Some people don't care for economic expansion

I just finished reading Arabian Sands, by Wilfred Thesiger, which is the story of the five years he spent exploring the Southern part of the Arabian Peninsula in the late 1940s.  On the surface, this is a book about an explorer traveling through the deserts of the Saudi Peninsula known as "The Empty Quarter" and is classified as a travel book.  But this book is significant because Thesiger was one of the first Westerners to travel the area, where he had the unique opportunity to live amongst Bedu and meet people from many of the tribes in the area.  Though he never learned to identify the tracks of his camel, he was a keen observer of the people he traveled with and among, and has documented the lifestyle and values of a people who are now almost extinct.

All of the people in the area were Muslim.  Many of the tribes he encountered were acutely xenophobic and anti-Christian.  Material possessions were few; his travel companions generally owned camels, guns, the shirt they were wearing, and little else.  Even settled tribes seemed to have very few possessions.  His travel companions were willing to kill for their tribe or traveling companions as a matter of honor.  They were generous to the point of poverty, always offering food to anyone they met while traveling, even if it meant they went without any food for the day or longer, and Thesiger's companions seemed incapable of saying no to a request, even if it threatened the provisions required to cross the desert.  It is also clear that there is great variation in degrees between different areas and tribes, with some not so concerned about Christians and others calling Thesiger's companions infidels because they were accompanied by a Christian.

In the five year period in which Thesiger completed his travels the area was in constant turmoil.  Tribal alliances were complex and the areas of conflict were constantly shifting.  Thesiger follows these tribal conflicts like a local, and recounts tribal conflicts that consolidated power and facilitated exploration for oil in the period between his travels and when he wrote the book.

The rigors of the desert created a society that differs dramatically from our own Anglo-Saxon society.  This book provides insight into where the Muslim religion was formed, and the growth of values that seem utterly foreign to many westerners, which is especially significant in the current climate of Christian-Muslim animosity and the global threat of terrorism. 

Thesiger aspired to define neither Arabs nor Muslims in this work.  However, his keen observations of the Bedu peoples amongst whom he traveled provide insight into the values of both.  Thinking back on my geography education, reading this book would have broadened my understanding of the Middle East far more than the chapters of our text book on the topic managed.  On top of all this, it details the challenge of crossing a desert five hundred miles across by foot, with only the provisions they could carry on their camels, amongst warring tribes.  It's well worth reading.

Recycled clothes to ease the travelers conscience

I bought a pair of high tech travel pants today, the kind where the material is partly composed of old plastic bottles.  The tag had a picture of the aforementioned bottles awaiting conversion into these pants.  As I started to examine the picture, I expected to see lots of Coke bottles; Coke is ubiquitous.  But I saw only one or two.  The vast majority of the bottles in the cage were water bottles.

I only rarely drink bottled water.  It is generally reserved for occasions when I need the bottle more so than the water.  I am fortunate enough to have lived my life in places where there is a safe supply of clean water delivered directly to my taps.  Mind you, I did start filtering my drinking water a few years ago when we lived in a house where the water ran brown for the first few seconds whenever you turned on the tap.  However, even when I travel, I usually drink the local water if I've been told by a local that it is safe (the one exception to this is when I visit my mother's house, where I can't stand the taste of the water after brushing my teeth).

A while back I went to Belize.  I spent nearly a week in a small town that would hardly exist if it weren't for the tourists.  On one of our excursions we noted that Coke was still delivered in glass bottles which were sent back to be refilled, but all the local tourists carried a disposable water bottle rather than a reusable bottle that they filled at their hotel.  Each of these disposable plastic bottles came with a little plastic cap to cover the mouth piece, which was further wrapped in plastic to keep it in place during shipping.  These bottles, caps, and little plastic wrappers were all over the roadside.

When I went to Spain a few years later, it was nearly impossible to get water that wasn't bottled; Restaurants didn't serve it and there were no drinking fountains.  The expectation was that everyone would purchase their drinking water in a bottle.  In fact, no matter how nice the restaurant, if you asked for water it was delivered to your table in its original plastic packaging, never decanted, so that it would be obvious that it was not tap water.  I guess this is for the same reason that bottles of wine are always opened in front of the customer.  I can imagine a stuffy old man quaffing his glass of water and puckering his lips as he says, "Hmm, a citrus bouquet, with rich mineral undertones."

