.Obama’s Young Mother Abroad
New York Times

By JANNY SCOTT
Published: April 20, 2011
The photograph showed the son, but my eye gravitated toward the mother. That first glimpse was surprising — the stout, pale-skinned woman in sturdy sandals, standing squarely a half-step ahead of the lithe, darker-skinned figure to her left. His elas­tic-band body bespoke discipline, even asceticism. Her form was well padded, territory ceded long ago to the pleasures of appetite and the forces of anatomical destiny. He had the studied casualness of a catalog model, in khakis, at home in the viewfinder. She met the camera head-on, dressed in hand-loomed textile dyed indigo, a silver earring half-hidden in the cascading curtain of her dark hair. She carried her chin a few degrees higher than most. His right hand rested on her shoulder, lightly. The photograph, taken on a Manhattan rooftop in August 1987 and e-mailed to me 20 years later, was a revelation and a puzzle. The man was Barack Obama at 26, the community organizer from Chicago on a visit to New York. The woman was Stanley Ann Dunham, his mother. It was impossible not to be struck by the similarities, and the dissimilarities, between them. It was impossible not to question the stereotype to which she had been expediently reduced: the white woman from Kansas.

The president’s mother has served as any of a number of useful oversimplifications. In the capsule version of Obama’s life story, she is the white mother from Kansas coupled alliteratively to the black father from Kenya. She is corn-fed, white-bread, whatever Kenya is not. In “Dreams From My Father,” the memoir that helped power Obama’s political ascent, she is the shy, small-town girl who falls head over heels for the brilliant, charismatic African who steals the show. In the next chapter, she is the naïve idealist, the innocent abroad. In Obama’s presidential campaign, she was the struggling single mother, the food-stamp recipient, the victim of a health care system gone awry, pleading with her insurance company for cover­age as her life slipped away. And in the fevered imaginings of supermarket tabloids and the Internet, she is the atheist, the Marx­ist, the flower child, the mother who abandoned her son or duped the newspapers of Hawaii into printing a birth announcement for her Kenyan-born baby, on the off chance that he might want to be president someday.

The earthy figure in the photograph did not fit any of those, as I learned over the course of two and a half years of research, travel and nearly 200 interviews. To describe Dunham as a white woman from Kansas turns out to be about as illuminating as describing her son as a politician who likes golf. Intentionally or not, the label obscures an extraordinary story — of a girl with a boy’s name who grew up in the years before the women’s movement, the pill and the antiwar movement; who married an African at a time when nearly two dozen states still had laws against interracial marriage; who, at 24, moved to Jakarta with her son in the waning days of an anticommunist bloodbath in which hundreds of thousands of Indonesians were slaughtered; who lived more than half her adult life in a place barely known to most Americans, in the country with the largest Muslim population in the world; who spent years working in villages where a lone Western woman was a rarity; who immersed herself in the study of blacksmithing, a craft long practiced exclusively by men; who, as a working and mostly single mother, brought up two biracial children; who believed her son in particular had the potential to be great; who raised him to be, as he has put it jokingly, a combination of Albert Einstein, Mahatma Gandhi and Harry Belafonte; and then died at 52, never knowing who or what he would become.

Obama placed the ghost of his absent father at the center of his lyrical account of his life. At times, he has seemed to say more about the grandparents who helped raise him than about his mother. Yet she shaped him, to a degree Obama has seemed increasingly to acknowledge. In the preface to the 2004 edition of “Dreams From My Father,” issued nine years after the first edition and nine years after Dunham’s death, Obama folded in a revealing admission: had he known his mother would not survive her illness, he might have written a different book — “less a meditation on the absent parent, more a celebration of the one who was the single constant in my life.”

Dunham, for whom a letter in Jakarta from her son in the United States could raise her spirits for a full day, surely wondered about her place in his life. On rare occasions, she indicated as much — painfully, wistfully — to close friends. But she would not have been inclined to overstate her case. As she told him, with a dry humor that seems downright Kansan, “If nothing else, I gave you an interesting life.”

Ann Dunham, who jettisoned the name Stanley upon emerging from childhood, was just 17 years old in the fall of 1960 when she became pregnant with the child of a charismatic Kenyan named Barack Hussein Obama, a fellow student at the University of Hawaii who was more than six years her senior. She dropped out of school, married him and gave birth shortly before their union ended. In the aftermath, she met Lolo Soetoro, an amiable, easygoing, tennis-playing graduate student from the Indonesian island of Java. They married in 1964, after Ann’s divorce came through, but their early life together was upended by forces beyond their control. On Sept. 30, 1965, six Indonesian army generals and one lieutenant were kidnapped and killed in Jakarta, in what the army characterized as an attempted coup planned by the Communist Party. Students studying abroad, including Lolo, whose studies were sponsored by the government, were soon summoned home. A year later, in 1967, Ann graduated with a degree in anthropology, gathered up her 6-year-old child and moved to Indonesia to join her husband.

The four years that followed were formative for mother and son — and are a subject of curiosity and an object of speculation for many Americans today. These were years in which Ann lived closely with the young Obama, who at the time was called Barry; she impressed upon him her values and, consciously and unconsciously, shaped his emerging understanding of the world. She made choices about her own life too, setting an example that in some ways Obama would eventually embrace, while in other ways intentionally leaving it behind.

The white woman and her half-African son made quite a pair traveling in Indonesia together. Elizabeth Bryant, an American who lived in the city of Yogyakarta at the time, remembers a lunch held at another expatriate’s house that Ann and Barry attended. Ann arrived in a long skirt made of Indonesian fabric — not, Bryant noticed, a look that other American women in Indonesia seemed to favor. Ann in­structed Barry to shake hands, then to sit on the sofa and turn his attention to an English-language workbook she brought along. Ann, who had been in Indonesia for nearly four years, talked about whether to go back to Hawaii. “She said, ‘What would you do?’ ” Bryant recalled when I spoke to her nearly 40 years later. “I said, ‘I could live here as long as two years, then would go back to Hawaii.’ She said, ‘Why?’ I said it was hard liv­ing, it took a toll on your body, there were no doctors, it was not healthy. She didn’t agree with me.”

Over lunch, Barry, who was 9 at the time, sat at the dining table and listened intently but did not speak. When he asked to be excused, Ann directed him to ask the hostess for permission. Permission granted, he got down on the floor and played with Bryant’s son, who was 13 months old. After lunch, the group took a walk, with Barry running ahead. A flock of Indonesian children began lobbing rocks in his direction. They ducked behind a wall and shouted racial epithets. He seemed unfazed, dancing around as though playing dodge ball “with unseen players,” Bryant said. Ann did not react. Assuming she must not have understood the words, Bryant offered to intervene. “No, he’s O.K.,” Ann said. “He’s used to it.”

“We were floored that she’d bring a half-black child to Indonesia, knowing the disrespect they have for blacks,” Bryant said. At the same time, she admired Ann for teaching her boy to be fearless. A child in Indonesia needed to be raised that way — for self-preservation, Bryant decided. Ann also seemed to be teaching Barry respect. He had all the politeness that Indonesian children displayed toward their parents. He seemed to be learning Indonesian ways.

“I think this is one reason he’s so halus,” Bryant said of the pres­ident, using the Indonesian adjective that means “polite, refined, or courteous,” referring to qualities some see as distinctively Javanese. “He has the manners of Asians and the ways of Americans — being halus, being patient, calm, a good listener. If you’re not a good listener in Indonesia, you’d better leave.”

Indonesia was still in a state of shock when Ann arrived in 1967 for the first of three extended periods of residence that would even­tually add up to the majority of her adult life. The details of the attempted coup and counter­coup remain in dispute even today, as do the particulars of the carnage that followed. But it is known that neighbors turned on neighbors. According to Adrian Vickers, the author of “A History of Modern Indonesia,” militias went door to door in vil­lages, abducting suspects, raping women, even targeting children. “The best way to prove you were not a Communist was to join in the killings,” Vickers writes. Bill Collier, a friend of Ann’s who arrived in Indonesia in 1968 and spent 15 years doing social and economic surveys in villages, told me that researchers were told by people living near brackish waterways that they had been unable to eat the fish because of decaying corpses in the water. Many Indonesians chose never to speak about what had happened.

The Jakarta that greeted Ann Soetoro and her son was a tapestry of villages — low-rise and sprawling — interwoven with wooded areas, paddy fields and marshland. Narrow alleys disappeared into warrens of tile-roofed houses in the rambling urban hamlets called kampungs. Squatter colonies lined the canals, which served as public baths, laundry facilities and sewers, all in one. During the long rainy season from November through March, ca­nals overflowed, saturating cardboard shanties and flooding much of the city. Residents traveled mostly on foot or by bicycle or bicycle-propelled rickshaws called becaks. Power outages were common. There were so few working phones that it was said that half the cars on the streets were ferrying messages from one office to the next. “Sec­retaries would spend hours just dialing and redialing phone numbers trying to get through,” Halimah Brugger, an American who moved there in 1968, told me. Westerners were rare, black people even rarer. Western women got a lot of attention. “I remember creating quite a sensation just being pedaled down the street in a becak, wearing a short skirt,” Brugger said. Letters from the United States took weeks to reach their destination. Foreigners endured all manner of gas­trointestinal upsets. Deworming was de rigueur.

