitable 6 month TA, she will work on the crisis of Syrian's displaced in Lebanon until December, before that she could have been going anywhere.  

Add caption

My own career path isn't so easily defined, it is more like that tangled spider's web from the spider on bennys experiment (watch the vid to the end)(at least I quit coffee!) so I can deal with another convolution, twist or turn. Good that one of us stays on track.

Now they say everything happens for reason; in this uncertainty I saw the chance to give the boys a break from formal schooling, to my mind an option while they are young and something I have been wanting to do for a while. The best place for this.....Ecuador of course! The house and land in Vilcabamba is really what makes such a possibility real. It also gives the chance to finally live in the house we built in Vilcabamba in 2003....a chance that has also been elusive so in a sense things start to come together. On the schooling question we consider that Mark Twain said 'don't let your schooling get in the way of your education' and Thoreau who said 'travel is the best education', I am working on the modality we will use for an informal home school.

Even not to planning to return to Lebanon may be wise the way things are going; the hard analysis says that unless the Syrian situation starts evolving differently, Lebanon stability appears like a small boat on the outer swirl of a spinning vortex going round round round and down down down. The pessimists view? I hope so and we pray that the power-brokers remember the damage of the long civil war here, and recognize the potential that awaits Lebanon that can only come with a sustained peace and proper governance.

Apologies friends in Lebanon for the visual metaphor but if things keep going the way they are, it could get quite shitty.

So by 20 August us boys will wing out over the Pacific to southern Ecuador until the end of the year. Work progresses on the construction of a casita adjacent to the casa roja in Vilcabamba to serve as a guest house. Construction is being supervised by our most excellent tenants and they will be the first 'guests' to live there. Rather than having to move away when we come, they'll just move next door!  They will manage the rental of the casita once we leave....a good option for all!

The footprint and foundation. Rebecca surveying.

So thats the plan, by remote I am working on this casita project, getting things ready to move to storage and closing the apartment, studying for my yoga course and looking at the education programme for the boys while we are in South America, I'll blog on that anon, stay tuned. busy is as busy does.

*The course is in Elemental Yoga as I build further on a different modality bringing therapy back to yoga practice and hope to work with people open to the notion that yoga as a life science can help them better manage their spiritual, mental and physical wellness. The more I practice, the more I realise how important this is in today's fractured and confusing world. This idea fits into a longer term vision to open a yoga/meditation site in Vilcabamba on the land, a project which has started and will grow organically as interest, time and commitment will allow, being there this year will help catalyze things significantly.

Its in the contrasts......

Returning last year from another sojourn to the southern Andes I was struck then by the contrasts between Vilcabamba and Beirut. Anticipating returning to Vilcabamba this year, I am reminded that I could not have chosen to reside in two places so far apart in so many different qualitative ways. This is a good thing in the sense that it provides great ground for considering everywhere we travel in between; it gives two extremes for pegging places along the different continuum. It is not a question of comparing; I mean Vilcabamba is in rural mountainous southern Ecuador, it is green, and Beirut.....well, its Beirut...urban, crowded and the most popular night-spot in the Middle East, it is grey. They are different realities, different planets! The point is to contrast, not compare.

The west side and the round terrace at Casa Roja....Vilcabamba.

Garden Towers. Our flat, on the first floor, right hand side....Beirut

STRESS:
Part of why Vilcabamba locals live to ripe old ages into their 90's is because they don't have stress. I mean not much, people work hard, putz along doing their thing day in and day out. Not particularly exciting but if you don't know any better...? They eat simple food and drink nice clean water...and alcohol.
Beirut?...holy cow. Just thinking about getting in the car stresses me out, in fact I use avoidance as the main coping strategy. But its not just the traffic. Its the underlying tension which on a daily basis might be undetectable to a visitor (for example) but once sensitized to it...it is almost palpable. You realise just how close to 'snapping' people really are and that the raised voices and slapping that might appear to be of 'Mediterranean temperament' in origin can rise to much worse very quickly. Like the other day when buddy sees his girl with another guy, follows the guy to an apartment and then whacks him.....with an AK-47....then proceeds to fire on and lob grenades at the army when they come running....it ended badly for buddy. Ask anyone when the next war will come and they all say the same thing, totally unpredictable....so be prepared....all the time.

SECURITY:
Beirut is pretty darn insecure when it comes to the possibility of war breaking out...this comes from living in a notoriously bad neighborhood surrounded by unruly neighbors who have in fact outstayed their visit on more than one occasion. It only takes one rocket attack or cross border incident to ruin your whole day. And then there is the general temperament of people... Street level criminality however is very low which takes some people by surprise;  given the size of the city (2-3Million) and a high density of people, there is a miniscule incidence of murder, rape, muggings, etc. I hazard to guess that this might be because if you are from one confessional (sect) and you were to attack someone from another well... you could start a civil war or at best a inter-clan feud that could last generations. That and because community justice will likely take care of your wrong-minded ways in a permanent fashion.
Vilcabamba....chances of a rocket attack are nil, the neighbors to the south are generally quiet although the Sundera luminosa (very bad people) are said to still lurk about the hills. Considering Vilca is generally a sleepy little Andean town, criminality has at times been a worry, not so much on the street (although at Carnivale in 2006 I was held at screw-driver point in town until I bought my drunken banditos lunch) but exhibited in a spate of home invasions two years ago. The violent shock and awe ruthless tactics used in night-time attacks on elderly residents in isolated homes was stunning in its brutality. More recently....calm has returned to Vilca for the kids and for all, its a tranquilo kind of place to be. Folk are just more vigilant is all.

