Category: Personal

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Less Face, More Book

My first Facebook status update, from 2007, was “Josh is going to the Waldorf-Astoria to work on the Foreign Minister’s speech.” Over the next few days, I let people know that I was “tired,” “hungry,” “mildly nervous,” “sorry the 49ers got slaughtered,” and “going swing dancing today.”

That third-person lead-in — remember? — prompted us to write about what was happening to ourselves in the present. This led to a kind of inane self-regard that was easy to make fun of, but it also made Facebook different from a blog, or from Twitter. It was a place to say what you were doing or feeling, not what you were thinking. In November 2008, I made not one political post.

Not dogs

Through all the changes — the end of the lead-in prompt, parents joining, brands joining, Farmville, Upworthy — what stayed interesting was seeing what people we knew, or used to know, were up to in their ordinary lives.

But as Facebook expanded, we became more cautious in what we posted. Silly nattering became vanity and humblebragging. Our online selves became something to curate. On the new Internet, everyone knows if you’re a dog.

More and more, then, we had to show that we weren’t dogs. We had to like and reblog the right things. Facebook became a place to perform our righteous selves. Especially after the election, we pivoted from sharing what we ate or where we went this weekend to sharing what we were outraged about and what we thought you should also be outraged about.

Many of my Facebook friends are legitimately outraged about legitimately outrageous things, but that’s not really a fun place to hang out. Living abroad, I’d hoped to use Facebook to stay in touch with friends back home, but it hasn’t worked out that way. I know a lot about what different people are upset about — trans issues, Democrats who don’t support unions, family separations at the border, guns in schools, Russia’s occupation of Eastern Ukraine, anti-vaxxers — but not what they ate for breakfast and did on the weekend, which is much more interesting.

The great unfollowing

I’m a profligate Facebook friender, but I make up for it by being a pretty ruthless unfollower.

I started years ago, unfollowing anyone who wasn’t an actual person. I’ve unfollowed all the Vietnamese people I friended when I gave lectures in Saigon and Hanoi, and most of the other people I met on my travels. I’ve unfollowed people I’ll never see again: long-gone friends, minor high school acquaintances, ex-colleagues, Landmark contacts. My feed is now down to family, close friends, local friends, news about Korea, and a few people whose posts I find interesting.

This has made my news feed both more interesting and a lot shorter — short enough, by now, that it doesn’t suck me in the way it used to, or at least it shouldn’t. I noticed recently that Facebook was still, out of habit, my go-to activity in moments of boredom, even though it offers less and less.

So I’m consciously trying to change that. I used to make sure never to leave the house without a book or The New Yorker, two if I was getting towards the back of the first one. I have all that on my phone, and I’m training myself to go there first. Facebook can wait.

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Learning in Circles

Once a year, Orthodox Jews take the Torahs out of the case and dance around with them drunkenly. It’s the raucous, joyous holiday of Simchas Torah, which celebrates the end and beginning of the annual cycle of reading the Five Books of Moses. You finish, you start over again. Yay!

This isn’t our typical way of learning in Western culture. We tend to learn sequentially, hierarchically: grade by grade, level by level. Working biologists aren’t expected to go back through their high school bio textbooks, and few of us reread the novels we read then, even though they were written for adults and not for the children we were at the time. (The Old Man and the Sea doesn’t hold up that well, but The Great Gatsby makes a lot more sense, and Holden Caufield’s prep school whinging is easier to take when you’re not reading it in a shitty public school.)

In language learning too, there are levels and hierarchies. By rights, my Korean is advanced intermediate or thereabouts. I’m certainly well past the beginner level, able to have real conversations with complicated grammar and vocabulary.

And yet.

Jews read and reread the Torah not because it’s new, or because they forgot what happens. (Spoiler alert: The Jews win and Moses dies.) We study because each time we can go deeper, or find something new that we’d overlooked the last time.