Yet the city had a magi­cal charm. People who were children in Jakarta in that period, including Barack Obama, reminisce about the sound of the Muslim call to prayer in the days before public-address systems, and the signature sounds called out by street vendors wheeling their carts through the kampungs. Tea was still served on the veranda of the old Hotel des Indes. Ceiling fans turned lan­guidly in the midafternoon heat, and kerosene lamps flickered in the houses lining the narrow alleys at night. For anyone of no interest to government security forces, life was simple. For a foreigner, it was possible to arrive in Indonesia in 1967 largely ignorant of the horror of just two years before. “I was quite naïve about the whole thing,” Brugger said. “It was all over then. I never felt the slightest bit endangered.” Years later, many people would look back on the late 1960s and early 1970s as a honeymoon period, Vickers writes. Restrictions on the press eased, a youth culture flowered, literary and cultural life thrived. It was, some later commented, Indonesia’s Prague Spring.

When Ann arrived, Lolo was in the army. His salary was low. On her first night in Indonesia, Ann complained later to a colleague, Lolo served her white rice and dendeng celeng — dried, jerked wild boar, which Indonesians hunted in the forests when food was scarce. But when Lolo completed his military service, his brother-in-law Trisulo used his contacts as a vice president at the Indonesian oil com­pany Pertamina to help Lolo get a job in the Jakarta office of the Union Oil Company of California. By the early 1970s, Lolo and Ann had moved into a rented house in Matraman, a middle-class area of Jakarta. The house was a pavilyun, an annex on the grounds of a bigger main house. It had three bedrooms, a kitchen, a bathroom, a library and a terrace. Like the households of other Indonesians who could afford it, it had a sizable domestic staff. Two female servants shared a bed­room; two men — a cook and a houseboy — slept mostly on the floor of the house or in the garden. The staff freed Ann from domestic obligations to a degree that would have been almost impossible in the United States. There were people to clean the house, prepare meals, buy groceries and look after her children — enabling her to work, pursue her inter­ests and come and go as she wanted. The domestic staff made it possible, too, for Ann and Lolo to cultivate their own professional and social circles, which did not necessarily overlap.

By January 1968, Ann had gone to work as the assistant to the American director of Lembaga Indonesia-­Amerika, a binational organization financed by the United States Information Service and housed at the U.S. Agency for International Development. She supervised a small group of Indonesians who taught English classes for Indonesian government employees and businessmen being sent by U.S.A.I.D. to the United States for graduate studies. It would be an understatement to say she disliked the job. “I worked at the U.S. Embassy in Dja­karta for 2 horrible years,” she wrote to a friend. As Obama describes the job in his memoir, “The Indonesian busi­nessmen weren’t much interested in the niceties of the English lan­guage, and several made passes at her.” Occasionally, she took Barry to work. Joseph Sigit, an Indonesian who worked as the office manager at the time, told me, “Our staff here sometimes made a joke of him because he looked different — the color of his skin.”

Obama’s Young Mother AbroadPublished: April 20, 2011
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By January 1968, Ann had gone to work as the assistant to the American director of Lembaga Indonesia-­Amerika, a binational organization financed by the United States Information Service and housed at the U.S. Agency for International Development. She supervised a small group of Indonesians who taught English classes for Indonesian government employees and businessmen being sent by U.S.A.I.D. to the United States for graduate studies. It would be an understatement to say she disliked the job. “I worked at the U.S. Embassy in Dja­karta for 2 horrible years,” she wrote to a friend. As Obama describes the job in his memoir, “The Indonesian busi­nessmen weren’t much interested in the niceties of the English lan­guage, and several made passes at her.” Occasionally, she took Barry to work. Joseph Sigit, an Indonesian who worked as the office manager at the time, told me, “Our staff here sometimes made a joke of him because he looked different — the color of his skin.”

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HAWAII TIME Barack Obama with his father at the Honolulu airport at Christmas in 1971.

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Joked with him — or about him? I asked.

“With and about him,” Sigit said, with no evident embarrassment.

Two years later, at 27, Ann was hired to start an English-language business-communications department in one of the few private nonprofit management-training schools in the country. The school, called the Institute for Management Education and Development, was started several years earlier by a Dutch Jesuit priest with the intention of helping to build an Indonesian elite. Ann trained the teachers, developed the curriculum and taught top executives. In return, she received not just a paycheck but also a share of the revenue from the program. She also became a popular teacher. Ann’s classes “could be a riot of laughter from beginning to end. She had a great sense of humor,” said Leonard Kibble, who taught part time at the institute in the early 1970s. Some of the laughter involved Ann’s still-incomplete mastery of the Indonesian language. In one slip that Kibble said Ann delighted in recounting, she tried to tell a student that he would “get a pro­motion” if he learned English. Instead of using the phrase naik pangkat, she said naik pantat. The word naik means to “go up, rise, or mount”; pangkat means “rank” or “position.” Pantat means “buttocks.”

That same year, on Aug. 15, 1970, shortly after Barry’s ninth birthday and during what would turn out to be the only visit by her mother, Madelyn Dunham, to Indonesia, Ann gave birth to Maya Kassandra Soetoro at Saint Carolus Hospital, a Catholic hospital thought by Westerners at that time to be the best in Jakarta. When Halimah Brugger gave birth in the same hospital two years later, she told me, the doctor delivered her baby without the luxury of a stethoscope, gloves or gown. “When the baby was born, the doctor asked my husband for his handkerchief,” Brugger said. “Then she stuffed it in my mouth and gave me 11 stitches without any anesthesia.” Ann tried out three different names for her new daughter, all of them Sanskrit, before settling on Maya Kassandra. The name was important to Ann, Maya told me; she wanted “beautiful names.” Stanley, the name Ann felt burdened with as a child, was not on the list.

In Indonesia, Ann was a striking figure who did not go unnoticed. “Maybe just her presence — the way she carried herself,” said Halimah Bellows, whom Ann hired in the spring of 1971. She dressed simply, with little or no makeup, and wore her hair long, held back by a headband. By Javanese standards, she was, as Felina Pramono, an Indonesian colleague, put it, “a bit sturdy for a woman.” She had strong opinions — and rarely softened them to please others.

“She used to tear me apart,” says Kay Ikranagara, one of Ann’s closest friends, in a tone that sounded almost fond. Ann told her she needed to be bolder and stronger. She made fun of her inadequacy in the kitchen. She told her she should give her housekeeper explicit instructions, not simply let her do whatever she wanted. “With everybody she was like that: she would tell them what was wrong with them,” Ikranagara said. Family members were not spared. “She was very scathing about the traditional Indonesian wife role,” Ikranagara recalled. “She would tell Maya not to be such a wimp. She didn’t like this passive Indonesian female caricature. She would tell me not to fall into that.”

Ikranagara was the daughter of a development economist from the University of California who taught at the University of Indonesia in the late 1950s. She lived in Jakarta as a teenager, studied anthropology and linguistics in the 1960s at Berkeley and then returned to Jakarta, where she met her husband. She met Ann while teaching part time at the management school and writing her dissertation in linguistics. They had a lot in common: Indonesian husbands, degrees in anthropology, babies born in the same month, opinions shaped by the 1960s. They were less conscious than others of the boundaries between cultures, Ikranagara told me, and they rejected what they saw as the previous genera­tion’s hypocrisy on the subject of race. “We had all the same atti­tudes,” she said. “When we met people who worked for the oil companies or the embassy, they belonged to a different cul­ture than Ann and I. We felt they didn’t mix with Indonesians, they were part of an insular American culture.” Servants seemed to be the only Indonesians those Americans knew.

But by the early 1970s, Lolo’s new job had plunged him deeply into the oil-company culture. Foreign businesses in In­donesia were required to hire and train Indonesian partners. The exercise struck some people as a sham: companies would hire an Indonesian director, pay him well and give him little or nothing to do. Trisulo, Lolo’s brother-in-law, told me he did not recall the exact nature of Lolo’s job with Union Oil. His son, Sonny Trisulo, said it may have been “government relations.” Whatever it was, Lolo’s job included socializing with oil-company executives and their wives. He joined the Indonesian Petroleum Club, a private watering hole in Central Jakarta for oil-company people and their families, which offered swimming, tennis and dining. Ann was expected to so­cialize, too. Any failure to do so reflected badly on Lolo. “It’s the society that asks it,” Ikranagara said. “Your husband is sup­posed to show up at social functions with you at his side, dressed in a kain and kebaya,” a costume consisting of a traditional, tightly fitted, long-sleeved blouse and a length of unstitched cloth wound around the lower part of the body. “You’re supposed to sit with the women and talk about your children and your servants.”

Ann begged off. “She didn’t understand these folks — the idea of living an expa­triate life that was so completely divorced from the world around you, that involves hiding yourself away in these protective cells of existence,” Maya said. “That was peculiar to her, and she was bored by it.” Ann complained to her friend Bill Collier that all those mid­dle-aged white Americans talked about inane things. Lolo, she told Collier, “was becoming more American all the time.” Occasionally, the young Obama would overhear Lolo and Ann arguing in their bedroom about Ann’s refusal to attend his oil-company dinners, at which, he writes in “Dreams From My Father,” “American business­men from Texas and Louisiana would slap Lolo’s back and boast about the palms they had greased to obtain the new offshore-drill­ing rights, while their wives complained to my mother about the quality of Indonesian help. He would ask her how it would look for him to go alone and remind her that these were her own peo­ple, and my mother’s voice would rise to almost a shout.

