Chronicles of Adventure: Part 3

Hello everyone! I’m currently writing on the bus back home from my escapade in Northern Ghana this weekend (actually from Thursday before 5:00am until late Monday night) on a fieldtrip with my Zoology class – Wildlife Management. We had such a memorable time (pictures coming soon on facebook) feeding monkeys bananas and learning that they each receive burial rituals identical to humans at the Boabeng-Fiema Monkey Sanctuary, watching in wonder as my Ghanaian classmates acted more like the stereotypical Japanese tourist group at the Kintampo waterfalls (I’m not sure if they saw anything with their naked eye… seemed like it was all through a digital camera lens), getting down and dirty with nature at Mole National Park – Ghana’s largest and most prestigious wildlife sanctuary, and pretending not to be tourists at the oldest standing building in Ghana – the nearly 600-year-old mud-and-thatch Mosque in Larabanga. It was a bonding experience to spend so much intimate time with the class (including rooming with my new friends Dennis and Myers), a cultural experience trying new foods like Kenkey (fermented cornmeal dough dipped in spicy sauce with fish), Cashew Fruit (I didn’t know the nuts grew under a fruit, did you?), and TZ (a gelatinous cornmeal dough eaten with a local soup)… and a considerably alcoholic experience (there was a lot of waiting around so I can’t count the amount of beers I ingested) which made it even more enjoyable. Most of all though, it was a wildlife-filled experience! Here’s a brief summary of my (wild) animal encounters:

(1)    Seeing five different kinds of monkeys (Olive Baboons & Mona, Green Vervet, Patas, and Black-and-White Collobus Monkeys), some just an arms-length away.

(2)    Trapping and catching all kinds of colorful birds for study using a mistnet we set up ourselves - I want to say none were hurt in the process, but that’s just not true, which made me pretty upset.

(3)    Three kinds of antelope including Kob, Waterbuck, and Bushbuck skipping away just meters from me.

(4)    Reconsidering the plan to jump into a lake for a morning swim after seeing a creeping pair of eyes on the surface that later showed themselves to be one of the many Nile crocodiles in the water.

(5)    And probably most magically, I got probably less than a hundred feet from a herd of giant African Elephants on multiple occasions from thumping around and feasting on vegetation near the informational center to relaxing, wrestling, and spraying water on each other in a giant pool of water. I was definitely mesmerized - it was SO AWESOME!

Something else that has been on my mind lately, especially on this trip, is what has been ailing many academic classes I have generally avoided taking at Berkeley and am now dealing with here in Ghana. I was chatting and getting to know my roommate, and new friend, Myers when the topic of graduate school came up. He said that he’s been really thinking about trying to apply to some American Graduate programs in conservation-related ecology/biology – “but do you think it will be very hard for me over there?” I didn’t quite know how to answer – well, I knew exactly what I was thinking but I wasn’t sure if it was appropriate to say it – but I decided to be brash and say what was on my mind anyway… I hoped he’d understand without taking offense. “Ok, I don’t mean to be too critical here, don’t hate me but you know that presentation due this past week about elephants, carnivores, and other animals?” I began (I was in a group assigned to compile information about how one would recognize an elephant if one saw one – I tried to pretend that meant between different species of elephants – and some elephant ecology),  “well, that seemed like 5^th-grade level work to me.” He burst out laughing: “5^th grade?! Man, I thought you were about to say ‘freshman year of college’ or something. Really?! Fifth grade?!” He ended up whipping out the “5^th grader” line for the rest of the trip, teasing me a little about it each time. I’m hopefully going to talk to him about it more soon, or maybe he’ll read this blog, and when I think about it again… I have to stand by what I said (ok, I can raise the mark to 8^th grade if that makes him feel any better). This assignment was embarrassingly shallow, and it is emblematic of a trend I’ve noticed here (probably taken from the UK or US) of valuing learning “the facts” without further processing and valuing questions such as who, what, and where over how and why. This has been something that has made me want to tear my hair out since I began taking Physics classes at Berkeley, eventually switching majors to cure my itch: the yearning for depth.

