2015 Goes Out with a … Whimper

Tags

Colombia, Estonia, Finland, Israel, Jordan, Lennon Wall, Mexico, Prague, Russia, travel sickness

The sun is going down on a great year of travel, but the latest trip – Colombia in this final week of the year – has ended with five sick people. Was it the eggs we ate yesterday morning? The ceviche the night before? A parasite in the tap water? No matter – we are all down for the count to various degrees, and my Colombia posts will have to wait for the New Year.

I managed to get my feet out the door to seven other countries this year, and ranged far and wide throughout the U.S. as well. I started off in the freezing cold with Russia, Estonia, and Finland in January, warmed up in Israel, Jordan, and Mexico during the summer, and finished 2015 broiling under the Colombian sun in high-altitude Bogotá and steamy Cartagena. It was a perfect mix of trips – some solo jaunts, various two-person combos, and a few family gatherings.

My final photo of the year shows a thrill I got this summer when son A and his friends gave a shout out to my blog on the Lennon Wall in Prague. I haven’t been able to find a way to use it, but I love the bright pink background and the five minutes of fame I got before someone no doubt painted over it.

Happy trails, voyages, or whatever you might wish for in 2016!

The Warmth of Israel

Tags

conflict, Dead Sea, Harmony, Israel, Jerusalem, Masada, Palestine, Tel Aviv

Israel was a pleasure I had not expected. Most people I knew who had gone to Israel had religious or political motivations – Christians wanting to walk in Jesus’s footsteps, Jews seeking a place in their promised land, political organizations on all sides wanting to promote their agendas. I resisted Israel for a long time; I didn’t (and don’t) want to take a side on the Israeli/Palestinian situation, I didn’t (and don’t) want to defend or criticize U.S. policy there, and I didn’t want to feel uncomfortable as Jews, Muslims, and Christians went about their religious rituals in a holy land for all of them.

Raised Christian, married to a nominal Jew, and long-time former teacher of Muslim students, I’m hard-pressed nowadays to commit to any religion that holds itself up as the one and only true path to anything. But Sunday school lessons die hard, Chaim Potok’s fictional characters still resonate, and present-day Muslim friendships challenge me to understand a currently controversial faith, so being in the cradle of the three Abrahamic religions turned out to be an enlightening and enjoyable experience after all. (It didn’t hurt that the country is also a sunny, vibrant destination on the Mediterranean Sea!)

I spent much of my time in Israel in Jerusalem, dictated by a 5-day business meeting my husband had there. I wandered the city in both small groups and alone during that time. As I moved through numerous sections of the city, visiting tourist sites and interacting with local people both randomly and through our business connections, I saw a unity that surprised me in some ways and reinforced in other ways the skewed view of the world that we get through the media.

More than a few Jewish residents talked of the feeling of safety and security they feel in Israel, where they are free to practice their faith overtly, without fear of discrimination or oppression. I met Jews young and old, reformed and conservative, who had come to Israel for this feeling of belonging. Yet they lived and worked side by side with those of many other political and cultural identities – Palestinians, Ethiopians, the French, and many more – perhaps nowhere better illustrated than by the yarmulkes and hijabs and colorful headwraps I saw side by side on bus shelter benches. My hotel itself was a microcosm, staffed by Muslim Palestinians, catering to a conservative Jewish clientele, and filled during my visit with several huge Christian Bible study groups on a pilgrimage.

I spoke with Palestinians, both Muslim and Christian (to my ignorant surprise), in the West Bank, and I spent an hour as one of perhaps four or five non-Muslims on the Temple Mount at the Dome of the Rock and Al-Aqsa mosque one morning. I stared at huge groups of Christian pilgrims prostrating over a stone slab in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre and followed them unwittingly through the stations of the cross along the Via Dolorosa. It all felt fascinating to me in an intellectual, historical way, seeing their holy shrines mashed up one against the other all over the Old City, but the overall feeling I came away with was the total normalcy of seeing these three major religious factions, and those of many different political identities as well, co-existing in an unremarkable way.

Church of the Holy Sepulchre side by side with a minaret

More than once, I heard a similar thought expressed, one that underscored the un-newsworthy daily reality of life in Israel. One was that people-to-people, day-to-day, many Israelis and Palestinians get along fairly well; it is their leaders and a more visible minority who propagate and perpetuate the divisiveness we all see in the press. Likewise, a Palestinian guide in the West Bank, asked by a fellow traveler if the Palestinians hated the U.S. and Americans, replied that “we do not confuse the American people with the U.S. government. We can love Americans and dislike your government at the same time.”