“ ‘They are not my people.’ ”

The relationship between Ann and Lolo appears to have begun deteriorating even before Lolo took the oil-company job. As Obama describes it, something happened between them when Lolo was called back to Jakarta during the time of unrest in Indonesia and they spent a year apart. In Hawaii, Lolo was full of life, regaling Ann with stories from his childhood, confiding his plans to return to his country and teach at the univer­sity. Now he barely spoke to her. Some nights, he would sleep with a pistol under his pillow; other nights, she would hear him “wandering through the house with a bottle of imported whiskey, nursing his secrets.” Ann’s loneliness was a constant, Obama writes, “like a shortness of breath.”

Ann had pieced together some of what happened in Indonesia in 1965 and afterward from fragmentary information that people let slip. Her new Indonesian friends talked to her about corruption in government agencies, police and military shakedowns, the power of the presi­dent’s entourage. Lolo would not talk about any of it. According to Obama, a cousin of Lolo’s finally explained to Ann what happened when her husband returned from Hawaii. Upon arriving in Jakarta, he was taken away for questioning and told he had been conscripted and would be sent to the jungles of New Guinea for a year. It could have been worse: students returning from Soviet-bloc countries were jailed or even van­ished. Obama writes that Ann concluded that “power had taken Lolo and yanked him back into line just when he thought he’d escaped, making him feel its weight, letting him know that his life wasn’t his own.” In response, Lolo made his peace with power, “learned the wisdom of forgetting; just as his brother-in-law had done, making millions as a high official in the national oil company.”

Lolo had disappointed Ann, but her refusal to conform to his culture’s expectations apparently angered him as well. “She didn’t know, as little I knew, how Indonesian men change when suddenly their family is around,” Renske Heringa, a Dutch anthro­pologist and close friend of Ann’s in the 1980s who herself married a man who was half Indonesian, told me. “And how Indo­nesian men like women to be easy and open abroad, but when you get to Indonesia, the parents are there, the family is there, you have to behave. You have to be the little wife. As a wife, you were not supposed to make yourself visible besides being beautiful. By the time I knew Ann, she was a hefty woman. She didn’t care about getting dressed, wearing jewelry, the way Indonesian women do. That was not her style. He expected her to do it. That is one reason she didn’t stick it out. She absolutely refused to. I understand why he couldn’t accept it.”

One morning in January 2009, at the offices of the manage­ment school for which Ann had worked, I met a man in his late 50s named Saman. Like some Javanese, he went by a single name. Speaking in Bahasa Indonesia, with Ann’s former assistant Felina Pramono translating, he told me that he worked as a houseboy for Lolo and Ann in the early 1970s. One of seven children from a family of farmers, Saman moved to Jakarta as a teenager to find work. When he worked for Ann and Lolo, his duties included gardening; taking care of a pet turtle, dog, rabbit and bird; and taking Barry to school by bi­cycle or becak. Ann and Lolo paid Saman well and treated all four members of the household staff equally, he said. He remembered Lolo as stern and Ann as kindhearted.

Ann would finish teaching at 9 in the evening and sometimes not return home until midnight, Saman said. She seemed barely to sleep. She would stay up, typing and correcting Barry’s homework, then get up again before dawn. On one occasion, Saman said: “She got home late with a student, but the student didn’t see her home properly. So he dropped her near the house, and Soetoro got very mad because of that.” An argument ensued, which Saman overheard. “He said: ‘I’ve warned you many times. Why are you still doing this?’ ” Saman recalled. Whether Lolo’s worry was infidelity or simply what others might think is unclear from Saman’s story. After the argument, he said, Ann appeared in the house with a towel pressed to her face and blood running from her nose. It is difficult to know what to make of the nearly 40-year-old recollection. No one else I interviewed suggested there was ever violence between Ann and Lolo, a man many people described as patient and sweet-tempered.

When one fellow teacher, an Indonesian man whom Ann befriended, asked about her husband in 1968 or 1969, she told him grimly: “I’m never asked. I’m told.” Reflecting on her marriage some years later, Ann told another Indonesian friend, Yang Suwan, resignedly: “Don’t you know that you don’t argue and you don’t discuss with a Javanese person? Be­cause problems don’t exist with Javanese people. Time will solve problems.”

With her children, Ann made a point of being more physically affectionate than her mother had been with her, she told one friend. She was cuddly and would say, “I love you,” according to Maya, a hundred times a day. She was playful — making pottery, weaving decorations, doing art projects that stretched across the room. “I think that we benefited a great deal from her focus when we were with her, when she was beside us,” Maya told me. “So that made the absences hurt a little less.” Where her children were involved, Ann was eas­ily moved to tears, even occasionally when speaking about them to friends. She preferred humor to harping, but she was exacting about the things she believed mattered most. Richard Hook, who worked with Ann in Jakarta in the late 1980s and early 1990s, said she told him that she worked to instill ideas about public service in her son. She wanted Barry to have a sense of obligation, to give something back. She wanted him to start off, Hook said, with the attitudes and values she had taken years to learn.

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Ann would finish teaching at 9 in the evening and sometimes not return home until midnight, Saman said. She seemed barely to sleep. She would stay up, typing and correcting Barry’s homework, then get up again before dawn. On one occasion, Saman said: “She got home late with a student, but the student didn’t see her home properly. So he dropped her near the house, and Soetoro got very mad because of that.” An argument ensued, which Saman overheard. “He said: ‘I’ve warned you many times. Why are you still doing this?’ ” Saman recalled. Whether Lolo’s worry was infidelity or simply what others might think is unclear from Saman’s story. After the argument, he said, Ann appeared in the house with a towel pressed to her face and blood running from her nose. It is difficult to know what to make of the nearly 40-year-old recollection. No one else I interviewed suggested there was ever violence between Ann and Lolo, a man many people described as patient and sweet-tempered.

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When one fellow teacher, an Indonesian man whom Ann befriended, asked about her husband in 1968 or 1969, she told him grimly: “I’m never asked. I’m told.” Reflecting on her marriage some years later, Ann told another Indonesian friend, Yang Suwan, resignedly: “Don’t you know that you don’t argue and you don’t discuss with a Javanese person? Be­cause problems don’t exist with Javanese people. Time will solve problems.”

With her children, Ann made a point of being more physically affectionate than her mother had been with her, she told one friend. She was cuddly and would say, “I love you,” according to Maya, a hundred times a day. She was playful — making pottery, weaving decorations, doing art projects that stretched across the room. “I think that we benefited a great deal from her focus when we were with her, when she was beside us,” Maya told me. “So that made the absences hurt a little less.” Where her children were involved, Ann was eas­ily moved to tears, even occasionally when speaking about them to friends. She preferred humor to harping, but she was exacting about the things she believed mattered most. Richard Hook, who worked with Ann in Jakarta in the late 1980s and early 1990s, said she told him that she worked to instill ideas about public service in her son. She wanted Barry to have a sense of obligation, to give something back. She wanted him to start off, Hook said, with the attitudes and values she had taken years to learn.

“If you want to grow into a human being,” Obama remembers her saying, “you’re going to need some values.” When necessary, Ann was, according to two accounts, not unwilling to reinforce her message. “She talked about disciplining Barry, including spanking him for things where he richly deserved a spanking,” said Don Johnston, who worked with Ann in the early 1990s, sometimes traveling with her in Indonesia and living in the same house. Saman said that when Barry failed to finish homework sent from Hawaii by his grandmother, Ann “would call him into his room and would spank him with his father’s military belt.” President Obama, through a spokeswoman, said his mother never resorted to physical discipline.

One evening in the house in Matraman, Saman said, he and Barry were preparing to go to sleep. They often slept in the same place — sometimes in the bunk bed in Barry’s room, sometimes on the dining-room floor or in the garden. On this occasion, Barry, who was 8 or 9 at the time, asked Saman to turn out the light. When Saman did not do it, he said, Barry hit him in the chest. When he did not react, Barry hit him harder, and Saman struck him back. Barry began to cry loudly, attracting Ann’s attention. According to Saman, Ann did not respond. She seemed to realize that Barry had been in the wrong. Otherwise, Saman would not have struck him.

“We were not permitted to be rude, we were not permitted to be mean, we were not permitted to be arrogant,” Maya told me. “We had to have a certain humility and broad-mindedness. We had to study. . . . If we said something unkind about someone, she would try to talk about their point of view. Or, ‘How would you feel?’ Sort of compelling us ever toward empathy and those kinds of things and not allowing us to be selfish. That was constant, steady, daily.”

It was clear to many that Ann believed Barry, in particular, was unusually gifted. She would boast about his brains, his achievements, how brave he was. Benji Bennington, a friend of Ann’s from Hawaii, told me, “Sometimes when she talked about Barack, she’d say, ‘Well, my son is so bright, he can do anything he ever wants in the world, even be president of the United States.’ I re­member her saying that.” Samardal Manan, who taught with Ann in Jakarta, remembered Ann saying something similar — that Barry could be, or perhaps wanted to be, the first black president.