Language study is like that too. Have you ever gone back through an old chapter of one of your language textbooks, something you’re now way past? You’ll find that once knotty and intractable passages are now easy to understand. And you’ll also find vocabulary and grammar you’d forgotten, or that you couldn’t get then but can now.

With that in mind, I’m rereading my Korean language textbooks from the beginning. It’s not that I’ll finally learn how to say hello or what’s for breakfast. But already, even in the first chapter, I’m bumped into a few words I’d long forgotten, a few concepts that had slipped my mind. 

Learning isn’t always about moving forward. Sometimes you get more by going back over the same ground and seeing what you missed the first time.

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Music After the Fall

Today I started reading Music After the Fall by Tim Rutherford-Johnson, a book about art music since 1989. I listened to Different Trains by Steve Reich, Piano Sonata No. 6 by Galina Ustvolskaya, Brain Forest by Merzbow, Kits Beach Soundwalk by Hildegard Westerkamp, and H’un (Lacerations): In Memoriam 1966-1976 by Bright Sheng. 

It feels good to engage with new music. Last week I saw the Silk Road Ensemble with Yo-Yo Ma perform here in Seoul, and I was especially moved by Kojiro Umezaki’s …seasons continue as if none of this had ever happened… and by Wu Tong’s merging of a Chinese folk song, sung and played on the sheng, with Yo-Yo Ma’s rendition of Bach’s Cello Suite No. 1 Prelude. Each piece combines the old and traditional with the modern, but in completely different ways: Umezaki through an ingenious and heartbreaking electronic deconstruction of the sound of the shakuhachi, and Ma and Wu through the juxtaposition of two older pieces, performed in fairly mainstream ways, to create a postmodern overlap.

As the weather turns cooler, it’s nice to know I’ve got a body of listening ahead of me, something to enjoy during the winter months when holing up at home is more appealing than venturing out.

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Settling in Seoul

A year ago, I embarked on an ambitious Year of No Particular Ambition. Two days ago, I made the least ambitious move of my life. Happy birthday to me.

The unambitious move

Until two days ago, the shortest distance I’d ever moved was across the hall in college, into a vacant double on an air shaft. Now I’ve broken that record by moving into an apartment that was actually adjoining my old apartment, one floor down and one apartment over.

I had to move because the owner of my old place was selling. I didn’t want to go anywhere, and I have managed to achieve that goal pretty spectacularly. The new place has one major advantage, which is that instead of balconies — enclosed spaces, but not heated or cooled, and so unusable much of the year — it just has bigger rooms. Outside of that, it’s basically the same as my old place, right down to the interior fixtures.

Copy/paste

I was anxious before the move, and it took my girlfriend a while to figure out why, until she realized I’d never moved in Korea before. “It’s copy/paste,” she explained. “From your old apartment to your new apartment. Copy/paste.”

And so it was. In New York, two or three Israeli guys would show up, box everything up, and dump it in the new apartment. Here in Seoul, a six-person crew showed up and did stuff American movers can’t do, like unplugging things all by themselves. They refolded my clothes and put them in the closet. They hung curtains. They made the bed. The one woman on the crew — inevitably, she had kitchen duty — cleaned the built-in fridge at the new apartment before restocking it with the food from my old fridge. She also tried mightily to replace my knick-knack shelf exactly as it was, until I told her I’d fiddled with the details later. Then she vacuumed and mopped. Korean movers are efficient and sexist. Copy/paste.

The city gas guy showed up like he was supposed to. The Internet guy, scheduled for a window from two to three, sent a message apologizing for running late and then showed up at 2:30. And then it was done. I’d moved.

Unplanning

When I’m frustrated or unhappy, I have a habit of retreating into planning: calculating the cost of retiring in Chiang Mai or looking into Ph.D. programs in Busan. It’s the adult version of taking my toys and going home.

When I was actually planning something big — getting a master’s degree, quitting Google, leaving New York, traveling for a year, moving to Seoul — the endless fidgeting with spreadsheets and details had a sense of purpose. Now that I was finally here, it felt more like a tic.