Am I hopelessly naïve, glossing over a turbulent underbelly? Maybe, but I don’t care; I saw peace and enough surface unity here (as I have seen elsewhere) to convince me that one-on-one, most of the world is pretty content to just go about the daily business of living and surviving. Yes, this region is volatile and potentially explosive, but the goodness and peacefulness of most Israelis and Palestinians, Muslims and Jews and Christians, and the whole beautiful mix of nationalities here, was palpable to me in the short time I had.

Moving beyond religion and politics … well, Israel totally rocks! It is modern and historic, high-tech and old-fashioned, business-savvy and beachy, conservative and avant-garde. Gallerias of luxury goods and fresh local cuisine, in shops and restaurants both quaint and grand, nestle up against the sunbaked limestone façades of centuries past. Teens in-line skate past black-hatted rabbis, and young women is strappy camis and killer suntans share the sidewalks with their fellow females in burkas. Lunch might be Moroccan, dinner French, with a nice, sloppy afternoon snack of falafel on the street.

I spent hours getting lost in all four quarters – Muslim, Jewish, Christian, and Armenian – of the Old City in Jerusalem, and I rambled through the city’s neighborhoods on my way to a local home for dinner.

I spent a day visiting the imposing site of Masada, the waterfalls and natural pools of Ein Gedi, and the Dead Sea, where I bobbed buoyantly in the salty water and slathered my skin with the black mud from the bottom, all in 110-degree temperatures that were entirely bearable with no humidity.

I spent a morning ambling alone on the outside of the Old City walls, seeing nary a soul until I entered through the Dung Gate and went through a rigorous security and a passport check to avail myself of the short non-Muslim visiting hours on the Temple Mount inside the Old City.

I picked apples on a farm north of Tel Aviv as part of a visiting delegation supporting the local foodbank, Leket.

I passed through sunny Eilat, on the far southern tip of Israel, on my way to Jordan, and I strolled the Tayelet, a beachfront walkway from the port of Old Jaffa to the northern port of modern, bustling Tel Aviv.

After three straight trips to the far northern and southern hemispheres, it was heavenly to be back in the middle of the globe, basking in the glow that only an ancient Mediterranean country exudes. May that warm, steady sun continue to thaw the years of tension that bedevil this beautiful land that is special to so many people.

Travel with a Mission

Tags

foodbanking, hunger, interview, long-form, mission

In a departure from my usual travel stories, today I am featuring an interview, which is my first assignment in a class focused on long-form blogging. I spoke with Jeff Klein, President and CEO of The Global FoodBanking Network, about his business and the kind of travel he does in his work.

With this being a travel blog, can we start by having you explain how your world travel in the past may have influenced your interest in this job?

Well, I had the benefit of some international travel over the years, both for my prior business career and also leisure travel, and I think that it was really more the leisure travel that opened my eyes to the possibility of doing something focused on an international mission. Specifically, the international travel our family did where [we renovated] a school and community center in Costa Rica, and built a home in Mexico, got me really intrigued with the possibility of doing something more service-oriented in an international context.

You mean as a career as opposed to a vacation activity? And how did you pick food?

The initial decision to move from a for-profit corporate career to a non-profit career was not driven in any specific way by the travel experiences I gave you, but the combination of travel and service made me think about that as a possibility. How I decided to move into food was pretty basic. As I thought about different possible careers within the non-profit arena, I decided to investigate a broad category I call “basic human needs” that dealt with hunger, food insecurity (which is not knowing where your next meal is coming from), areas related to staying healthy, and shelter. Hunger, to me, has always been the absolute condition you have to sort out before you can educate or have a healthier, hopeful person. So to me it was the bottom of the pyramid.

Tell us a little about The Global FoodBanking Network in particular.

Well, many people have had experience interacting with foodbanks. Foodbanks started in the U.S. in the ‘60s. A food bank is an institution that’s really good at finding where there might be surplus food in the community … it might be food that has some packaging issues, dented cans, failed product extensions that just haven’t been successful, or promotions where the date for the promotion is over and now the manufacturer has to figure out what to do with it. A foodbank is the process by which that food can be gathered from manufacturers, grocery stores, produce markets, or any place where surplus product exists that’s still healthy and safe and legal to eat, but has just lost its commercial value. Foodbanks gather that through a pretty sophisticated interaction with companies that have those attractive parcels of food. They provide storage, record keeping, and tax receipts and then they redistribute [the food] to organizations that do the actual feeding, whether they’re soup kitchens, food pantries, orphanages, old age homes, or after-school programs.

