Food not Fear

I'm lucky enough to visit lots of places in the world. This year alone, Senegal, Rwanda, Cambodia, Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Romania, Lebanon, Lithuania, Turkey, and Mexico have all been stamped in my passport.  I've discovered that there may be two fundamental approaches to exploring the world.

When I tell people where I'm going, one kind of person says, "Isn't that dangerous?"  And that danger might mean everything from sectarian violence to food poisoning.

But there's another kind of person--and fundamentally, I'm the second.  This is the person who asks me, when I say I'm going to one of these places, "I bet the food is great!  Tell me what it's like!"  That's the way I hope all of us would approach the world--with an openness to difference, to traditions, and to what represents comfort and hope to all kinds of people.

What have I learned from food?

Migration and Meals
I've had the chance to see long trails of migration and changing borders.  I learned about the work of Armenian-Turkish journalist Hrant Dink in Istanbul over meals with colleagues from the Hrant Dink Foundation.  In Lebanon, I ate wonderful Armenian food with two Germans now living there, and learnt about how many Armenians made Lebanon their home after the Armenian genocide of 1915.  But in Puebla Mexico,  on a food walk with Eat Mexico, I learned about Tacos arabes, a speciality of the city, created by Lebanese immigrants.  Those trails of food connect us.

In Saint-Louis, Senegal, I watched bakers creating fresh baguettes, a legacy of French colonialization. In Sarajevo, my hotel served me special Bosnian coffee, which owed much to Turkish coffee. Dinner in a Romanian cafe had echoes of the Austria-Hungarian empire in its food, and at the same time, mama liga (usually called banosh in Ukrainian) reminded me how much interchange happened in this part of the world.  No matter where you are, the newest residents bring their own food traditions, which are mixed, adapted and embraced by others and old traditions hang on.

Local still Matters
Despite the fact that there sometimes seem to be a Starbucks or KFC on every corner, everywhere, local still matters.  Whenever I can, I seek out local markets, the best place to see that local still matters.  Along the road in Senegal you can see mango season ending and melon beginning.  In Mexico, mamey sapote had just arrived at the market when I was there.  In Cambodia, there's a riot of fresh fruits and vegetables in the crowded market--diving into the crowds is a feast for all the senses. 

When I persuaded a friend to pull over for a village market in Romania, it was hard to resist the large handmade copper still for sale.  I love when any waiter is happy to explain a meal--at one restaurant in Puebla, a waiter didn't feel his English was up to the task, so he went and pulled the owner into the conversation.  In Newfoundland, Canada, a new movement towards local food means not just partridgeberry jam but also house-made charcuterie including moose sausage.  Local food still mattering is just another way of saying local stories--everyone's stories--still matter.

Fried dough matters everywhere
Goes without saying--try it when you see it!

Meals are about talking, not just eating
Whether it's talking with African colleagues over a meal in Kigali, or eating seafood with a museum colleague in Antwerp, or laughing as we attempt to buy fruit from a street vendor in Phnom Penh with Sites of Conscience members from all over Asia, or drinking beer on the steps of the art museum in Lithuania (as above) meals have brought me together with so many amazing people around the world.   

This week, of course, like most Americans, I got to celebrate Thanksgiving with my own extended family (large and growing).  As we head into the holiday season, do remember how many people don't get the opportunity to gather around the table with family and friends.  Remember them. 

We're too big a family group to fit into a single photo, so I'll end with one from this summer--my Italian friend Martina, from Rome,  and her family visited Drew and me at the very beginning of their cross-country adventure.  We talked, we laughed, we ate--the best!

"I am an activist" From Walden to Sites of Conscience

This Fourth of July celebration seemed different than others, somehow.  My social media feeds were filled with reminders of both the potential of the United States (tweeting the Declaration of Independence) and of the distance we still have to go (Frederick Douglass' 1852 Fourth of July speech in Rochester, NY).  Reading those tweets and speeches pushed me to finally write a small bit about my experiences with International Coalition Sites of Conscience members at our Africa and Middle East and North Africa meetings in May. Those two weeks were deeply meaningful to me as an introduction to Coalition members' work around the world. Whether it was sitting by the water in Tunis, drinking tea late at night or somberly trying to make sense together of a visit to a genocide memorial, those connections will long resonate for me. Somehow those reflections had the unexpected result of bringing me back around to an exhibition at the Morgan Library, just down the block from my office in New York City.

So let's start at the exhibit. It's This Ever New Self: Thoreau and His Journal, featuring Henry David Thoreau's journals along with a stellar collection of Thoreau-related artifacts, many from the Concord Museum, where the show will travel later this year.  Thoreau kept a journal---lots of journals, filled with all kinds of things, from the weather to politics.

In the exhibit, big quotations on the wall pull you in to learn more.  And somehow, although I knew this exhibition has been in the planning for quite some time, the quotes seemed incredibly timely.

As I looked at the lock and key from the Concord jail where he spent one single night for his failure to pay the poll tax, I read this quotation,  "I say, break the law. Let your life be a counter friction to stop the machine."  That simple quote led me back to my colleagues in Africa and the Middle East.

Before I began work at the Coalition, I thought of Sites of Conscience in primarily US-focused terms: sites like Lincoln's Cottage, or the Levine and Wing Luke Museums, or national parks like Seneca Falls and Manzanar.  These are organizations that operate as relatively traditional (but inspirational) museums. But many of our Coalition members have come to memory work, the work of archives, museums and memory, from very different places and their organizations are often very young.  I'm just beginning to puzzle out how to share the vital knowledge and practice of these new organizations with the more traditional museum field in the US and elsewhere, in ways that may have the potential to transform our museum practice. And of course, at the same time, I'm working to find more ways to assist all of our members around the world in building on their own strengths.

Here's a bit of what I've been thinking (in no particular cohesive framework--I'm still thinking!).

Because many people working in these organizations come from human rights, social activism, law, and other fields, the gatherings represent a diversity of perspectives not always found in US museum work. It's a reminder that by privileging the knowledge of a museum studies graduate degree, we lose out on important knowledge, skills and perspectives. 

I was reminded of the power of archives, even more than artifacts.  Gonzalo Conte, from Memoria Abierta in Argentina, shared their incredible ongoing archival work, integrating oral histories, images, maps and more to build the ongoing work of justice.  Sites everywhere are doing the same--those oral histories and archives are valued for the ways in which they can speak truths, and in so doing, build justice and reconciliation.  But archives are only valuable when they are accessible. 

When we visited the Kigali Genocide Memorial, which includes the mass grave of 250,000 Rwandans murdered during the 1994 genocide, I found myself balancing between the absorption of complicated information and emotion.  That challenge exists in almost every history exhibit, and the experience is different for every visitor. There are no easy answers, but as exhibition developers, working with those whose story we are telling is critical.  We know this, yet too often we neglect it. We need to find more ways to make those voices heard and more ways to support museum staff who work every day with trauma.  The Memorial seems to do an exemplary job of supporting both staff and visitors.

And lastly, I went away from both meetings struck by the potential power of museums and historic places that are sites of conscience.  In Tunis, we stopped at the site of the former 9th of April Prison (above), now a dusty parking lot and a place where our Tunisian members are working to have designated as a memorial or museum. As we stood there, one of the participants moved a bit over, and stood in a place, saying, "This is exactly where my cell was."  I asked how it felt to stand there. He said, "I do not let this define me.  I am not a victim.  I am an activist."

We need more activists in all our museums to keep from settling for the role of, as Thoreau described museums, "catacombs,"  for dead things, rather than places for the living power of change.