It took maybe half the Year of No Particular Ambition for me to let go of that tic. As the long, cold winter gave way to spring, I felt a change. My parents came for a visit, which gave me a reason to look closely at what’s best and most interesting about my life here so I could share it with them. Partly so I could take them around more easily, I bought a car — a depreciating investment, money spent on now rather than saved for later.

And I fell in love.

Home

For a very long time, all of my relationships have had expiration dates on them: someone is leaving the country, or I just knew it wasn’t something I wanted for the long term.

Then I met Jihyun. We’re two divorced people in our forties, neither of us masters at sticking with relationships, but we’d each been preparing in our own ways. I’d been practicing the art of not running away. Jihyun had been learning how to love by raising her daughter, who’s about four (and delightful). Our relationship has had its ups and downs, but we’ve managed to keep it together for nearly half a year.

A few weeks ago I was at Jihyun’s place, playing with her daughter while she and her mom whipped up a home-cooked dinner of barbecue and and bean paste stew and side dishes. It was special because it wasn’t. I get startled sometimes, in these ordinary moments, at how comfortable I am here. It feels like home.

For this new year, there’s still no grand plan, but I intend to stick with what I’ve got and deepen the roots.

That’s enough.

That’s plenty.

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Second Seouliversary

Today is my Seouliversary: two years since I arrived in this city to make it my home, and I’m happy to report that all is well. Coming here was not a mistake. Over the past few months, a lot has happened that has made Seoul feel more than ever like the place I belong.

Life with car

I bought a car. I’m now the proud owner of a 2017 Hyundai Avante (what you probably know as an Elantra) with all the bells and whistles. I drive to work and can take trips to the countryside with ease. Getting to a decent grocery is easier. I walk less, but I eat more fruit and get out of the city more often.

Learning to deal with Seoul’s aggressive driving culture — not to mention the local habit of parking butt-in — has been a challenge. Seoul parking garages tend to be terrifyingly narrow, and I dented the car in the first week just trying to get out of the garage at my apartment complex. I was also caught speeding by one of Korea’s ubiquitous cameras, and so I’ve paid my first ticket (about $30).

Buying a car may be no big deal for most of you, but I haven’t really ever owned one as an adult, since I lived in New York. Owning one here is, among other things, a commitment to being here a while, and also to expanding my reach in this country I call home.

Gayageum

Over the spring and summer, I took a gayageum class for foreigners. A gayageum is a twelve-string zither, and I can now pluck out a couple of tunes. We had a performance at the end of the twelve-week course, and since then, I’ve continued on with the same teacher. It’s challenging but fun, another way of connecting to Korean culture and deepening my experience of being here.

Parents

My parents came for a visit in the spring, their first to Asia other than Israel (what continent did you think Israel was on?). Native New Yorkers, they were impressed by the sheer scale and density of Seoul. We packed a lot into two weeks: a baseball game, a shaman ritual, two traditional music performances, a couple of hikes, lots of touring around the heart of Seoul, a number of museums, palaces and temples, shopping on Insadong, antiquing around Dongmyo, and a Shabbos at Chabad of Korea. They had a blast.

I’m glad that I’ve been able to share this important part of my life with them. Now, when I talk about what I’m up to, they can picture it better. They have a sense of what I find so compelling about this place. It was sort of like introducing them to a girlfriend.

Love

Speaking of which, I’ve got a girlfriend, and my parents met her while they were here, which was a little weird because we’d only been dating about a month. But we’re crazy about each other, and my parents could tell, plus she’s awesome and loves jazz, so my parents thought she was great. If you want to get on my dad’s good side, ask him for jazz pianist recommendations, then later tell him you spent all day listening to Red Garland and Art Tatum. If you want to get on my mom’s good side, look at one of her children (or grandchildren) like they’re the best thing in the world.