“What do you want to be when you grow up?” Lolo asked Barry one evening, according to Saman.

“Oh, prime minister,” Barry answered.

What mattered as much as anything to Ann, as a parent, was her children’s education. But that was not simple. Indonesian schools in the late 1960s and early 1970s were inadequate; there were not enough of them, the government controlled the curriculum, teach­ers were poorly trained. Westerners sent their children to the Jakarta International School, but it was expensive and difficult to get into. Obama attended two Indonesian schools, one Catholic and one Muslim. The experience cannot have failed to have left a mark. The Java­nese, especially the Central Javanese, place an enormous emphasis on self-control. Even to sneeze was to exhibit an untoward lack of self-control, said Michael Dove, who got to know Ann when they were both anthropologists working in Java in the 1980s. “You demonstrate an inner strength by not betraying emotion, not speaking loudly, not moving jerkily,” he said. Self-control is inculcated through a culture of teasing, Kay Ikrana­gara told me. Her husband, known only as Ikrana­gara, said, “People tease about skin color all the time.” If a child allows the teasing to bother him, he is teased more. If he ignores it, it stops. “Our ambassador said this was where Barack learned to be cool,” Kay told me. “If you get mad and react, you lose. If you learn to laugh and take it without any reaction, you win.”

With time, Ann’s thinking about Barack’s future changed. “She had always encouraged my rapid acculturation in Indone­sia,” he wrote in his memoir. “It had made me relatively self-sufficient, undemanding on a tight budget, and extremely well mannered when compared with other American children. She had taught me to disdain the blend of ignorance and arrogance that too often character­ized Americans abroad. But she now had learned, just as Lolo had learned, the chasm that separated the life chances of an American from those of an Indonesian. She knew which side of the divide she wanted her child to be on. I was an American, she decided, and my true life lay elsewhere.”

In early 1971, Ann told Barry that he would be returning to Hawaii. He would live with his grandparents in Honolulu and attend Punahou School, a respected prep school within walking distance of the Dunhams’ apartment. “She said that she and Maya would be joining me in Hawaii very soon — a year, tops — and that she’d try to make it there for Christmas,” he wrote in “Dreams From My Father.” Ann’s uncle Charles Payne told me he suspected that her mother, Madelyn, played a part in the decision. “Madelyn always had a great concern about Barack getting a good education,” he said. “I think that was her defense against his racial mixture — that education was the solution to whatever problems that would bring.”

As Obama later described his send-off, an Indonesian co-pilot who was a friend of Ann’s escorted him to the plane “as she and Lolo and my new sister, Maya, stood by at the gate.”

Ann uprooted Barry, at age 6, and transplanted him to Jakarta. Now she was up­rooting him again, at barely 10, and sending him back, alone. She would follow him to Hawaii only to leave him again, less than three years later.

When we spoke last July, Obama recalled those serial displacements. “I think that was harder on a 10-year-old boy than he’d care to admit at the time,” Obama said, sitting in a chair in the Oval Of­fice and speaking about his mother with a mix of affection and critical distance. “When we were separated again during high school, at that point I was old enough to say, ‘This is my choice, my decision.’ But being a parent now and looking back at that, I could see — you know what? — that would be hard on a kid.”

He spoke about his mother with fondness, humor and a degree of candor that I had not expected. There was also in his tone at times a hint of gentle forbearance. Perhaps it was the tone of someone whose patience had been tested, by a person he loved, to the point where he had stepped back to a safer distance. Or perhaps it was the knowingness of a grown child seeing his par­ent as irredeemably human.

“She was a very strong person in her own way,” Obama said, when I asked about Ann’s limitations as a mother. “Resilient, able to bounce back from setbacks, persistent — the fact that she ended up finishing her dissertation. But despite all those strengths, she was not a well-organized person. And that disorganization, you know, spilled over. Had it not been for my grandparents, I think, providing some sort of safety net financially, being able to take me and my sister on at certain spots, I think my mother would have had to make some different decisions. And I think that sometimes she took for granted that, ‘Well, it’ll all work out, and it’ll be fine.’ But the fact is, it might not always have been fine, had it not been for my grandmother. . . . Had she not been there to provide that floor, I think our young lives could have been much more chaotic than they were.”

But he did not, he said, hold his mother’s choices against her. Part of being an adult is seeing your parents “as people who have their own strengths, weaknesses, quirks, longings.” He did not believe, he said, that parents served their children well by being unhappy. If his mother had cramped her spirit, it would not have given him a happier childhood. As it was, she gave him the single most important gift a parent can give — “a sense of un­conditional love that was big enough that, with all the surface dis­turbances of our lives, it sustained me, entirely.”

The importance of sleep

We generally need 8 hours of sleep to function well. Interestingly, those who had less than that over the period of the study thought that they were performing well, when in fact, the performance was deteriorating. The lack of insight into their poorer performance is worth noting.

'How Little Sleep Can You Get Away With?

New York Times

By MAGGIE JONES
Published: April 15, 2011

We all know that we don’t get enough sleep. But how much sleep do we really need? Until about 15 years ago, one common theory was that if you slept at least four or five hours a night, your cognitive performance remained intact; your body simply adapted to less sleep. But that idea was based on studies in which researchers sent sleepy subjects home during the day — where they may have sneaked in naps and downed coffee.

Enlarge This Image

AMERICAN SLUMBER Number of hours of sleep (self-reported) on weeknights.
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Antonio Bolfo for The New York Times
Enter David Dinges, the head of the Sleep and Chronobiology Laboratory at the Hospital at University of Pennsylvania, who has the distinction of depriving more people of sleep than perhaps anyone in the world.

In what was the longest sleep-restriction study of its kind, Dinges and his lead author, Hans Van Dongen, assigned dozens of subjects to three different groups for their 2003 study: some slept four hours, others six hours and others, for the lucky control group, eight hours — for two weeks in the lab.

Every two hours during the day, the researchers tested the subjects’ ability to sustain attention with what’s known as the psychomotor vigilance task, or P.V.T., considered a gold standard of sleepiness measures. During the P.V.T., the men and women sat in front of computer screens for 10-minute periods, pressing the space bar as soon as they saw a flash of numbers at random intervals. Even a half-second response delay suggests a lapse into sleepiness, known as a microsleep.

The P.V.T. is tedious but simple if you’ve been sleeping well. It measures the sustained attention that is vital for pilots, truck drivers, astronauts. Attention is also key for focusing during long meetings; for reading a paragraph just once, instead of five times; for driving a car. It takes the equivalent of only a two-second lapse for a driver to veer into oncoming traffic.

Not surprisingly, those who had eight hours of sleep hardly had any attention lapses and no cognitive declines over the 14 days of the study. What was interesting was that those in the four- and six-hour groups had P.V.T. results that declined steadily with almost each passing day. Though the four-hour subjects performed far worse, the six-hour group also consistently fell off-task. By the sixth day, 25 percent of the six-hour group was falling asleep at the computer. And at the end of the study, they were lapsing fives times as much as they did the first day.

The six-hour subjects fared no better — steadily declining over the two weeks — on a test of working memory in which they had to remember numbers and symbols and substitute one for the other. The same was true for an addition-subtraction task that measures speed and accuracy. All told, by the end of two weeks, the six-hour sleepers were as impaired as those who, in another Dinges study, had been sleep-deprived for 24 hours straight — the cognitive equivalent of being legally drunk.

So, for most of us, eight hours of sleep is excellent and six hours is no good, but what about if we split the difference? What is the threshold below which cognitive function begins to flag? While Dinges’s study was under way, his colleague Gregory Belenky, then director of the division of neuroscience at the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research in Silver Spring, Md., was running a similar study. He purposely restricted his subjects to odd numbers of sleep hours — three, five, seven and nine hours — so that together the studies would offer a fuller picture of sleep-restriction. Belenky’s nine-hour subjects performed much like Dinges’s eight-hour ones. But in the seven-hour group, their response time on the P.V.T. slowed and continued to do so for three days, before stabilizing at lower levels than when they started. Americans average 6.9 hours on weeknights, according to the National Sleep Foundation. Which means that, whether we like it or not, we are not thinking as clearly as we could be.

Of course our lives are more stimulating than a sleep lab: we have coffee, bright lights, the social buzz of the office, all of which work as “countermeasures” to sleepiness. They can do the job for only so long, however. As Belenky, who now heads up the Sleep and Performance Research Center at Washington State University, Spokane, where Van Dongen is also a professor, told me about cognitive deficits: “You don’t see it the first day. But you do in five to seven days. Unless you’re doing work that doesn’t require much thought, you are trading time awake at the expense of performance.”

And it’s not clear that we can rely on weekends to make up for sleep deprivation. Dinges is now running a long-term sleep restriction and recovery study to see how many nights we need to erase our sleep debt. But past studies suggest that, at least in many cases, one night alone won’t do it.

