A Crack in the Concrete

"All living things contain a measure of madness that moves them in strange, sometimes inexplicable ways. This madness can be saving; it is part and parcel of the ability to adapt. Without it, no species would survive."
- Yann Martel, Life of Pi

BEEP! BEEP! BEEP! BEEP! 

My eyes open slowly, blinded by the darkness that has settled into my room, as my right hand fumbles for my phone, which has found its way onto the floor at some point during the night. I turn my alarm off, struggling to keep my eyes open, and drop my head back onto my pillow with a resounding WUMPH. I turn my face to the side, and in the dull grey hue of morning, a small figure darts across my room and into the shadows. A smile, which stems from the very depths of me, makes its way onto my face. 

"Yoda?" I call out in a groggy sing-song voice. 

"Mroww"

A pause. Some rustling. 

"Yodaaa?" Again, that same sing-song. 

"Mewrrhhh"

Another pause. And then, a faint sound of purring, which intensifies as he draws near. 

"Come here baby," I say, my voice flowering with tenderness, as I lift him from the floor with one hand. 

He lands on my chest, and presses his soft, warm nose into my face. I pull him away and try to make him hunker down under my chin, to cuddle into the soft folds of my shirt, so that I can stroke his fur and drift into the abyss once more. Instead, he viciously bites my hand, and flips onto his back, exposing his little pink belly. His back legs kick back and forth as he clamps his razor sharp nails into my skin. I sigh, defeated, and turn on the light. 

"C'mon," I say wearily, lifting myself from the mattress and planting my feet on the floor, "breakfast time". 

It's Ramadan. And I have half an hour to eat before I go into lock down mode. I make my way into the kitchen and throw two pieces of toast in the toaster, as Yoda winds around my feet, crying and crying and crying some more. He is still bottle-fed and ready for his own breakfast, a scoop of goat's milk powder mixed into hot water followed by 3 mL of antibiotics, 2 mL of probiotics, and an array of other medicines that have to be jammed down his throat with a syringe. I hate this part, and it takes me the better part of 15 minutes to get it all down. I remember my toast, which is cold by now, and spread a thick layer of coconut butter on top, with a second layer of tropical jam: sweet juicy pineapple. mouthwatering mango. crisp coconut flakes and hint of lime. I cram it into my mouth and wipe my hands on my pants. The knowledge, that this is the last thing I will eat for 12 hours, sits heavy on my mind. 

Yoda, still howling, for what I do not know, tramps behind me back into the bedroom. I get dressed, brush my teeth, and swaddle him tightly in a light blue towel, patterned with elephants, which seems to be the only way to calm him down when he is being fussy. He sits, bound in his terry cloth prison, and stares at me with big blue eyes. His mouth opens and shuts softly, like he is murmuring to himself. Eyelids get heavy, and I shove him under my burnt orange sweater. 

I call a taxi with an app on my phone (similar to Uber), and then hurry down to Jalan Kelab Ukay 5, which is the closest address listed for pickup. It takes about 7 minutes to arrive, and I barrel in with Yoda, heavy on my arm. 

As soon as I'm settled in the back of the cab, Yoda wakes up, and begins to wriggle out of his swaddle, howling uncontrollably. I feel a warm puddle begin to form on my lap, and I run my hand through my hair, which stands on end. The driver glances into the rear view mirror suspiciously, and then cranes his head towards me, his dark eyes settling on my sweater, which has taken on, more or less, a life of its own.

"You have kitten?" he asks menacingly, and wracked with guilt, I nod, lifting the burnt orange fabric to expose Yoda in all his glory, arms thrashing and face, deranged. 

"So cute!", he exclaims, delighted, and tells me that he has 10 cats at home. This is not uncommon in Malaysia. I do my best to dry my pants while he talks, stroking Yoda's ears, to keep him quiet. 

At work, Yoda stays in a pink basket on the window sill, where he sleeps, plays with his orange ball, howls for his bottle and basically does cat things. I feed him 3 - 4 times during the day, and then, when work is over, we go straight home. The people at work have, with knowing grins, started calling me, "kucing ibu" which means "cat mom" in Malay, and recently, at an iftar dinner (which is a break fast dinner for Ramadan), a Malay grandmother who spoke not a lick of English, asked her granddaughter if I was breastfeeding the cat. Everyone laughed. This is my life now. 