Anyway, my girlfriend is Korean, we speak more Korean than English, she has an incredible smile, she’s smart and funny and thoughtful, and I feel good whenever I’m with her. We celebrated our 100 days together — kind of a thing here in Korea — at Ryunique, one of the best restaurants in Seoul.

I’m not saying much more about her or us because love is personal — to both people involved — but this is the biggest thing going on in my life right now, and I’m happy, and it’s another way I know, two years in, that I’m in the right place.

 

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To Do Great Work, A Man Must Be Very Idle

I am now halfway through my Year of No Particular Ambition. I’m not sure how well I’m doing at it.

For one thing, I got a promotion last week. I swear it was an accident, but there it is. I’m now at the level of suseok, or principal, which comes after senior and before vice president. Before you get too impressed, I’ll note that one of my Korean textbooks has a joke about a guy who’s boasting about becoming VP, so his wife tells him it’s no big deal, there’s even a VP of prunes down at the grocery, and when the husband calls the grocery to see if she’s for real, the grocer says, “Sure, do you want the VP of packaged prunes or the VP of loose prunes?”

February

I did manage, in my first week of principality, to go down to headquarters in Suwon, attempt to give a presentation to a room full of VPs (not sure if loose prunes was there), and have the whole thing go down in flames in an argument over Pokemon syndrome (don’t ask). It was a surprisingly quick and effective lesson in why it is that so many suseoks are just kind of goofy middle-aged guys who don’t do all that much. Not all of them are like that, but suseok seems to be the level where you can just coast if you want, or if you’ve had the ambition bludgeoned out of you by too many years of corporate politics.

But the thing is, I don’t and I haven’t. For all that this is supposed to be my year of no particular ambition, I’ve been trying to do things at work. I would like to think of them as fundamentally lazy — trying to solve big problems so I can stop spending all damn day solving the same small problems over and over — but I suppose trying to solve big problems is ambitious. But at least I don’t have any clear ambitions of moving up or moving on.

 

The promotion had the salutary effect of knocking me back into the present, following a period of existential crisis that I like to call “February.” Every year, I wonder why the hell I’m working so hard to live somewhere so cold and miserable. The somewhere used to be New York, but same-same. This February I went to America and visited my brother and sister and their spouses and babies and wondered whether I’d made a terrible mistake by not having a spouse and babies. Then I came back to Korea and went to the Olympics and watched people with more (and stupider) ambition than I will ever have do insane things like flipping 60 feet in the air and crashing face-first on ice, or skiing 50 kilometers in two hours and not immediately dying. I wondered if my lack of ambition meant maybe my life was already over, and I spent too much time doing financial math and looking at Thai real estate listings. The promotion reminded me that things are actually pretty good right here and now.

Keeping busy

Recently I saw a woman in the subway wearing a coat that said, “TO DO GREAT WORK A MAN MUST BE VERY IDLE.” I have no ambition to do great work — not this year, anyway — so I suppose I ought to keep busy, if a random article of Korean clothing is to be believed. That’s the whole point of this year of no particular ambition, isn’t it? To be engaged with the here and now. To do stuff without it having to mean something or go somewhere.

Now that the weather is turning, I can start going out again, walking over mountains or what have you. I went to a Purim party. I’m taking a gayageum class, which might sound ambitious, but I have absolutely no intention of ever being very good at it. I’m getting my social life moving again now that stepping outside doesn’t make my face hurt. I’m trying to do a hundred squats a day for a whole month. It’d be nice to find someone to date. And in another six months, I suppose I’ll still be right here, working at Samsung and living in Seoul and maybe noodling around on a gayageum. No big changes, no grand ambitions.

It might not be easy, but if I believe in myself and stay focused, I can achieve nothing in particular. Wish me luck!

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Conquering Umyeon Mountain

Between my home and my workplace is a mountain. I can see it from my balcony, looming up out of the density of apartment buildings. It’s there each day as we take our post-lunch constitutional around the odd little neighborhood of single-family homes that backs up against the Samsung R&D Campus. If you look at it on Kakao Map, you’ll see that there are trails running along it, but none that link Umyeon-dong, where I work, with Seocho-dong, where I live.