Not every sleeper is the same, of course: Dinges has found that some people who need eight hours will immediately feel the wallop of one four-hour night, while other eight-hour sleepers can handle several four-hour nights before their performance deteriorates. (But deteriorate it will.) There is a small portion of the population — he estimates it at around 5 percent or even less — who, for what researchers think may be genetic reasons, can maintain their performance with five or fewer hours of sleep. (There is also a small percentage who require 9 or 10 hours.)

Still, while it’s tempting to believe we can train ourselves to be among the five-hour group — we can’t, Dinges says — or that we are naturally those five-hour sleepers, consider a key finding from Van Dongen and Dinges’s study: after just a few days, the four- and six-hour group reported that, yes, they were slightly sleepy. But they insisted they had adjusted to their new state. Even 14 days into the study, they said sleepiness was not affecting them. In fact, their performance had tanked. In other words, the sleep-deprived among us are lousy judges of our own sleep needs. We are not nearly as sharp as we think we are.


Maggie Jones (margueritepjones@gmail.com) is a contributing writer for the magazine. Editor: Tony Gervino (t.gervino-MagGroup@nytimes.com). '

quote

from how it happened - 'I started this blog during some downtime, in the middle of a labour ward night-shift in October 2003. In fact until April last year, I wrote most of it during quiet moments between deliveries. For the last 9 months I’ve been doing a research job, with lots of clinical work, but no emergencies. The job has a 9-5ish routine and I’ve been loving it. During the last 9 months I’d persuaded myself that I didn’t enjoy labour ward anymore. Tonight by chance I got offered a labour ward shift, following on immediately from my day-shift. Somehow I’d forgotten how much I love labour ward too. It feels great to be up in the middle of the night, eating greasy takeaway food, posting rubbish on the internet, and delivering the occasional baby. I’m happier knowing that I’m not entirely a 9-5 kind of guy. ' — 5 years ago (Feb 2006)

London's little secrets: Platform 9 and 3/4

Yes! You can find it in King's Cross station! It has moved location a couple of times. And changed appearances with the moves (there is construction work going on at the moment...). It used to look like this (with part of a trolley sticking out a real brick wall). You can find the current platform 9 and 3/4 at the far end of platform 8. Platforms 1-4 need a ticket to get past the barrier, but a ticket isn't required for platform 8. Walk along the platform. On your left there will be a sign directing you to platforms 9+ - ignore it, continue walking along platform 8. Go past the cycle rack. You will feel like you are going too far, because all the commuters will not be going this far. Don't give up. Carry on walking until on your left you spot the little entry way with platform 9 and 3/4. There is a trolley sticking half out a wall (as if its going through!). Not a real brick wall at the moment, a mock one. But the sign denoting 'Platform 9 and 3/4' is cute. At the moment there aren't any signs guiding you to this platform (there used to be). Whenever I've been, there has always been a group of tourists (families, groups of young adults, groups of older adults(!)) checking out this nod to a fantastic series of books. Go forth, and enjoy!

Analysing the White Paper in rap form

Via the Guardian ' Andrew Lansley takes rap from MC NxtGen over health policy in viral video Success of YouTube video criticising Department of Health white paper prompts health minister to respond to rapper critic Esther Addley guardian.co.uk, Friday 25 March 2011 20.18 GMT Three years ago, when he was 19, a young rapper calling himself MC NxtGen hoped he was on the verge of the big time. Performing at a "battle" at a nightclub in central London, he rapped: "To be found you gotta be loud and have a different sound, step out from the crowd, just rise from the underground!" The crowd liked him but the title of Britain's Next Urban Superstar was not to be his. He failed to make the final, and returned home to his dreams of superstardom and his job as a binman in Loughborough. This week, however, Britain might just have been offered a second chance to turn NxtGen into a star, in the very unlikeliest of circumstances. The rapper, real name Sean Donnelly, has found himself a viral YouTube and Twitter celebrity after recording a track that certainly offers a "different sound". Eschewing the traditional hiphop themes of bling, booty and babes, Donnelly has recorded a caustic three-minute rap about the Department of Health's white paper "Equity and Excellence: Liberating the NHS", and dedicated it personally – highly personally, one might say – to the health minister himself. "Andrew Lansley, greedy! Andrew Lansley, tosser!" runs the refrain, repeated throughout the song, over a sample taken from The House of the Rising Sun. "The NHS is not for sale, you grey-haired manky codger!" But if Donnelly is far from polite in his political protest, he has certainly done his research. "So the budget of the PCTs, he wants to hand to the GPs / Oh please. Dumb geeks are gonna buy from any willing provider, / Get care from private companies." Later, he offers a helpful parse of the white paper, saying Lansley's plans are that "we'll become more like the US / and care will be farmed out to private companies, / who will sell their service to the NHS via the GPs / who will have more to do with service purchase arrangements / than anything to do with seeing their patients." Finishing his shift on the bins on Friday ("I don't think this is really anyone's career choice"), Donnelly said he'd been overwhelmed by the response, which had seen his Facebook, Twitter and YouTube pages "going crazy" and even contact from TV companies. "I didn't really plan for it all to be about me," he says. "I just did it basically so I could speak to the youth." The song came about, Donnelly, now 22, told the Guardian, because he has "close family and friends" – his girlfriend is one – "who want to work in the NHS in the future hopefully, but they're worried about the cuts. So I researched it on the internet and I just did the song. I feel for the people that are ill in hospital. If they were privatised they wouldn't be able to afford it." And why focus on Lansley in particular? "Because I'm peed off with the guy." He insists he'd rather rap about "truth" than money, fast cars or sex. "That's what sells, but I'm just not like that." Donnelly started MC-ing when he was 11 or 12, he says, when he first saw Eminem, whose wit he immediately loved. "It was just the funniness and this complete truth at the same time." The Detroit rapper's influence might be detected in the video to Andrew Lansley – which has been viewed on YouTube more than 30,000 times in 24 hours – in which he enlists shoppers in his home town to wave placards, wear David Cameron and Nick Clegg masks and mouth "Tosser!" and "greedy!" at the camera at apposite points in the song. At one point, railing against Lansley's involvement of the fast food industry in formulating health policy, Donnelly dons a mask of the health secretary and throws crisps at his face. He even riffs on the health secretary's expenses record, and – in what has a reasonable claim to be the unlikeliest rap lyric ever – on the controversial donation to Lansley's office by the chairman of a private health company. "He's been given cash / by John Nash / chairman of Care UK, / a private healthcare provider, / who, if they have their own way, / will be the biggest beneficiaries / of Conservative Lib-Dem policies / to privatise healthcare, pull apart the welfare state …" It's some distance from 2 Live Crew's Me So Horny. He is now trying to release the track on iTunes – "I've had so many people saying, 'Let's get it to number one!'". Then he'd love to quit his job on the bins. "The older I've got the more I've been worried, thinking I'm not going to make it." He's made a wider impact now. By Friday night the viral video had infected the Department of Health, and Lansley himself was moved to comment. "We will never privatise the NHS," he told the Guardian. "But I'm impressed that he's managed to get lyrics about GP commissioning into a rap." ' Andrew Lansley rap on YouTube - includes analysis of White Paper in rap form, and some bad language (I don't generally approve of bad language to make a point, but...).

On making decisions...

'The moment you commit yourself, then providence moves too. All manner of things happen to help you that would never otherwise have occurred. A whole stream of events are started by the decision, creating all manner of unforeseen incidents and meetings and material assistance in your favour, which no-one could have dreamed would have come your way. Whatever you can do, or dream you can, begin it. Boldness has genius, power and magic in it. Begin it now.'

Johan Wolfgang von Goethe, 1749-1842 (translated from German)

Torture in Bahrain

Blind eye to the butcher (torture in Bahrain)# - eye opening documentary shown in 2002 on British TV.

2002 article in the Observer

Britain silent on 'Butcher of Bahrain'
Tony Thompson, crime correspondent The Observer, Sunday 30 June 2002 01.00 BST

The Government has been accused of stalling attempts to prosecute a British citizen accused of running a brutal regime of torture in Bahrain in order to protect the UK's relationship with the Arab state.
Scots-born Colonel Ian Henderson, dubbed the 'Butcher of Bahrain', spent 30 years as head of the Bahraini secret police. During this time his men allegedly detained and tortured thousands of anti-government activists.

Their activities are said to have included the ransacking of villages, sadistic sexual abuse and using power drills to maim prisoners. On many occasions they are said to have detained children without informing their parents, only to return them months later in body bags. Between 1994 and 1998 at least seven people died as a result of torture at the hands of the Bahraini regime.

Human rights organisations have collected evidence from thousands of victims of the regime who have provided horrific accounts of the torture they suffered. Yaser al-Sayegh's case is typical. 'My wrists were shackled to my ankles and they suspended me upside down from a pole,' he said. 'They then beat me on my legs and feet and face with iron bars and rubber hoses.'

Hashem Redha, a Bahrainian pro-democracy activist who now lives in Britain, said he was attacked personally by Henderson. 'He tortured me one time. He kicked me and shook me two times. He said, "If you like to be hit, we can hit you more than that".'

A Carlton documentary, Blind Eye to the Butcher, to be screened on Wednesday, reveals that despite solid evidence torture took place on many occasions, a two-year investigation by Scotland Yard's Serious Crimes Branch and questions being asked in Parliament, Henderson has never been interviewed about the allegations.