I am a starving cat mom. 

When we arrive home, Yoda prances around the house like Matt Rempel at a music festival, and I sit, with fork and knife clutched in hand, waiting for the call to prayer to sound out across the city. It's been a long and stressful day. But I am happy. 

Because Yoda is happy. 

And even though he shits on my bed and spreads litter all over the house and bites my face while I'm trying to sleep and cries for milk at all hours of the day and night, at the end of the day, he has shown me how resilient life can be. 

And, in this month of Ramadan, like a flower, growing up through a crack in the concrete, how resilient I can be. 

And that is an important lesson to learn, any day. 

Yoda - the day we found him - severely malnourished and covered with fleas

So tiny!

Bottle feeding when he first arrived (pre-medication!)

Swaddled in my burnt orange sweater!

"What's that mom?"

"I'll just sit here..." 

Helping me with my blog!

The Danger of a Single Story

In 2009, a Nigerian writer, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie gave a TED talk called “The Danger of a Single Story". It is about what happens when you boil the stories of millions of complex human beings down into one single narrative. 

When I was a little girl, we didn't have cable. We had 5 channels, and other then Saturday morning cartoons (which I lived for), I spent a lot of time channel surfing. Since I refused to go outside, especially on nice days, and was even more averse to cleaning my bedroom, I ended up wiling away countless hours, stretched out lazily on our lumpy green couch succumbing to my fate. The World Vision one hour special. 

Looking back, I now realize that I spent an inordinate amount of time watching colonialism in action. An old, grey haired man strolls into a remote African village, where the people live in squalor, a bank of flies teasing their nostrils, climbing into their eyes and ears. This man (think Bill Clinton), looking particularly well-kempt in this setting, kneels in his khaki pants (always khaki!), one knee in the dirt, to reach the child's height. Placing an arm around the malnourished, fly-ridden body of the young person, he looks directly into the camera and asks, rather implores, for help. For the good of the child. For the good of the community. Because they do not have the capacity to save themselves. 

And so, with my spongey little nine year old brain, I learned that Africans are nothing more than the passive recipients of white benevolence and that Africa itself is an undesirable, poverty-stricken, heat-ravaged, fly-infested dust bowl of a place. 

Sadly, I held this conception for a long time, because nobody showed me another truth and I didn't take it upon myself to learn more. And this, my friends, is the danger of a single story. 

I now know that Africa is one of the largest continents in the world, comprising 54 distinct countries, which encompass more than 1500 region-specific languages and countless cultures, as well as a tremendous wealth of natural resources. It is home to a vast and fertile landscape, enormous rainfall, good soil and plenty of sought after minerals, like diamonds, salt, gold, iron, cobalt, uranium, copper, bauxite and silver, in addition to a plethora of other resources like petroleum, cocoa beans, woods and tropical fruits. 

In the past, when I have conjured up images of Africa, they have been two-fold.

"Extreme hunger in drought-ravaged East Africa"

OR

African Safari

My own misconceptions, and my failure to examine my flawed belief systems, led me to see Africa as one homogeneous entity. This TED talk, "The Danger of a Single Story", shed some light on how we, as people, are prone to categorizing other people, places, cultures, religions, and more, based on our own black and white interpretations of what we THINK we know. Africa is not homogeneously poor - in the way I was led to believe. And things are not always as they seem. 

When I started writing this blog, I wanted it to be diverse, to showcase every aspect of my trip. But I also need to be careful about the way that I tell my own stories. For example, while police officers in Kuala Lumpur are notoriously corrupt, that doesn't mean that they ALL are - and even the ones who do fit this description aren't always all bad - one might shake down a refugee for every penny they have on them in the afternoon, and be home in the evening to sing their baby to sleep. 

As far as I'm concerned, there is a Jekyll and a Hyde, a good and a bad, in everyone and everything. And there are a million sides to every story. Understanding this is an important part of being human. There is no black and white. People are complicated, multi-faceted. One problem can have 10 different solutions, each one as good as the next. 