About 90 billion liters of bottled water is consumed each year in the world.  The Italians drink the most per capita, but Americans now drink over 4 billion liters of it.  Friends of mine consume bottled water because they perceive it to be cleaner and more healthful than what is available through the tap.  It pays to take care when purchasing bottled water, though, because up to 40% of it comes from a tap.  When in the U.S., where community water supplies are among the cleanest in the world, it hardly seems worth the bother to get your water from a bottle rather than the tap.

Anyway, all this bottled water requires a lot of bottles.  In a place like small town Belize where they barely have garbage collection, the bottles are as good as garbage.  But in Australia and the U.S. they can be turned into pants that are designed to be worn on trips to exotic places with dubious water quality.  It's appropriate that the people creating all that plastic waste are the same ones purchasing the high tech pants.  It's too bad the recycled pants will reduce waste where the tap water is safe and not from the destinations where the pants are intended to be worn.

Why I'm teaching sign language to my child

I guess I'm not an entirely conventional mother.  One of the ways this evidenced itself was when I tried explaining to my child's day care minder that we were teaching him sign language.  She reacted with surprise; she had never heard of hearing parents teaching sign to a hearing child.

To be fair, I had never heard of teaching sign to a hearing child until I noticed a friend of mine had an uncanny ability to figure out what her daughter wanted even though she wasn't speaking.  Her daughter only knew about ten signs, but was using them to communicate valuable information.  As soon as I found out about this, I acquired copies of Baby Signs by Linda Acredolo and Susan Goodwyn and Sign With Your Baby by Joseph Garcia.  Then it seemed like I was seeing references to baby sign all over the place: books at the bookstore, DVDs at the baby goods store, classes at the local community house, articles in the weekly baby newsletter.  Most of the women in my mother's group had heard of it, though I think I am the only one who is actually using it.  With all this exposure, I was surprised that someone in the childcare industry had not heard of it.

There area number of supposed advantages to teaching your child sign:

• It takes years for children to develop the oral skills to say all the sounds in their native language.  Manual dexterity develops much earlier and research suggests that infants develop the ability to use language before they develop the muscle coordination required to speak clearly.
• Learning to communicate at an earlier age reduces frustration for both the child and the parents.
• Using sign allows children to learn fundamentals of language earlier.  Garcia found that children who learn sign language are speaking about objects at the age when children who aren't using sign are only starting to identify objects.  Acredolo and Goodwyn concluded that babies using signs understood more words and learned to speak more easily than babies who weren't using signs.

My child can only say three words orally, but he's currently using at least five signs.  Like all children, these words have a much broader meaning than a fluent speaker would attribute to the same words.  For instance, the sign for potty may mean "I need to use the potty", "I have just peed", or "There's the potty".  But what a relief!  Instead of crying, if he has a sign for what he needs he silently moves his hands.  I no longer need to guess if he is thirsty or hungry.  When he signs "potty" I know he either needs to use the potty or needs a nappy change.  Sign hasn't turned him into the angel child; he still yells when he wants something or when he is unhappy, but only when he doesn't have a more effective way to communicate or doesn't get what he wants.

He seems to be so excited about being able to identify something and share that with us.  For instance, he recently started using the sign for "hat".  He now signs whenever he sees a hat or a helmet, not only when he wants to put one on or look at it more closely, but also as if to say "hey, I see a hat and I know what it is, and I can tell you that I know what it is."  This creates opportunities for conversation that would not have happened if he weren't initiating it.  These conversations expand his understanding of the world and of English.

As it would be when learning any language, my son's pronunciation is at times difficult to understand.  For instance, the sign for "more" can be confused with clapping (I'm still not sure which one he is using), and it took me at least a day to figure out his sign for drink.  But now that his pronunciation is familiar, it is becoming very easy to understand him.

When I first started this process, I used signs from ASL.  Then I started looking for variations because some signs are just too difficult for a young child with limited manual skills.  I'm not opposed to making up signs, as Acredolo and Goodwyn suggest, and as I learn to understand my son's "pronunciation" I realize that the official sign doesn't matter all that much as long as we understand what he's saying.  Since very few people he interacts with are likely to know sign, it doesn't really matter what signs we use.