However, under international law, he would be responsible for acts of torture carried out under his command, regardless of whether he was personally involved.

A file was submitted to the Crown Prosecution Service last August but police say they are still waiting for a response.

Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International have repeatedly called for an investigation into the allegations but believe successive governments have been reluctant because of Britain's close ties with the Arab state. Britain has 85 defence staff based in Bahrain and members of the country's armed forces are invited to defence colleges in this country for training.

Since retirement, Henderson has spent much of his time living at an extensive property called Stoke Shallows on the edge of Dartmoor where his neighbours know nothing of his past. He continues to travel frequently to Bahrain where he remains an adviser.

In the programme Henderson denies allegations of torture and refused to take part in any discussion. However, he issued a statement saying there was no truth in any of the allegations.

The Home Office refused to comment on allegations of torture in Bahrain.

Tim Hortons-turned-ER

(Tim Hortons is a Canadian coffee shop. The news story is about a Canadian Emergency Department having to overflow into the hospitals coffee shop. Story pasted below).

B.C. Health Minister Colin Hansen says the system worked just the way it's supposed to when emergency patients at Royal Columbian Hospital in New Westminster ended up in a Tim Hortons next door to the ER.

Doctors had to set up temporary beds in the closed coffee shop Monday night between 11:15 p.m. PT and 12:45 a.m after the hospital was swamped by about 200 patients.

"It does happen from time to time that emergency rooms are under tremendous stress because of the number of patients presenting themselves on that day," Hansen said.

Hansen said it doesn't happen as frequently as it did 10 years ago, when he was the Liberal opposition's health critic.

"They had all the ambulances lined up outside waiting to unload passengers," he said. "Today we have protocols in place where the patients are brought inside, they're cared for, they get the attention of medical staff."

Fraser Health Authorty spokesman David Plug says the space inside the Tim Hortons is a "designated overflow area" to be used in extreme high-volume situations where the emergency room sees an unexpected surge.

Plug said about 100 patients checked into the emergency room, half the number later cited by Hansen.

The hospital has suffered from a shortage of beds and an overcrowded emergency room for several years. In May 2008 the hospital announced plans to build a temporary portable emergency room in the parking lot to ease overcrowding.

Plug says the hospital needs an expansion, but other facilities run by the Fraser Health Authority are first in line.

"We've built a new hospital in Abbotsford. We're working to build a new critical care tower at Surrey hospital at our regional hospital there, and Royal Columbian Hospital would then be next," he said.

Doctors concerned
But one emergency doctor at Royal Columbian disagrees. Dr. Sheldon Glazer said corridors and coffee shops are not adequate for patients.

"We can't appropriately examine someone in a hallway. We can't get them undressed. We can't do a thorough examination on a patient in a waiting room," said Glazer.

Treating people in makeshift conditions leads to mistakes and poor care, Glazer said, but it also points to a larger problem.

"There are not enough hospital beds in the system and the emergency room ends up being an overflow ward of the hospital, so that emergency patients, patients who have the acute problems, have to be seen in chairs, in hallways or now in a coffee shop," he said.

B.C. Nurses Union president Debra McPherson blames the health authority and the government for overcrowding.

"I don't know what it's going to take to get this government out of its coma of inaction, and for the Fraser Health Authority in particular to wake up and smell the coffee and finally admit that it has problems," said McPherson.

NDP health critic Adrian Dix has blamed what he calls the ill-conceived decision to shut down nearby St. Mary's Hospital in 2004 and underfunding for acute-care beds.

Getting organised...

3 home office zones

5 steps to a permanently cleaner office

Desktop zones

It's all about the zones. Apparantly...

I wish I was one of those naturally uber-organised-neat-freak type people, who has everything organised all of the time. I try. I try hard. But it just feels like a cycle of intense tidying followed by a slow but steady decline into a natural state of organised chaos, followed by intense tidying, followed by...
You get the picture.

Article: How to Make Oatmeal . . . Wrong

February 22, 2011, 8:30 pm By MARK BITTMAN

How to Make Oatmeal . . . Wrong


Another Article from the New York Times - please see writing in bold below which pointed out the ease simple food can be made.

There’s a feeling of inevitability in writing about McDonald’s latest offering, their “bowl full of wholesome” — also known as oatmeal. The leading fast-food multinational, with sales over $16.5 billion a year (just under the G.D.P. of Afghanistan), represents a great deal of what is wrong with American food today. From a marketing perspective, they can do almost nothing wrong; from a nutritional perspective, they can do almost nothing right, as the oatmeal fiasco demonstrates.

One “positive” often raised about McDonald’s is that it sells calories cheap. But since many of these calories are in forms detrimental rather than beneficial to our health and to the environment, they’re actually quite expensive — the costs aren’t seen at the cash register but in the form of high health care bills and environmental degradation.

Oatmeal is on the other end of the food spectrum. Real oatmeal contains no ingredients; rather, it is an ingredient. As such, it’s a promising lifesaver: oats are easy to grow in almost any non-extreme climate and, minimally processed, they’re profoundly nourishing, inexpensive and ridiculously easy to cook. They can even be eaten raw, but more on that in a moment.

Like so many other venerable foods, oatmeal has been roundly abused by food marketers for more than 40 years. Take, for example, Quaker Strawberries and Cream Instant Oatmeal, which contains no strawberries, no cream, 12 times the sugars of Quaker Old Fashioned Oats and only half of the fiber. At least it’s inexpensive, less than 50 cents a packet on average. (A serving of cooked rolled oats will set you back half that at most, plus the cost of condiments; of course, it’ll be much better in every respect.)

The oatmeal and McDonald’s story broke late last year, when Mickey D’s, in its ongoing effort to tell us that it’s offering “a selection of balanced choices” (and to keep in step with arch-rival Starbucks) began to sell the cereal. Yet in typical McDonald’s fashion, the company is doing everything it can to turn oatmeal into yet another bad choice. (Not only that, they’ve made it more expensive than a double-cheeseburger: $2.38 per serving in New York.) “Cream” (which contains seven ingredients, two of them actual dairy) is automatically added; brown sugar is ostensibly optional, but it’s also added routinely unless a customer specifically requests otherwise. There are also diced apples, dried cranberries and raisins, the least processed of the ingredients (even the oatmeal contains seven ingredients, including “natural flavor”).

A more accurate description than “100 percent natural whole-grain oats,” “plump raisins,” “sweet cranberries” and “crisp fresh apples” would be “oats, sugar, sweetened dried fruit, cream and 11 weird ingredients you would never keep in your kitchen.”

Since we know there are barely any rules governing promotion of foods, one might wonder how this compares to real oatmeal, besides being 10 times as expensive. Some will say that it tastes better, but that’s because they’re addicted to sickly sweet foods, which is what this bowlful of wholesome is.

Others will argue that the McDonald’s version is more “convenient.” This is nonsense; in the time it takes to go into a McDonald’s, stand in line, order, wait, pay and leave, you could make oatmeal for four while taking your vitamins, brushing your teeth and half-unloading the dishwasher. (If you’re too busy to eat it before you leave the house, you could throw it in a container and microwave it at work. If you prefer so-called instant, flavored oatmeal, see this link, which will describe how to make your own).

If you don’t want to bother with the stove at all, you could put some rolled oats (instant not necessary) in a glass or bowl, along with a teeny pinch of salt, sugar or maple syrup or honey, maybe some dried fruit. Add milk and let stand for a minute (or 10). Eat. Eat while you’re walking around getting dressed. And then talk to me about convenience.

The aspect one cannot argue is nutrition: Incredibly, the McDonald’s product contains more sugar than a Snickers bar and only 10 fewer calories than a McDonald’s cheeseburger or Egg McMuffin. (Even without the brown sugar it has more calories than a McDonald’s hamburger.)

The bottom-line question is, “Why?” Why would McDonald’s, which appears every now and then to try to persuade us that it is adding “healthier” foods to its menu, take a venerable ingredient like oatmeal and turn it into expensive junk food? Why create a hideous concoction of 21 ingredients, many of them chemical and/or unnecessary? Why not try, for once, to keep it honest?

I asked them this, via e-mail: “Why could you not make oatmeal with nothing more than real oats and plain water, and offer customers a sweetener or two (honey, the only food on earth that doesn’t spoil, would seem a natural fit for this purpose), a packet of mixed dried fruit, and half-and-half or — even better — skim milk?”

Their answer, via e-mail and through a spokesperson (FMO is “fruit and maple oatmeal”): “Customers can order FMO with or without the light cream, brown sugar and the fruit. Our menu is entirely customizable by request with our ‘Made for You’ platform that has been in place since the late 90s.”

Oh, please. Here’s the thing: McDonald’s wants to get people in the store. Once a day, once a week, once a month, the more the better, of course, but routinely. And if you buy oatmeal, they’re O.K. with that. But they know that, once inside, you’ll probably opt for a sausage biscuit anyway.

And you won’t be much worse off

Thoughtful article

Some interesting points are made here. The importance of the practical side of medicine, picking up physical signs, not focussing on the 'iPatient' rather than the patient. I don't agree with the performance aspect.