I have come to realize that it is my job to sift through all of the information presented to me - to identify the gaps and to do my own research, to find my own truth. That is what I aim to do in this internship, and outside of it. This life is meant for digging, And the deeper you dig, the more you will find :) 

Algiers (the capital city of Algeria) 

Abuja (the capital city of Nigeria) 

Snow in a small ski town in South Africa

The Danger of a Single Story

A Rude Awakening

The midnight air is frigid, the A/C blasting its icy breath into the back of the cab, as Danae and I make our way home from "The Green Man", an English pub in the heart of downtown, Kuala Lumpur, on our first Friday night in the city.

"I am seeing this word, Jalan, everywhere..." Danae proclaims loudly, her words glauming on to one another excitedly, as she pushes her large brown satchel to one side, "I'm going to ask the taxi driver, what does Jalan mean?"

I see his shoulders sag.

"Excuse me, sir. sir? Can I ask you..." she taps him on the shoulder, "Sir? Yes, Sir. What does Jalan mean?"

"It means road," he sighs, and stares longingly at his GPS, willing it to call upon our final destination.

Peals of laughter erupt from the backseat, and I can almost see him roll his eyes through the back of his head. Then, the mood shifts in the car quite suddenly, as we come over the crest of a steep hill and begin to descend the long and winding road towards home.  I notice, all around me, for the first time, flashing lights. A nervous energy winds itself, like a persistent weed, into my body, and I hear my voice, urgent and strangled, ring out in the darkness.

"Is that a police blockade?"

The taxi driver, his fingers wrapped tightly around the steering wheel, nods, and turns towards me for the first time.

"Yes ma'am. Very bad for us..." he smiles apologetically.

"But it's OK right?" I hear myself say, as if from far away, "because you haven't been drinking".

"No ma'am," says the driver in his indistinguishable accent, "they are not checking for the drinking... they are checking for the passports."

My blood freezes in my veins.

I don't have my passport with me, and neither does Danae.

"It's OK", says Danae quietly, all of her previous gusto evaporated, along with my confidence, "we can show them photocopies".

I'm not convinced. The Malaysian police are notorious for taking bribes, and arresting travelers who are unable to show documentation.

As we near the check-stop, a car up ahead is being searched, and I am horrified to see that every officer in the vicinity is sporting an automatic weapon, which resembles an AK47.

Pretty much, this was happening

One heavily armed officer approaches the window, and taps the butt of his gun against the pane. The driver rolls it down hurriedly.

"Yes Sir," he says, timidly, as the police officer ignores him, and sneers into the back of the cab.

"Passports," he says gruffly, and I can tell, for lack of a better expression, that he is not fucking around.

"We don't have them," I state plainly, my voice wavering slightly, "they're back at the house."

"That is not my problem," he says, a callousness buried deep in his voice.

"We have photocopies though", says Danae, a little too brightly, and begins to dig through her wallet.

"You can't produce REAL passport...", he says, "you go downtown".

He opens Danae's door, and motions for us to get out of the cab.

As he turns to speak to another officer, I violently stuff 600 ringgits (about $200.00 Canadian) from my wallet into my bra, and refuse to step foot out of the taxi.

After much pleading, we manage to convince the officers to let me leave Danae at the checkpoint and return to our apartment to fetch our passports. I take her phone, since mine is dead, so that I can use Google maps to find my way. It takes half an hour to get back to her, and the entire time, my heart beats out of my chest.

After an hour of negotiations and travel, I return to the scene of the non-crime, in my opinion, to produce our shiny navy blue passports for inspection. And then, just like that, we are on our way.

One of the things I have thought about often since this incident is how lucky I am to be Canadian. How lucky I am to have a passport. Most of the refugees living in Kuala Lumpur don't have any form of documentation. Nor do they have any ways to obtain that documentation. And for them it means random police checks turn into human rights violations on a daily basis. They are robbed, assaulted, strip-searched, and oftentimes detained indefinitely by police. The system is incredibly broken, because it allows people (and particularly, men) in positions of authority to exploit the most vulnerable populations.

And why is it that I'm special and they're not? Why is it that I can move freely across borders, and my story does not end with violence or humiliation or degradation or detention? Why is it that my face in a little booklet, worth $120.00, tells the police officers in Kuala Lumpur that I mean something?

The more I learn about the refugee plight, the more I realize that the world is not fair.

And it probably never will be.

And that's just not OK.