POLLUTION:
Noise, Air. Garbage. Beirut has mucho, every sort of pollution you can imagine (ok well not radiation from what we know, except of course is Iran nukes Israel there will likely be 'fall-out' in Lebanon us being close neighbors n'all). Want to throw your garbage from the car window? Come to Lebanon, yep, they still do that here. In fact some Lebanese expats, those living abroad who know much better, seem to take a perverse pleasure when they return to the motherland in pitching their garbage just anywhere. Big garbage dump in the town of Saida (home to absolutely humongous multi-millionaire and leader of the opposition who doesn't want to do a thing a bout it) is right on the sea side. Daily garbage gets washed into the deep blue Mediterranean. Is it changing? It is changing....but not very quickly.
Vilcabamba has nada. Vilcabamba does not even have aircraft flying overhead....so not even the danger of chemtrail fallout. Its pretty amazing. Not to say there isn't a waste disposal issue, don't get me wrong, but at least there is an evolving level of consciousness about that kind of environmental issue. Vilca is in the valley below a fantastic National Park...Podocarpus....google it. Its a natural phenomenon.

Food:
Beirut. Lebanese food is so good but even if it wasn't it wouldn't matter as there are plenty of other great dining experiences around. Restaurants abound and for the Lebanese, food is very important. Part of the French legacy is a national hankering for good things like wine and cheese, the former home-grown and really a quality product, the latter imported and you can get most any cheese you want for a price. In Beirut at least take-away food is the norm for many Lebanese and their families and if you're living on your own a very inexpensive option. If there were a survey done I think it would discover that home delivery is the mainstay of many local diets. Organic veggies are available for those with disposable incomes. Pork is particularly bad. Beef particularly good.
Vilcabamba. Food is pretty boring on the rural restaurant platter here in southern Ecuador...actually I haven't been anywhere in the country where it shines. Thanks to the inundation of gringos, our little town has a pretty good variety of restaurants considering its size, we even boast a Japanese master chef.....but folks don't go out and eat much. You can get pizza delivered....but the fact is at the Sunday morning market you can get a great variety of organic greens and veg.... or grow what you need and make for yourself what tickles the palate. Pork is particularly good. Beef particularly bad.

Bringing up kids in the digital age.

omg. Its amazing to imagine what the world will be like for my boys when they have kids. For my parents the world of worry about media exposure for us kids was limited to television (all 3 English and 1 French channel), movies (either it was rated child-friendly or not) and music records (which we couldn't afford) we might listen to at friends houses but we didn't because most friends didn't have them either. In fact, it wasn't really much of a worry at all.

For parents today policing media exposure is hugely more complex and to my mind quite worrying. Who said the world is getting smaller when access to it has increased exponentially, the internet has exploded my world!? Today there are games and apps (huh?) on all manner of contraptions, smart phones, gameboys, xbox, ds, ipad, iphone, i don't even know their names. DVDs abound and are cheaply accessed, some kind of web-enabled device is in every room in the house (exaggeration but you get my drift) and everything is connected to wifi or 3G so internet enabled. Essentially there is a huge open picture window looking out into the world inside nearly every screen you have. Media access for everyone.

Who doesn't know Ben 10?

And then there is TV with its myriad number of channels to navigate everything from nature show, Nat Geo, reality shows, cartoons, movies (all in English or French, Russian, Arabic....take your pick). I was recalibrating our 'Children's Favorite' channels on the remote control the other day and realised that there were more than 30 channels French or English channels to choose from! Nuts. What a difference from the good old days of little or no choice... Flintstones at lunch hour, Giligans Island and Hogans Heros after school....!? Something I realised in Malaysia was when Zaki at 4 years old came home and asked 'daddy, who is Mickey Mouse guy?'....you can't bring your kids up in a bubble lest they feel like weirdos because they don't know the basic whos who of popular (read commercialized) culture. Better to expose them to it at home where you know what they are getting into.

We haven't had to deal with this one yet but managing social networking is just around the corner....my approach is to introduce it while I can still have a measure of control over it so Zaki will get his fb page when he turns 7 in February and we'll take it from there. While I find facebook and linkedin useful to stay connected, this is largely a derivative of having a truly global group of e-connected friends and colleagues and so I can see how they would be only marginal e-accessories and only entertaining if most of my 'friends' were also my neighbors who I could actually meet up with. Ultimately though what I also achieve is to use these new tools and evolve with them so that once the boys get into them I am ahead of the curve and not behind it...a lesson I learned from my Dad who never really got on the technology curve (the home computer he got from the University back in '89 before retiring never really made it out of the box). For the past nearly 20yrs that I have had an email address we have never had an internet encounter (unless you count skype calls?) as a result inevitably a certain distance has grown between us...