From the New York Times: Treat the Patient, Not the CT Scan

By ABRAHAM VERGHESE

Published: February 26, 2011
Palo Alto, Calif.

THE other day as I walked through a wing of my hospital, it occurred to me that Watson, I.B.M.’s supercomputer, would be more at home here than he was on “Jeopardy!” Perhaps it’s good, I thought, that his next challenge, with the aid of the Columbia University Medical Center and the University of Maryland School of Medicine, will be to learn to diagnose illnesses and treat patients.

On our rounds of the wards, Watson would see lots of other computers with humans glued to them like piglets at a sow’s teats. We might visit a patient with a complex illness — one whose second liver transplant has failed, who has a fungal meningitis and now also has kidney failure and bleeding and is on a score of medications.

Watson might help me digest the sheer volume of data that is in the electronic medical record and might see trends in the data that speak of an impending disaster. And since Watson is constantly trolling the Web, he would perhaps bring to my attention a case report published the previous night in a Swedish journal describing a new interaction between two of the drugs my patient is taking.

Better still, if Watson could harness data from all the patients in our hospital and in every other hospital in America, we might be alerted to mini-epidemics taking shape. For example, Watson might recognize that the kidney failure in our patient is linked to kidney failure in a patient in Buffalo and another in San Antonio; all three patients, he might inform me, were taking a “natural” weight loss supplement that contained a Chinese herb, aristolochia, that has been associated with more than 100 cases of kidney failure.

In short, Watson would be a potent and clever companion as we made our rounds.

But the complaints I hear from patients, family and friends are never about the dearth of technology but about its excesses. My own experience as a patient in an emergency room in another city helped me see this. My nurse would come in periodically to visit the computer work station in my cubicle, her back to me while she clicked and scrolled away. Over her shoulder she said, “On a scale of one to five how is your ...?”

The electronic record of my three-hour stay would have looked perfect, showing close monitoring, even though to me as a patient it lacked a human dimension. I don’t fault the nurse, because in my hospital, despite my best intentions, I too am spending too much time in front of the computer: the story of my patient’s many past admissions, the details of surgeries undergone, every consultant’s opinion, every drug given over every encounter, thousands of blood tests and so many CT scans, M.R.I.’s and ultrasound images reside in there.

This computer record creates what I call an “iPatient” — and this iPatient threatens to become the real focus of our attention, while the real patient in the bed often feels neglected, a mere placeholder for the virtual record.

Imaging the body has become so easy (and profitable, too, if you own the machine). When I was an intern some 30 years ago, about three million CT scans were performed annually in the United States; now the number is more like 80 million. Imaging tests are now responsible for half of the overall radiation Americans are exposed to, compared with about 15 percent in 1980.

With that radiation exposure comes increasing risk for cancer, but what worries me even more is that this ease of ordering a scan has caused doctors’ most basic skills in examining the body to atrophy. This loss is palpable when American medical trainees go to hospitals and clinics abroad with few resources: it can be quite humbling to see doctors in Africa and South America detect fluid around patients’ lungs not with X-rays but by percussing the chest with their fingers and listening with their stethoscopes.

Of course, we still teach medical students how to properly examine the body. In dedicated physical diagnosis courses in their first and second years, students learn on trained actors, who give them appropriate stories and responses, how to do a complete exam of the body’s systems (circulatory, respiratory, musculoskeletal and the rest). Faculty members stand by to assess that the required maneuvers are performed correctly.

But all that training can be undone the moment the students hit their clinical years. Then, they discover that the currency on the ward seems to be “throughput” — getting tests ordered and getting results, having procedures like colonoscopies done expeditiously, calling in specialists, arranging discharge. And the engine for all of that, indeed the place where the dialogue between doctors and nurses takes place, is the computer.

The consequence of losing both faith and skill in examining the body is that we miss simple things, and we order more tests and subject people to the dangers of radiation unnecessarily. Just a few weeks ago, I heard of a patient who arrived in an E.R. in extremis with seizures and breathing difficulties. After being stabilized and put on a breathing machine, she was taken for a CT scan of the chest, to rule out blood clots to the lung; but when the radiologist looked at the results, she turned out to have In retrospect, though, her cancer should have been discovered long before the radiologist found it; before the emergency, the patient had been seen several times and at different places, for symptoms that were probably related to the cancer. I got to see the CT scan: the tumor masses in each breast were likely visible to the naked eye — and certainly to the hand. Yet they had never been noted.

Too frequently, I hear of (and in a study we are conducting, I am collecting) stories like that from all across the country. They represent a type of error that stems from not making use of basic bedside skills, not asking the patient to fully disrobe. It is a more subtle kind of error than operating on the wrong limb; indeed, this sort of mistake is not always recognized, and yet the consequences can be grave.

IN my experience, being skilled at examining the body has a salutary effect beyond finding important clues that lead to an early diagnosis. It is a ritual that remains important to the patient. Recently my ward team admitted an elderly woman who had been transferred from her nursing home in the night because of a change in her mental status. A CT of the head and all other tests were determined to be normal; the problem had been dehydration, and she was better, ready to go back. But as our team was about to enter the room, my intern warned me that the patient’s lawyer daughter was unhappy with the plan to return her mother to the nursing home, and was waiting impatiently to see me and contest the transfer.

After introducing myself to the patient and to her daughter, I did a thorough but quick neurologic exam. I put the patient through her paces: mental status, cranial nerves, motor and sensory function, used my reflex hammer and pointed out interesting things along the way to my interns and students. I then said to the daughter that her mother seemed back to normal. To our surprise, the daughter seemed comforted, and now had no objection to her mother’s return to the nursing home.

Later, our team discussed what had just happened. We all felt that the daughter witnessing the examination of the patient, that ritual, was the key to earning both their trusts.

I find that patients from almost any culture have deep expectations of a ritual when a doctor sees them, and they are quick to perceive when he or she gives those procedures short shrift by, say, placing the stethoscope on top of the gown instead of the skin, doing a cursory prod of the belly and wrapping up in 30 seconds. Rituals are about transformation, the crossing of a threshold, and in the case of the bedside exam, the transformation is the cementing of the doctor-patient relationship, a way of saying: “I will see you though this illness. I will be with you through thick and thin.” It is paramount that doctors not forget the importance of this ritual.

An answer that might have been posed on “Jeopardy!” is, “An emergency treatment that is administered by ear.” I wonder if Watson would have known the question (though he will now, cybertroller that he is), which is, “What are words of comfort?”

Christmas in Baghdad - story

For those who don't know Arabic (mine is very rough).

Baghdad at Christmas has no electricity. Abu Na'aal (old man) notices a little boy called Hamoodi standing in the cold. He asks him why he is standing there. Hamoodi answers that he is waiting for Baba Noelle (Father Christmas in Arabic) to bring him a bicycle. Abu Na'aal explains that Baba Noelle doesn't visit Baghdad and only distributes toys to children in America. Hamoodi is upset, and says Baba Noelle is known to distribute toys to children all over the world, so why won't he visit Baghdad, why? At this point Abu Na'aal has an idea (indicated by the gas lamp above his head, the narrator reminds listeners that there is no electricity, hence no light bulb to indicate the idea), and decides to call Father Christmas himself to ask if he could visit Baghdad. Santa Claus is not happy that Arabs call him Baba Noelle, doesn't want to visit Baghdad, and is generally not nice (there is a bit of bad language here). On being rejected by Santa Claus, Abu Na'aal then calls Noor Al-Maliki (leader of Iraq) to see if they can organise Christmas. Al-Maliki explains this isn't possible because there are 42 different departments, and it would take at least 100 years to organise things, and he decided to go for a smoke (found it difficult to understand this bit). At this point Abu Na'aal decides to organise Christmas himself. The man who came with the generator asked how important this all was because he had wanted to watch Massi playing for Real Madrid (??). Anyway, a massive tree was put up, beautifully decorated, and lit the whole of Baghdad, and it was so bright and beautiful it could be seen by the astronauts in space. Abu Na'aal appreciated the worth of this beauty. He understood that if you want something done you should not depend on others to do it for you. So, he then got himself a little carriage and a flying donkey and flew through the Baghdad skies distributing toys to all the children (the narrator notes he has no idea how the donkey flies, but recommended you ask Santa Claus how his reinder flew). The end.

Happy new year!

Abstract city by Christoph Niemann

For the New York Times

The haunted household


Let it dough!

Poem: BEING A MAN

“Be a man,” they say,
“and don’t cry.”
And I wonder why
a man is not meant to show emotion.
A man must wear a mask –
And when I ask
Why, he says, “Because I’m a man!”
But I think a man can
Display feelings.
I do – and more –
I shout when I score!
And when someone’s a bore,
I show it – for sure!
Slamming doors brings relief
When I’m cross.
When my sister annoys me
I yell
And I tell
Her where to get off
‘Cos I’m the boss!
And I hope when I’m older,
I’ll continue to show
Both joy and sorrow,
Compassion and pain;
And maybe – just maybe –
When I am a man,
I’ll help make the world sane –
With emotion.