Still, the gap between the last marked road and the first marked trail looked to be no more than 500 meters. How hard could it be? I’ll admit that I’ve been feeling a burst of confidence since I got a surprise promotion on Wednesday. Success in one domain doesn’t necessarily translate to success in another, but what the hell? It was clear and cool and I had a couple of hours until sundown.

I was aided in the first stretch by Korea’s relentless improvements. A new ecological park is being put in, and though there are great roles of jute carpeting still to be laid, the trails are in, and the railings and signposts too. After a while, though, the trail began to loop back down. I could see on my GPS the trail that would take me home, no more than four or five hundred meters away. And up.

Between me and the trail was a steep slope, covered in gray-brown leaves. It looked slippery, and I wasn’t in the best shoes for it. Do it anyway. Once I’d gone up a ways, there could be no turning back — no sliding down those slippery leaves in the encroaching dusk. So I kept going, picking out here and there what seemed like rough bits of trail. Crows laughed at me overhead. At 5:30, an electronic Last Post wafted in from a military post on a nearby ridge.

At last I came to a windowed pillbox: a sign of civilization. Soon I found the trail, and people too: hikers, some of them elderly, making their way up. If they were still ascending, I figured I was OK to follow the sign for Somang-Tap (tap means pagoda) just 150 meters on, rather than heading directly down toward home. I passed an elevation marker at 326 meters (1069 feet), then ascended a bit more and found the pagoda: a rock pile with commanding views of Seoul to the north.

Somang-Tap.

Look closely and you can see my apartment.

I now realize I could have followed an earlier trail fork up to the pagoda, without the scrabble through the leaves. If I ever do this again, I’ll know better. But that’s part of the fun: heading up into a mountain whose contours are uncertain and knowing you’ll just have to figure it out.

I grew up doing that on the ridges around Lucas Valley, in Marin County, California, and I learned then that you can never get too lost: just head down, and eventually you’ll find your way out. The same holds true for Seoul’s mountains, though they’re more formidable than Marin’s gentle swells. Still, back then I didn’t have a phone with a GPS and an emergency dialer.

From the peak, it was a long descent on mostly well-groomed trails, often with stairs, past the usual sorts of Korean mountainside exercise parks, until I stepped out of the woods and into the bright lights of Gangnam.

I had done it. Granted this wasn’t exactly Amundsen at the pole, but I’d rendered known what before had been a blank space on my own little map of the world. I hadn’t been sure whether you could get from one side of that mountain to the other. It turns out you can.

And once you do, you can take yourself to Butter Finger Pancake and get yourself a burger with barbecue sauce and a strawberry milkshake. Which is exactly what I did.

 

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The New Year of No Particular Ambition

Last year, after a tedious New Year’s Eve party, I nearly ended up in a fistfight over a taxi.

The year before that, I stood on a cold, rainy beach in Da Nang, enduring hours of Vietpop for what turned out to be one small firework. The highlight of the evening was hearing my Vietnamese girlfriend declare that “Vietnam has the most beautiful bitches in the world,” by which she meant beaches.

In past years, I’ve been to countless forgettable parties, paid too much for mediocre dinners, wasted a grim evening at Menahata Bulgarian Bar that was not at all like the video for Start Wearing Purple. I welcomed the millennium at my cousin’s house in Washington, DC, where she had forgotten to throw the party she’d invited me to because she’d just had a baby. About the only really fun thing I can ever remember doing for New Year’s Eve is going to concerts for bands I would’ve loved seeing any night of the year. Mostly Primus. Although it was after one of those concerts that my car caught on fire.