A favorite and near nightly occupation for Mum or Dad.

Our current coping strategy includes having an e-schedule that limits screen-time on the wii, iPad, computer and TV. Also its helpful that the boys keep involved in after-school activities and so don't have too much time down-time to fill. All in all they have about 5 scheduled hrs/week and probably 1-2 unscheduled hrs of screen time. Last year when I was more organized computer time was only for educational games. This year on computer we are only watching music vids (that we choose) on youtube.com/music and I just discovered soundcloud.com. Limiting screen time teaches the boys that we choose our media and what we look at ourselves, it is not a free-for-all and the media should never dictate to us. There is never any screen-time after dinner so that their dream-time is not so invaded by whatever they watched last, rather by homework, the dinner conversation and the books they read before sleeping...does this work?...perhaps; Kasem still has 'nightmares' about events or things viewed during the day but certainly cutting out after-dinner screen time has helped.

The demographic of their school friends means that many kids here are being brought up by their nannies. Last year we realised that when Zaki went to a friends' houses he ended up watching who knows what DVD's, playing what games on various devices and actually not really 'playing' at all. What I do know is he came home firing his 'air gun' at everything that moved and insisting that he get a nintendo ds. Recently when one of Zaki's friends came over to play he brought his own iPad which was full of age inappropriate apps. In the 3 hrs he was here our boys had 2 meltdowns each.

Age appropriate? Who knows but they love the classic comics.

We are using age appropriate ratings as a sort of filter with the boys so that the first thing we look at when searching for a new app, game etc is the age rating. Its there on most games, apps, dvd's, etc...not always the first thing you see but usually there. If it isn't age appropriate we automatically discount it and move on. This seems to work. This website was pointed out to me (on fb) http://www.commonsensemedia.org/ and might be worth checking out when thinking of melting the mind of your young one when exposing them to new media. And this is my next step to try and give them 'centering' tools that can help them through the coming years... meditation... http://mindshift.kqed.org/2011/10/how-meditating-helps-with-multitasking/

Would really love it if you could click below and comment on your own experiences, coping strategies and useful tools or websites.

On language and learning

Language and learning continues to be a fascinating journey of discovery as parents of kids growing up in multi-lingual settings. Our approach has been unequivocally open to the potential of having little linguists; Cecile has always spoken French to the boys and me English and now they are fluent in both and learning Arabic and there have been exciting moments in the process.

Until his 4th summer Zaki would always reply to Cecile in English which was frustrating for her but finally, visiting her parents in 2009, I remember Zaki racing upstairs in their house where I was unpacking saying "daddy i can understand Mamie (Cecile's mum)" and i said "sure Zaki thats because you're a little French boy and you can talk to her in French as well". A little while later he was back breathlessly excited saying "...and daddy i can talk to her too!" he was so proud of himself at this revelation and, of course, I was extremely happy for him, he hasn't looked back.

Now, here in Lebanon, they get Arabic 6 hrs a week in school. We don't speak it at all at home, the only consistent exposure they have are our building guards and concierge who are Syrian. We know however that they are actively learning it....and it is quite likely that Zaki was reading Arabic before either French or English. On a trip to the airport in February we passed an Arabic exit sign and Zaki said 'daddy thats the exit for the airport' and I asked how he knew....and he said 'because i read the sign'....this before he was really reading French or English.

Now months later Zaki reads English (although he has never had any formally taught English lessons) reads French, and is writing in Arabic and French as his school workbooks attest. Kasem seems to learn language simultaneously he goes along. Before the summer he said "daddy i can count to 100" and off he went, in English, faultlessly counting to 100 and he has only been formally taught numbers in French (and only up to 20!).

They both understand Arabic when spoken too and just lack the confidence to reply to all but the most simple phrases. We endeavour to find someone to come in and speak to them in Arabic so that they can understand that it is a 'normal' language to speak and thereby reinforce their learning by using the language. Zaki just started guitar lessons and I asked the teacher to only speak Arabic! The other day in the shower Kasem wrote his name 'KASEM' on the steamed up mirror and so I asked him to write it in Arabic.....which to my surprise he did...writing it once then rubbing it out saying 'thats not right' and doing it again! And he sings equally beautifully the Arabic and French songs that he learns in school.

We will certainly regret not having learned enough Arabic ourselves to have more actively encouraged this learning process especially if, when we move on as we will in July next year, they forget their Arabic. This will almost certainly happen if we do not end up in another Arabic language environment because there will be no practice at home. And there will likely be yet another 'third language'. It would be great to have a secret family language in such places but time and opportunity have really thwarted my efforts to learn. The real challenge for us remains using what little we have learned; the people on the street want to practice their English or default to English (as a courtesy to the visitor) defeating and deflating our efforts rather than reinforcing and encouraging us. This is a common complaint of the expat language learner, but in the end probably just a tired but useful excuse for undisciplined laziness!