I just can’t stand the rhetoric emanating from much of the scientific community – which has been modeled in many other “soft” science departments (how preposterous to call them that) like economics, political science, even too often in sociology and anthropology – that we are “shoving off old relics of traditional superstition, even religious teaching,” by teaching you “the facts.” They then continue, since pretty much The Enlightenment, to stumble around claiming they have found those facts (while constantly proving each other wrong)… all the while not realizing that there are NO facts without theory (when you say it’s a fact that you are looking at “the stars” at night remember that scientists used to see those little white dots as holes in a giant black sphere) and being completely blind – even though they claim to be the first to see – to the box (or is it a cage?) they have theoretically constructed for themselves that has been suffocated nearly all creativity, ingenuity, and depth from their students (with a few obvious exceptions). I remember telling my parents that I felt exactly that – feeling like I was being turned into a robot that was trapped in a box, gasping for fresh air. I’d say that I decided to leave Physics behind because of the same thing students are dealing with in Ghana – it is even more normalized here than back home – and they are not able to experience all of the five fundamental things that changed my world 2 years ago: (1) Ken Robinson’s TED Talk on Schooling and Creativity, (2) Lee Smolin’s The Trouble With Physics: The Rise of String Theory, The Fall of a Science, and What Comes Next, (3) Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, (4) a failed internship with the cutting edge Berkeley’s Sadoulet Group doing Cryogenic Dark Matter Search, and (5) an intriguing alternative presented by Laura Nader’s Anthropology course on Controlling Processes. I was interested in studying physics because I was captivated by learning about what was generally invisible to people, taken-for-granted by the masses, but I soon realized that there was so much invisible to physics (and to the scientific world-view more broadly) and hopped over to Anthropology which has revitalized me ever since – my professor last semester in had an amazing quote on our first day of class: "Anthropologists are trouble-makers. While other sciences and social sciences begin by teaching you to understand what the world has given us, anthropologists begin by questioning the given-ness of the world's categories."

 So regardless who you are that is reading this – in Ghana, the United States, or elsewhere – remember to push for deeper thought (or maybe this is just me reminding myself). I can think of three ways, right off the top of my head, to do just that. First, focus on the questions of “how,” “why,” and “what does that mean,” and ask them like a 5-year-old does. You know the annoying 5-year-olds I’m talking about, with their never-ending chain of hows and whys that leave you incredibly frustrated when you run out of answers. But it is exactly when the answers run out that you should get excited – that’s some intellectual gold right there! – and definitely an area to think about and explore further together. My dad used to say that he didn’t need to remember the exact math equations from decades ago because he understood what was underneath them and could recreate them with some pencil and paper whenever he wanted. This is exactly what lectures today need to be composed of – rather than the spewing of information to be copied-and-pasted by the student and regurgitated mindlessly on the exam some time later. Second, focus on the criticisms. Every arena (political, academic, etc.) has its biggest critics, and I have noticed that most often they come from within the arena itself. Find them, learn from them, and engage with them (you can imagine having a debate with them, as long as you keep yourself honest which is hard to do, or arrange a meeting for an actual debate). I have always been proud of the Jewish tradition I hail from for valuing rich debate and disagreement so highly, regardless of the fact that I think the mainstream establishment has generally discarded this. Critique breeds self-awareness and self-awareness is the key for my next suggestion. Lastly, focus on abstracting from the problem at hand, thinking “out of the box,” and you will be able to arrive at some profound paradigm shifts. . “Have you stopped beating your wife recently?” Yes! I mean no! I mean – blargh!  In Japanese, there aren’t just two answers to a yes-or-no question, but rather three: yes, no, and mu. Mu has been translated as “no thing,” essentially requesting that the question be unasked because the scope of the answer exceeds that of the question. Sometimes everything you have learned so far is just trapped in a little theoretical box, and once you have opened it and escaped, you will see that your thought now has so many more degrees-of-freedom. This is the hardest one to do – good luck with it J!

Anyway, now that I have thoroughly cleansed myself of that rant, I can finish off this post with another short anecdote. As we were packing our things to leave the North and return back to campus, I realized that this was my first excursion where nothing went horribly wrong (like not having enough money to get back from Keta a month earlier or getting stuck in the rainforest mud two weeks ago). We loaded our things onto the bus at the disgustingly early time of 5:00am (yes, that means I woke up before 4:30am) and took off shortly after. We had a long way to go and I could tell that the bus driver was antsy to get us home because he was speeding down the road – much faster than on the way here. Allow me to comment on the fact that even though I have said before that the roads in Ghana aren’t the best, the road out of Mole National Park is in the worst condition yet – most times I feel like I’m jiggling around the whole time but this road was more like an included rollercoaster. I fell asleep sometime early in the bus ride, only to be woken up to insanity. We had gone way too fast off of a large bump and everyone was now catching some air – we must have been at least 2 feet out of our seats to be exact since some people hit their heads on the roof of the bus. We landed, sounded like it crashed, and soon realized that the back of the bus was smoking. Guess I spoke to soon about nothing going horribly wrong earlier, eh? Turns out that the cooling system for the engine was upset about that fall and refused to work, leaving us going at low-speed for 10 minutes at a time, with 15-minute breaks for the engine to cool down. Some guy on a motorcycle even hunted us down and tried to sell us back a part that fell off the bus in the crash – he has some guts. After about 6-7 hours of heat, hopscotch, and snacks we ended up getting a mechanic to fix the bus but we had barely moved that whole time. After some thunderstorms and baboon-dung-infested air (someone apparently needed it for a project – was that really necessary?), we got home right before 2:00am which must mean that it was a 20+ hour bus ride that day (longer than the flight here from San Francisco). Check!