Coming up on four years

On March 8th I will have lived 4 years in Germany. If that's not an opportunity to put my two Heimats on the scales, starting with...Things I miss about the US:
 
1) Cultural differences are flaunted, and it shows up best in the diversity of restaurants and ethnic grocery stores. I especially miss tacos and burritos. 

2) Americans are open toward strangers. In fact, Americans even like to confide in strangers. (Once a woman asked me at a craft fair: "Do you think this sweater is too baggy? Recently my daughter said I look like a hobo.") Germans, by contrast, need to down a few beers before they can make eye contact with strangers.

3) Small food co-ops, consumer-owned, where you can buy beans, grains, honey, olive oil, and peanut butter (ground from fresh peanuts) in bulk quantities. Here, a rare sighting of a want-to-be co-op in Germany:


4) The Unitarian Universalist faith. (UUism is a "religion" that draws its values and members from diverse religious traditions, and focuses on social justice here and now.) It has no equivalent in Germany that I know of. (For Germans, UUism is another example of America's love affair with à la carte: take what you like, ignore the rest.) 

5) The US is smoke-free almost everywhere but in private homes. Even there, smokers don't light up around non-smokers. In Germany, smoking in public is still a widespread phenomenon, and you (i.e., kids) can even purchase cigarettes from vending machines on the street. On the other hand, here is something else you can buy on the street: bike inner tubes. That also says something about differing cultural values, leading me to...



...what lures me to stay in Germany (aside from livable/bikable/railable cities):


1) Hearty, whole grain rye bread with pumpkin seeds. (Did you notice that food tops both of the lists? For all our philosophizing, what drives us humans is really quite simple.)

2) Ubiquity of shared flats (Wohngemeinschaften). A not insignificant number of Germans live with housemates/roommates into their forties and beyond, and not just for the sake of convenience.


3) Craftsmanship. In Germany you can still apprentice in bread baking, boat building, and shoe making. In Bonn, there is even a school for organ construction. The long-held tradition of systematically passing know-how from one generation to the next leads to an appreciation for things seasoned and of high quality.


4) Sperrmüll (large item garbage pick-up). Four times a year (to specified dates) people put their old furniture, etc. on the streets - so it is up for grabs until the next morning, when the small portion of it that remains is transported to the dump.


5) Finally, I don't mean to flaunt it, but it is true: five weeks of vacation and 80% of full-time with full benefits is hard to beat.

3 tidbits from the past week

Food for thought: My friend S. is spending three months on an organic goat farm in the hills of Bavaria learning to make goat cheese. Her young co-farmer, who grew up in the area, confessed that as a girl she asked her sister, "Where do people without chickens get their eggs?"

Advice: If you are trying to convince a dyed-in-the-wool carnivore that vegetarians can also make good use of a barbecue grill, avoid the T-word.

Good for a chuckle: For the Bonn Marathon last weekend, participants had to register at a "Scheck-In" counter. Some Germans are really on the fence about the growing use of English in everyday life.

my first press release

Food for Thought: youth get a taste – literally – of how the other half lives

Instead of reading about poverty in their textbooks, 100 tenth graders at Martin Luther Secondary School had a social studies lesson served up in their school cafeteria.

Rimbach, Germany (June 4, 2007). About half of the Hunger Banquet’s participants represented the low income population of the world, which meant they waited almost an hour on the floor for a small portion of plain rice. The looks cast at the tables where luckier peers were served either soup or a three course dinner were wistful and envious.

The students were participating in an experiment conceived by British aid organization Oxfam International to make income disparity in the world tangible. At a Hunger Banquet, guests are divided up proportionally to the numbers of rich, poor, and middle income people in the world – and they eat accordingly. Bringing the experiment to Martin Luther in Rimbach was the idea of guest teacher Catherine Reynolds, who had participated in and helped organize similar events while a student at the College of William and Mary in her native USA.

In order to heighten suspense, Ms. Reynolds kept details of the event a secret. Students came expecting a meal, but not until they funnelled into the dining hall and opened an envelope revealing their socioeconomic status did the full picture begin to emerge. Only the luckiest students, fewer than 15 %, were invited to join the wealthy society at proper tables and have the lunch fare that the average Rimbach student expects, in this case, lasagna.

At the Hunger Banquet, even ladling lentil soup at cramped tables seemed like an extravagance in the eyes of the 50% of students – corresponding to the half of the world that lives on less than $2 a day – who had to eat rice while sitting on cardboard boxes on the floor. Low income diners were forced to wait in line for water and weren’t guaranteed to get it. Still hungry after eating her ration, one poor student asked a neighbor from the middle income group if she could have an empty pot of lentil soup just to scrape the sides.

After the event was over, small groups met to debrief their experiences. Behavior observed at the Hunger Banquet stimulated a lot of discussion and insight, and many participants reported feeling empathy. “I realized how much luck is involved in who is born into a rich country like Germany,” commented upperclassman Akina Ingold.

Though many students felt similarly to Ingold, no privileged guests reached out to help the poor during the experiment. “The rich immediately put up a wall,” mentioned Clemens Frassine. “They pretended not to see so that they didn’t feel guilty – just like rich nations.” Not only did the dozen students in the high income group keep their eyes on their plates, none offered to give up even a bite of lasagna, let alone a seat.

Most students agreed that the experiment, though contrived, was thought-provoking and had parallels to real life. There was a common objection, however, that the situation of the low income group was not grim enough. In the words of one student, “The poor were allowed to go back for seconds. That was lame!” Surprisingly, few underfed students complained about being hungry. Some were engrossed in exploring new perspectives. And all, perhaps, were relieved that they would soon return to their familiar world and the Dönerbuden around the corner.

Size Matters

When you return to America after a long hiatus, you feel like you have shrunk, because there is no place in the world where all the objects around you are as large as in the fifty, nifty, thrifty, and colossal United States. I shared this insight recently with the handful of German teenagers who have a love of language or a sense of pragmatism and show up Friday afternoons at school for the English conversation practice I offer.

Actually, I shouldn't say "insight," because America's love affair with larger- than- life qualifies as known wisdom. The country's vast plateau still captures the imagination as the land of ever- expanding frontiers. And inspires justifiable disgust with its bulky cars, mammoth houses, and shopping centers the size of small countries.

Since I don't like to spend long hours recounting ideas that other people have articulated better, I posed a new question to my students: what objects, (anything that you can touch), are smaller in America than in Germany? Silence. So I changed the conversation back to what everyone had planned for the weekend. But five minutes into the chatter about a drunken rampage at a party the previous weekend, I got a nagging feeling not to let the thread of the original conversation die so easily. "Come on, guys, I know most of you haven't been there, but you learned that there was an America before you learned to talk."

"Carrots," said Isabelle.

"Carrots?" I asked. "Our carrots look just like your carrots."

"You have mini carrots."

"Oh, those." I didn't know whether to be offended or bemused. "You mean the ones shaped like fingers?" (How did she think they get like that?)

"Yes," she said, "these."

"But that's a marketing tactic. They're cut like that. It gets kids to eat them." You can also buy them before they go under the knife. America is the land of the strange, but let's not exaggerate.

After that our conversation stalled again, so I gave up and waited to try the question out at home on my globe-trotting friends, the anthropologists and geographers in Heidelberg. Here's the list that we came up with (comparison US/Germany). Please add your ideas.

• churches (store-front neighborhood church v. gothic cathedral)
• chocolate bars (300 g bars are not unusual in Germany - by God, that's nearly a pound!)
• the first letter of nouns, "size" or length of words in general
• high school teachers' shoulder bags (because teachers move from classroom to classroom in Germany)