Refugees

Because New Year’s Eve is so artificial and forced, it’s pretty much the opposite of spontaneous or interesting fun. It’s fitting that the most famous New Year’s Eve celebration involves plastic celebrities in a fake place full of revelers who endure hours of frozen huddling without access to toilets. It’s like a North Korean performance of fun. If the Times Square revelers were refugees, Amnesty would complain about the conditions. And then Jenny McCarthy would try to stop Doctors Without Borders from vaccinating the children.

Because New Year’s Eve is so overhyped, everyone tries way too hard. Because so many people are trying so hard, there are too many events and parties, and the energy gets diffused. You end up at a bar or a party where the hosts are freaking out all night that not enough people have shown up, and everyone attending is worried that something way better is happening somewhere else without them, and the people working hate that they’re working on New Year’s Eve. If you’re with a date, there’s way too much pressure, and the people without dates are all setting the bar way too high. Then it’s midnight and nobody knows what to do, and then the party is over.

 

No uniformed personnel

My family has had some terrible luck with New Year’s Eve. My grandfather had more than one New Year’s Eve heart attack that landed him in the emergency room. Once my mom got a nosebleed that wouldn’t stop, and the paramedic apologetically asked her if she’d been putting anything interesting up there (she hadn’t).

One year my brother got his car stuck in the mud. A cop saw the car and called my parents. When my parents asked if anyone was in the car, the cop said he didn’t know because he didn’t want to get his boots muddy checking the car. Turns out my brother was fine and had just decided to sleep there until morning, but since then my parents have considered it a good New Year’s Eve if they’ve avoided speaking with any uniformed personnel.

A quiet new year

This year — during my year of no particular ambition — I spent New Year’s Eve at home, by myself. I ordered in. I binge-watched Parks & Rec. I took a nap, and later I took another nap. I had a bath, listened to some jazz, and then I watched the ringing of the Bosingak bell on Korean TV. For a while at midnight I could see some fireworks in the distance from my balcony. My New Year’s Eve was quiet and relaxing, cost very little, and exceeded my expectations.

This morning I woke up, made myself a cup of coffee, and watched the first sunrise of 2018.

Happy new year.

 

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Giving thanks

I’m grateful on this Thanksgiving Day (in the US) for so many things.

  • I can’t believe how much more adjusted I am to my new life in Seoul, and I’m tremendously grateful to all the wonderful people, expats and locals alike, who have helped me settle here.
  • I’m grateful for the opportunities that came my way, including the chance to visit a dear friend in Sri Lanka (and stop by for dinner with another friend in Kuala Lumpur) and to go visit some orangutans in Borneo.
  • I’m thankful that my family is well, and that the two newest members have grown adorably in the past year.
  • I’m glad I have a Thanksgiving party to go to this weekend, and a rock concert to go to tonight, and a friend from Seoul Pride to meet up with on Sunday. There’s a lot that’s good in my life here.
  • I’m thankful for my job. It’s a good one, and I don’t take that for granted.

I could go on and on — really, I’m thankful for a tremendous number of things and grateful to a tremendous number of people — but I won’t, so you can be thankful I didn’t.

Also, I know this has been a really tough year for a lot of people, including people close to me. The California fires hit close to home (literally). Other political events are weighing on people I care about, and on me. All that’s real and serious and important, and so is gratitude for what’s good. When we acknowledge the good, we remind ourselves that goodness is possible. We lay the foundation of hope on which to build the changes we need.

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Giving Back to Southeast Asia

I was very fortunate to be able to take time off and travel for 202 days in Southeast Asia in 2015-2016 — mostly in countries where the dollar stretches pretty far because of the disparity in wealth between the country where I happened to be born and the places I was visiting. I decided to give back, in a small way, by pledging a certain amount of money to charity for each day I spent in each country.

Thailand: 72 days

Because I spent the most days in Thailand, I split my donation between two charities.

My closest Thai friend was, like many Thais, reverent toward the royal family. I have my own outsider opinions about all that, but I respect my friend and her values for her own country. The Association for the Promotion of the Status of Women, under royal patronage, provides emergency shelter, health services, vocational training, and many other services to women in Thailand.