So, this is foodbanking in general. Where does the Global FoodBanking Network come in?

GFN was created in 2006 out of the organization that focuses on foodbanks in the U.S., known as Feeding America. So many countries had been approaching Feeding America about how to make this happen in [their] countries. It started to consume a lot of staff time at Feeding America, which was focused on addressing domestic hunger, so a decision was taken by the board that, as an experiment, [they would] create an organization that would focus strictly on developing and scaling foodbanks internationally, using the know-how that exists in the U.S. So that was really the birth of The Global FoodBanking Network. [Later,] the focus became, OK, let’s help social entrepreneurs all over the world create foodbanks in their communities.

(Courtesy of The Global FoodBanking Network)

How many countries are you in now?

We’re currently working in 34 countries, either where we have foodbanks that are network partners of ours, or where we’re working on a project with the short-term goal of establishing a sustainable foodbank there to meet the local hunger needs.

What are the top few countries that you’re looking to get into next?

We have active projects in Botswana; that’s one that’s fairly new. We’re working with a great team to make an existing foodbank bigger in Peru and to make a foodbank a reality in Bangalore, India. Those would be three that are pretty topical right now.

Does your work differ depending on what country you’re working in?

The basic model of foodbanks is a good place to start, but yes, the model is very, very different in different countries. In Mexico, as an example, the foodbank provides food to local people who are identified by members of the community as having a particularly difficult time either through a sickness or a job loss, etc., so the food is distributed directly to hungry people as opposed to organizations like orphanages or organized non-profits. In some countries, there’s not much food that’s manufactured or retailed at grocers. Israel would be an example of one that has abundant produce. So they do something known as gleaning, which is work with over 700 farmers who will from time to time make their production available, either because they don’t think they can sell it at a profit, or it may have some modest damage or be out of season, or they may just do it for tithing purposes. They’ll gather that produce and redistribute it, which is great because it’s very healthy. So models change based on culture, local prices, local tax law and other regulations, but the general model is consistently applied with tailoring for the local geographies.

Gleaning in Israel. (Courtesy of The Global FoodBanking Network and Omri Rubisa of Front Photography)

One of the things we all learn though traveling is that we need to be culturally attuned. Can you give us an example of a place where you’ve had to change the way you talk or do business?

There are so many examples. I don’t like to speak about “Asia” [as one big place] because it [contains] many different cultures, but one thing that’s common among many of the countries is this idea of “hunger.” They view it as very insulting if they perceive that you’re telling them that you want to open a foodbank because they are not able to successfully feed their people; they see it as a loss of face, which is very significant in many of the Asian cultures. So when you address the notion of foodbanks, you really need to use different words. You can’t use words like “poverty” and “hunger.” What you do is try to convince people that it would be great to salvage or rescue perfectly fine food before it gets wasted or goes to a landfill. People usually say, yeah, that’s a really great idea! And we had this problem in India where people would say to us “why in the world would any organization want to provide free food to people?” They were convinced there was a political agenda and there was some kind of scheme to buy votes for the party that wasn’t in political control. So we had to spend a lot of time talking about why this was to supplement their activity, or a different approach that really focused on excess food that was going to be heading to landfill.

Can you tell me how it’s different to travel when you’re essentially on a mission vs. traveling just to enjoy yourself?

A couple of different ways. One is that financial resources are always in short supply, so when I do travel I tend to be very discerning about taking the trip in the first place and wanting to have my schedule be very relevant, where I can have meetings that are not just observational meetings. I mean, I have the curiosity, obviously, to see our operations, but everything I do when I travel is with the goal of making more resources available, better communicating the story, and raising awareness, all things that will help the success of the enterprise there. So I don’t leave myself a lot of time for traditional touring. I do try to engage in the culture and meet people that we’re feeding, but it’s first and foremost a very intense business experience; I’m trying to spend my time there to advance the cause locally. So that would be the first reaction; the second is that when I do my visiting, it’s not typically in parts of town that a normal tourist would want to go to. I’m seeing places where people are in desperate situations in terms of their financial status and hunger level. So in that sense it’s probably pretty different.