It has taken very little effort to teach our son the signs he knows.  Because I own two books on baby sign, we have an accessible reference to learn new signs ourselves.  Then it is just a matter of using them at the right moment.  As my son learns more signs and expands his interest in the world, I learn more signs to share with him.

All I want for Christmas is a pizza cooker

I recently noted at the local home wares shop a window full of pizza cookers.  This appliance looks like a  large, round sandwich griller.  I can't imagine why anyone would prefer to own a specialized appliance just to cook pizza rather than use their oven.  Everyone already has an oven.  Pizza cookers require storage space and are probably harder to clean than the pan you use in the oven.

Each year I note a new appliance like this on the market, something that is essentially the same as an existing, and possibly even useful appliance (I do find the sandwich griller very useful), but in a different shape or size.  They are supposed to allow you to prepare something that you already prepare some other way.  They quickly end up gathering dust in the most inaccessible cupboard available.

Why don't the home wares companies ever come up with something truly innovative.  I'm waiting for someone to develop a compact, energy and space efficient system to wash and dry Ziploc bags.  That's something I'd pay $100 for.

Your turn

I know that blogs are new to most of my readers, so now it's time to introduce comments.  Did you know you can add comments to my postings?  It's easy: just click on the "Permalink" link at the end of the post.  You will be taken to a page that contains the post, any existing comments, and a place to add your own comment.

Top five reasons to comment on this and other entries in Wombats and Cents:
1. You can share your opinion
2. You can create a dialog
3. You can let me know who's reading
4. You can let others know you're reading
5. You can tell me how the blog is going (verbose?  airy-fairy?  insightful?  boring?)

When you submit a comment it will not appear on the page immediately.  I review all comments prior to posting to make sure that they are appropriate (mostly to prevent spammers from using my site for unsavory purposes, and to make sure there's nothing offensive).  I do reserve the right to delete part or all of a comment, but it probably won't ever happen unless you give me a reason to.

When you're done you can use the links at the top of the page or on the right side to read my other posts.

Writing lessons

I feel a little let down by my high school English curriculum.  For six years I read countless novels, short stories, and plays, I identified themes in spot quotes, and I wrote five to ten page essays purporting to explore the deeper meaning of these stories.  Despite all that reading and writing, I have not been able to shake the feeling that I missed the day when the teacher discussed how to write a good essay (I missed very few days, so it must have only taken one or two classes).

I'm a huge fan of Tim Cahill's writing.  Cahill, who used to be a regular contributor to Outside Magazine, has a style that melds personal experience with history and often has you thinking about the future as well.  For non-fiction, he is one author I'd like to be able to mimic (another is Jon Krakauer, another contributor to Outside Magazine who writes with a very similar style).  Why didn't we read articles by Cahill in high school?  Why didn't we spend any time analyzing the writing techniques used in our endless reading list of the classics?  I suspect it was because my high school English curriculum was more geared towards making sure we could quote from Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man ("Madame, I never eat Muscatel grapes.") than to develop an understanding of different writing styles and how to mimic them.  Not to suggest that mimicry should be the goal of any aspiring writer, but that it can and should be used as a valuable step towards developing one's own style.

Today I was very excited to discover an analysis of a typical article by Tim Cahill.  If you haven't read anything by Cahill, I suggest you get a copy of his first book, A Wolverine Is Eating My Leg, which is a collection of articles on topics as diverse as the Jonestown Massacre and Bigfoot sightings.  The aforementioned analysis is of a piece from Pass the Butterworms, a collection I haven't read, and is quite understandable even without having first read the article.  I will be reading this analysis several times to glean everything I can from it.  Hopefully it will have an effect on what you see here, but no one should hold their breath for that.

According to Stephen King, in his memoir/writing instruction manual On Writing, good writing comes from lots of reading and lots of writing with a few things like grammar and vocabulary thrown in (in other words, there is no formula).

With the exception of a few pages of Cujo when I was too little to be reading Stephen King novels, I've never read anything by Stephen King.  I was so scared of the shadows in my closet that I have avoided scary books and movies ever since.  And I'm not terribly interested in writing fiction.  I never would have picked up his writing manual except that my mother was so enthusiastic about it that she sent me a copy.  Once I started reading it I couldn't stop.  I was hooked by the second page, which I suppose is why he is a bestselling author.

