vegetables

for quite a long time, i've wanted to be a vegetarian, or at least reduce my meat consumption form the currently exorbitantly high levels to normal, dietician-recommended levels. now why would an almost carnivore like myself want to do this? upon much pondering, i've come up with three reasons

1) Health - generally, eating heaps of vegetables is healthier than eating heaps of meat, both in terms of reduced sodium (and I do have some mild hypertension, due either to poor eating habits or secondary to my daily dose of NSAIDs) as well as fat
2) Environment - meat is REALLY REALLY bad for the environment. It takes thousands of liters of water to produced just a kilo of beef, and while cow seems to be the most egregious culprit, rest assured vegetables always leave a smaller footprint.
3) Ethics - sometimes i wonder if a thousand years from now, humanity will look back and say that the people of this generation were barbaric for eating animals that clearly can suffer and feel pain. at the moment, such thinking is probably concerned crazy for non-PETA members, but i've read enough sci fi (haha, geek i know), particlarly a book called K-Pax (good read!) that i wonder. another way of looking at it - if we've got heaps of laws preventing cruelty to animals (most often domestic animals), how is it at all okay to kill cows and pigs and chickens by the thousand? is there not some sort of deep moral incongruence there?

now, i've tried to hop on the veggie-train in the past, but this has usually ended in me going to the deli and buying a pound of cold cuts and just gobbling it down within a week. i'm not sure if my self-control has improved much at all since then, but let this post be some sort of declaration of affirmed effort - when i return from china, i will look into how to convert to at least semi-vegatarianism.

so wish me luck - i'll definitely need it. it's like someone trying to quit smoking, but i don't think they have anything that i could parallel to a nicotine patch :P

transience

last night we went to mahak's in lusaka, an indian food restaurant, to commemorate the departure of one of the young women who live on our floor at the nusring hostels. i had only ran into her a few times during the week that i've been here, and there were a few people there whom we had just met earler in the day visiting the museum. this happens frequently when i travel and live briefly in a new place. relationships come into existence quickly, they spark brightly, and the almost always fade utterly. perhaps our paths will cross again, but more likely than not they never will.

prior to mahak's, i skyped with a good friend of mine for almost two hours. we were lamenting about the difficulty of forging lasting relationships in a cauldron of instability. i remarked that a more effective strategy would be to learn to better live in the moment - to find random flings rather than to seek true love, so to speak. not something i find satisfying, by any means, but perhaps it is something i could grow to appreciate?

i feel that dynamism is so important, but at some point you can change so much that you begin to lose the core of who you are. so... i find it difficult to appreciate both these transient relationships and the longer-lasting ones, since they seem to be so different.

expat living

there are quite a few internet cafes in lusaka, but there is one i like going to in particular - la mimosa cafe - largely on account of the fact that it has the fastest, most reliable connection i've been able to find. the biggest problem is that the place is about 70 minutes away by walking or 20,000 Kwacha away by cab ($4).

i usually opt for my walking, and boy-oh-boy what a relief it is to be able to walk again, courtesy of Schering-Plough's biologics. anyway, on today's walk i chose a different route from usual and along the waysaw a number of rather nice-looking, well-to-do homes - in stark contrast to the slums that populate the city and even my relatively cushy nursing student dorms.

i've generally noticed two things:
1) many expats living in zambia and other developing countries are here doing some sort of humanitarin work
2) many expats tend to seek a mode of living that emulates their life at home as much as possible

by 2), i mean that expats will tend to live in houses that are quite posh by local standards, frequent the expat establishments (i stand guilty, la mimosa is certainly one of those), employ helpers (cook, maid, chauffeur), etc... etc...

now, i'm personally as guilty of anyone as wanting a nice clean place, warm showers (or any showers for that matter), and a home generally devoid of bugs. somehow though, i feel that it's a tad more egregious to live a western-style life in the midst of great poverty than in a place like riverbend or millwoods. i remember last year when i was in zambia i ran into a british doctor who actively sought to live in the slums - something that i thought was fairly insane even by the standards of craziest bleeding heart liberals. now, i personally wouldn't go so far as to want to live in the slums, but living in a really pretty place out here sits somewhat uneasily with me.

i guess this all boils down to the concept of how much material sacrifice is ideal.

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on an utterly unrelated note, the air here smells really nice. there's this hint of smoke that permeates through everything. i'm not sure what gives the air this flavor, but it seems particularly nice breathing it in as i sit out here in the open under the nighttime sky.