Do you feel hopeful about the future of food security in the world as a whole?

I try to. I think that what I can say is that a greater percentage of the world seems to be aware of the issue. I would say young people are very focused on hunger and the food waste that I talked about – the amount of food that the world grows but is not consumed, which is about a third of the world’s food, an unacceptable and staggering amount of waste. I think the world is putting some pretty intelligent, creative, focused resources against that problem and, of course, every pound of food that’s saved does not pollute, but it also feeds. In that sense I am more hopeful – that the amount of food waste that exists will be squeezed down and the beneficiary of that will hopefully be hungry people. I am encouraged by that. The world produces enough food to feed everybody on the planet, but so much of the food that we produce is wasted for commercial and logistics and distribution-oriented reasons, and sometimes, frankly, very cavalier treatment of food, where we take it for granted and are fairly wasteful just in our own consumption habits.

(Courtesy of The Global FoodBanking Network)

Is there anything else you’d like to add about your organization for my readers?

The only thing is, if you want to know more, go to foodbanking,org. We’ve got a really great website that’s educational, both on the nature of the food waste problem and the hunger problem, and what we’re all about and where we’re working in the world to reduce the amount of hunger that people experience.

Travel in Times of Terror

Tags

fear, Israel, Norway, terror

In the last week, I’ve had reason to question the wisdom of traveling to certain places in this troubled world today. I’d always felt that travel was no more dangerous than driving to my local supermarket; I figured I was just as likely to get T-boned by a distracted suburban mom on her phone as I was to be caught in cross-fire overseas.

But in recent days, I have sat at home helping to re-route my son twice as he finished up a summer of work and vacation in Europe. After spending the month of July teaching in northern Israel – safely out of the reach of Hamas rockets – it was time to return to Tel Aviv to fly out. As (bad) luck would have it, a lone rocket landing close to the airport set off an international panic and almost all flights into and out of Tel Aviv were canceled at the exact time he was scheduled to leave. Quick thinking and a willingness to part with many extra dollars allowed us to re-book him on El Al only a day late; many others remain stuck in Israel for up to a week after the airport re-opened a few days ago.

Feeling relieved after a few tense days, I attended a dinner with friends where we chatted about the relaxing vacation our son was now on – a few days in Rome and Dubrovnik, then a stop in Norway and Sweden before heading home. “Norway?” a friend asked. “There’s a big terror alert there right now!” I laughed – haha – good one! But I checked it out and was stunned to see there was a real, credible threat there from Syrian terrorists, and that the likely date for the strike was July 28, the end of Ramadan, the very date my son was scheduled to fly into Oslo.

Should we change the flights? Do we panic and let the terrorists “win”? Will there be anything even open in Oslo? We’ve heard about museums and palaces closing their doors, nuclear plants being shut down, the airspace over Bergen blocked. Ultimately, we decided to make the change, mainly to avoid getting stuck in Dubrovnik and unable to make the international flight home if the Norwegian flights were canceled.

I’ve been thinking about many things as I confront these two scenarios. One is that it is much scarier to be the person who is outside the situation. Our son did not feel threatened in Israel at any time; there was tension to be sure, but being with Israelis for whom a daily instability is routine made him much calmer than those of us reading overly-dramatic U.S. news reporting every day. Years ago, when I was studying abroad in Spain, the Basque separatist ETA group was busy bombing Madrid on a regular basis, and one bad blast actually hit a busy restaurant across the street from my apartment. Somehow this did not faze me in the least; my parents reading about it in the paper were freaked out, but life went on as usual for me. Likewise, being in Istanbul during the Taksim Square demonstrations, in Athens during street protests, and in Lhasa after China had closed it off to foreigners were not even remotely as disturbing as the world press made these situations seem from the outside.

For those of us who feel we are citizens of the world, the recent unrest in so many places is depressing more than anything else. Yes, it messes up our vacations, costs us money and time, and adds angst to our travels, but the saddest part is that we have seen the kindness in the world, the common ground among people, the cooperation, the kinship, and the potential for peace. It shatters us to see the divisions, the hate, and the violence. I joked with my family in an email update a few days ago that all this worrying and rearranging might dampen my enthusiasm for traveling, but I couldn’t help adding parentheses with the word (Maybe!). But there’s really no maybe about it; I will never be afraid to venture out into our wide, wonderful world; I’ll just cross my fingers extra hard that I pick the right place at the right time!