The book starts with an autobiography that exposes his insatiable appetite for horror, a love of writing, and a determination to publish, all of which started from a very early age.  The second half of the book commences with a discussion of the elements of one's toolbox and relies heavily on Strunk and White's Elements of Style (he recommends that any writer own and study this book).  The better part of the writing manual, however, is about how to manage story, themes, background information, and research in writing.  He illustrates this very effectively with examples from his own writing history and samples of his writing.  The postscript is about getting hit by a car and how writing fit into his recovery.

My only complaint is that he assumes that the reader is an aspiring fiction writer to the extent that he instructs the reader to stop reading if he is not.  I found the book interesting, regardless of my non-existent desire to write fiction, because it demonstrates how one successful author cultivated his skills and develops his stories.  This book would be a welcome addition to any high school English curriculum.

Reading  On Writing made me want to read more of King's books, but I'm still a little afraid of the shadows in my closet.

Outsourcing international relations

I got a phone call from India the other day.  This is nothing new.  Even though I don't know anyone in India, I get many calls from the call centers there.

Like anyone with a telephone who has lived in the same place for more than a few months, we regularly get sales calls.  Everyone who has been subject to the litany of calls can attest to the poor timing; the calls inevitably happen just as you are getting home, just as you are cooking dinner, or just as you are sitting down to eat.  They call during that precious period between when you arrive home and that ill-defined time when it's considered too late to call, which for a telephone solicitor is, thankfully, earlier than it would be for a friend. 

What you may not know is that these calls also happen during your normal working hours.  I discovered this when I stopped work to take care of my child.  Now I can get an unsolicited sales call when I am feeding my son, changing his diaper, or putting him down for his nap.  The timing of the call is annoying because it happens when you are at home at all.  It is an invasion of our personal time (and space - I don't pay $30/month to have a phone line with the intent of making it easier for the telemarketers - wouldn't it be great if we could treat them like the trespassers that they are).

Okay, so you know how I feel about telephone solicitors, and my guess is that you share some of these feelings.  I'm probably not the only one who provides an abrupt response when I receive these calls.  My partner often engages in little games with the callers before telling them he's not interested.  I'm sure some people give the telephone solicitors an earful before they hang up.  I certainly have in the past.  My standard reply when I get a sales call now is "Not interested. Please remove me from your list.  Thank you."  Then I hang up the phone before they have the chance to try to convince me otherwise.  A few people are authentically sorry for bothering me and don't even try. Most callers I can hear starting their plea as the phone makes it's way
to the hook.

Like many things these days, the work of telephone solicitors is being outsourced overseas.  I rarely receive sales calls from rural Australia, even more rarely receive them from one of the major cities.  Virtually all of our sales calls come from India.  This may make economic sense to the companies using the call centers to sell their wares.  Labor is certainly cheaper in India than Australia.  It probably costs less to call from India to Melbourne than from Adelaide to Melbourne (if my international phone card is anything to go by).  And Indians speak English.  In theory, it's perfect.

Unfortunately for the poor Indians, and for the companies employing their services, they don't actually speak the same language.  Even though the grammar and much of the vocabulary is the same, the pronunciation is often so different that it is notably more difficult for a person from the US or Australia to understand someone from India than someone from their own country.  Furthermore, it is immediately obvious that the caller is not a native Australian, which increases my irritation with the company using the call center; not only are they paying someone to invade my time and space with annoying sales calls for things I don't want, but they won't even pay Australians to do it (probably because it's such a despicable job that Australians demand a lot of money to do it).  Unfortunately for the person on the other end of the phone line, they bear the brunt of this irritation.

Many of the people working in the Indian call centers probably do not have phones in their homes (according to the Economist, there are 4.4 land lines per 100 people in India - compare that with 54.1 and 60.8 land lines per 100 people for Australia and the US), and therefore do not understand how numerous and annoying sales calls are in countries like Australia.  They must think Australians (and this American living in Australia) are terribly rude.  But now, because of this peculiarity of international markets, there is probably more contact between Australians and Indians over sales calls than over cricket.

And that leads me to wonder what effect this new trend towards international call centers is having on international relations.