 The SET Foundation gives scholarships to those in need, with the unique principle of supporting students for a full twelve years, from elementary through collegiate studies, rather than just for a semester or two.

Malaysia: 11 days

As you travel Malaysia, it’s hard not to notice the oil palms: acres and acres of them, a giant monoculture dominating the landscape. I didn’t visit Malaysian Borneo on my trip, but I went there recently, and I discovered the Sepilok Orangutan Rehabilitation Centre, which helps orangutans who’ve lost their mothers to recover and prepare for reintegration into the wild. Malaysia’s unique wildlife is precious and under threat — the oil palm plantations are pressing in, and the lumber industry wants what trees are left — but places like the Sepilok Centre have the potential to drive up the economic value of conservation and diversify the local economy by bringing tourism. And in the meantime, the preservation and restoration work they do is saving unique animals in a unique environment.

Vietnam: 44 days

I met my friend Christina Bui in Myanmar through a chain of travel connections, and ran into her again in Saigon and Hanoi. She works at Pacific Links Foundation, which helps to protect people in Vietnam from human trafficking — being forced into factory work, domestic work, and the like — and empowers women and communities in Vietnam. Slavery is bad and Christina is good, so this was a pretty easy choice.

Myanmar: 23 days

Yangon is a time capsule. Decades of misrule have had the perverse effect of preserving the older part of the city much as it was under British colonial rule. Yangon Heritage Trust is working to preserve and restore the city’s remarkable architecture before it all gets torn down and turned into KFCs, and I hope they succeed in making Yangon the gem of a city that it deserves to be, like today’s Hoi An or Penang but on a much larger scale. (Nothing specific against KFC, by the way. I threw up in the bathroom of the Yangon KFC and they were very polite about it.)

Cambodia: 8 days

Cambodia is rife with terrible NGOs and scammy voluntourism projects, so I wanted to find an organization with a good rating on Charity Navigator, and Cambodia Children’s Fund has that. They take “a holistic, family-based approach” to childhood education, which is sorely needed in this poor and damaged country. They recognize that there are root problems like hunger and violence that can undermine education, so they try to deal with all of these issues as they help young people get the schooling they need and deserve.

Laos: 23 days

Perhaps the most dangerous thing I did in Southeast Asia was go for a walk in Laos.

Laos has more unexploded ordnance (UXO) per capita than anywhere else on earth, a sorry result of a decade of American bombing during the Vietnam War. On a tour of the Plain of Jars, on a trail that was supposed to be cleared, my guide suddenly jumped back and pointed. “That’s a cluster bomb detonator.” He then told me how his brother died: he’d gone fishing and was cooking up his catch in a rice field when the heat triggered an old pineapple bomb that took his head off.

I split my Laos donations between two organizations that deal with the ongoing disaster my country left behind. COPE gives people their lives back by providing prosthetics and rehabilitation to UXO survivors and others with mobility-related disabilities, while the Mine Awareness Group (MAG) works to demine Laos (and other places) and educate the local people about how to avoid UXO accidents, thereby reducing COPE’s potential clientele. I saw both organizations at work in Laos, and at one point even had to stop driving while MAG blew up some UXO they’d found in a field — a field that, when cleared, could provide food and income to a Laotian family.

Indonesia: 18 days

Yayasan Usaha Mulia (YUM) – Foundation for Noble Work has been around a long time and does holistic community work focused on education and alleviating poverty. Finding a good charity in Indonesia — especially one that wasn’t religiously based — was a bit difficult, but YUM seems to have a decent track record.

Singapore: 3 days

For Singapore, I cheated. Singapore is a wealthy country, so there’s not a tremendous need to give there. Instead, I donated to Singapore-based Choson Exchange, an innovative NGO that supports North Koreans with hands-on entrepreneurship training, helping to create an ownership culture and a better standard of living for North Koreans. I’ve met the founder and some of the team, and they’re passionate but not naive about what they’re up against. I admire what they do and wish them success.