John Davies

Poem: What it is

It is nonsense
says Reason
It is what it is
says Love

It is unhappiness
says Caution
It is nothing but pain
says Fear
It is hopeless
says Insight
It is what it is
says Love

It is ridiculous
says Pride
It is careless
says Caution
It is impossible
says Experience
It is what it is
says Love
~ by Erich Fried

A brief history...

... of Muslims in Britain

I don't normally like the daily mail, but...

An interesting and revealing article on an English mother's perspective of having a mixed race child. (The guardian version of the article is below, as well as another).

'I love my mixed race baby - but why does she feel so alien?'by LOWRI TURNER
Last updated at 16:46 13 July 2007

"She's getting very dark, isn't she?" This is what one of my friends recently said about my much adored - 12-week-old daughter.
She didn't mean to be rude. But it was a comment that struck me with the force of a jab to the stomach.
Immediately, I was overwhelmed by a confusion of emotions. I felt protective, insulted, worried, ashamed, guilty, all at once. The reason? My lovely, wriggly, smiley baby is mixed race.
Now, I think of myself as pretty 'right on'. My home is on the border of the London Republic of Hackney. I've been to the Notting Hill Carnival, even if I found the music a bit loud. Yet now I realise what a 'white' world I inhabit.
I am white and I have two sons from my first marriage who are both milky complexioned and golden haired. My twin sister, who I spend a lot of time with, has a Danish partner. As a consequence, she has two boys who are also pale skinned and flaxen haired.
Into this positively Scandinavian next generation, I have now injected a tiny, dark-skinned, dark-haired girl. To say she stands out is an understatement.
My colouring and that of my children has never really been an issue before. However, three years ago I met the man who became my second husband and who is the father of my daughter.
Although born in the UK, his parents came from India in the Sixties. This makes him British-Asian and our daughter mixed race.
There is another more PC term for the plump little bundle I strap to my front. She is 'dual heritage'. It's a bit trendy, but I quite like it. It implies a pride in coming from two cultures, rather than the less attractive connotations of 'mixed race'.
The usual time something is labelled 'mixed' is when it's a packet of nuts and they've bulked out the luxury cashews with cheaper peanuts. I'm not sure I want my daughter to be regarded as an adulterated version of some pure original. Still, it is the most accepted description.
The truth is, whatever the label, the fact there is a label proves that my daughter's conflicting parentage matters.
At the more frothy end of the scale, mixed-race children are regarded as pretty dolls ? white kids with a nice tan.
When I was pregnant and people asked me about the child I was having, and I explained her father was Indian, they would often coo something along the lines of: "Ooh, she's going to be beautiful!" as if I was discussing a new rose, made from an exotic cross-breeding programme.
On a less benevolent level, mixed-race children can receive a hostile welcome from both white and black communities. Being neither one thing nor another may get you on the cover of Vogue, but it isn't an easy way to make friends

But this is 2007, surely things are more enlightened than that? I hope so, but I fear not.
One reason for my fear is my own mixed reactions to my daughter. Don't get me wrong, I love her. She is the child I didn't think I'd have after my first marriage broke up. She is the only granddaughter in our family and we all dote on her.
But when I turn to the mirror in my bedroom to admire us together, I am shocked. She seems so alien. With her long, dark eyelashes and shiny, dark brown hair, she doesn't look anything like me.
I know that concentrating on how my daughter looks is shallow. She is a person in her own right, not an accessory to me. But still, I can't shake off the feeling of unease.
I didn't realise how much her looking different would matter and, on a rational level, I know it shouldn't. But it does.
Evolution demands that we have children to pass on our genes, hence the sense of pride and validation we get when we see our features reappearing in the next generation.
With my daughter, I don't have that. Do black fathers who marry white women and then have paler-skinned children feel my sense of loss? Or maybe Chinese mothers or Middle-Eastern grandparents grieve when they see a child they know to be their own, but whose features don't reflect that?
I worry that, as my daughter doesn't look like me, people will assume she is adopted. After all, it's all the rage in showbiz circles.
Madonna famously scooped up a black child when she wanted to be a mother again and Angelina Jolie appears to be assembling a 'pick 'n' mix' of kids from different countries. It's all very United Colours of Benetton, isn't it?
In the real world, I fear for my daughter's sense of self. She has a tiny foot in two cultures. How will she negotiate a path between the two? I worry that my sons will feel less of a kinship with their sister because she is different, although there is no sign of that.
As for myself, there is an inescapable status issue to address. White women who have non-white children are stigmatised as 'Tracy Towerblocks' living on benefits, most of which they spend on lager and fags.
Even if I don't fit this profile, my daughter's difference definitely points out the fact that my children come from two different fathers.
If I wanted to pass us off as a nice, neat nuclear family, she would blow my cover at once.
But it is more than that. I am frightened, frightened of others' reactions to her, as well as my own. I didn't think of myself as racist and yet my daughter has shown me a side of myself about which I feel deeply uncomfortable.
Even admitting to having mixed feelings about her not being blonde and blue eyed, I feel disloyal and incredibly guilty.
I know the obvious comment is that I must have known how a child of our union would look when I married an Indian man, but it is a wise woman who thinks that far ahead when she falls in love.
I didn't think about any of this before I got pregnant. I wanted to have a baby. Her colour and culture were immaterial then.
But self-flagellation is not useful. I have more pressing concerns. I am now the mother of a 'black' child, even if she is more the hue of weak tea than espresso.
This is a role for which I am utterly unprepared. Part of me thinks I should be playing sitar music to her in her cot, mastering pakoras and serving them dressed in a sari, but that would be fantastically fake coming from me.
When she was born, pale but with lots of dark hair, I asked the midwife if her eyes would stay blue. 'Asian genes are very strong,' she said in what I took to be an ominous tone.
No more Brady Bunch kids for me. The midwife has been proved right and every day my baby's eyes get a little darker.
Even so, when she looks up at me as I feed her, my heart melts. My love may not be colour blind, but hers is, and that is truly humbling.


daily mail

guardian version

My mixed emotionsLowri Turner had a liberal upbringing and married an Asian man, but it wasn't until she had a mixed race baby that she began to confront her own prejudices

The Guardian, Saturday 7 July 2007
We all know the theory: love is colour blind. It is a somewhat simplistic and sugary ethos, but one that many of us were brought up on. My parents - my mother was a magistrate, my father a prison reformer - were hand-wringing liberals, who fervently held to this notion. When I went to the local primary school, my class was a boisterous melee of white British, West Indian, Greek Cypriot, Irish and Ugandan Asian kids. It wasn't all happy, smiley multi-culturalism, but all we rubbed along pretty well.

There was one mixed-race couple who had children at the school who were then quite unblushingly referred to as "half-caste". As a kid myself, I was fascinated. Did the mum and dad know, I wondered, whether their next baby was going to be black, white or brown, or if their hair would be straight or curly? I used to try to stand behind one of the girls from this family in assembly, so I could study the cornrows in her blond afro hair close-up.

I went on to mostly date white boys, but not always. When I was in my late 20s, I remember telling my mother that I had a new boyfriend who was black. "I don't care what colour he is, is he nice to you?" she said forcefully. "Blimey!" I thought, "it's like having Nelson Mandela for a mum."

It was this same attitude she showed when I married my second husband 18 months ago. When I met him, I didn't know his parents were Indian. He didn't look Indian. He didn't sound Indian. He was born in Glasgow. His skin was paler than you might expect. In the new multi-ethnic Britain, it is often difficult to tell what anyone is. And does it matter anyway? Certainly, back then, it didn't to me.

Anyone who dates someone of a different colour and claims that their hue is immaterial is lying, either to themselves or to everyone else. When a black man and a white woman date, they are both are making personal and political statements, even if they are subliminal. However, the colour of a person's skin is just one of many factors about them that add up to the person you fall in love with. I have a Greek Cypriot girlfriend who is married to a man whose parents are from Jamaica. She says she no longer "sees" him as black and I believe her. However, things get a whole lot more complicated when you have a child.

Ten weeks ago, I gave birth to a daughter. She is undeniably beautiful, but she is also alien to me. I was a blonde child and these days, admittedly helped along more than a bit, I am still blonde, as are my other two children, whose father was white. But my tiny daughter has dark brown hair, dark eyelashes and eyebrows and even a dusting of downy dark brown hair touching the edges of her ears. While my eyes and those of my sons are hazel and my skin and that of my sons is white and slightly motley, hers is an even tone, like very weak tea. She is a black child or is she?

I am not sure yet of the etiquette. Do I call her black or Asian or mixed race, or dual heritage? Is it necessary to call her anything at all? I didn't have any such considerations when I had my sons. They were just mine. They didn't need classification. When I registered my daughter at the local GP, I had to put a tick in a quite unfamiliar box - the one marked "mixed race, white/Asian" - on the "racial monitoring" form. It felt weird and oddly public. She was being labelled at seven weeks old.

What I now realise is that, having had my daughter, I have taken my first steps on the incredibly fragile terrain of mixed-race modern Britain and, as I begin to pick my way across, I am acutely aware of my clumsiness. I am not alone. Look around, there seem to be mixed-race couples everywhere. We are raising a new generation of children who span different races, cultures and religions. Yet, how many of the parents, like me, find themselves unprepared for the challenges ahead?

In my head, I knew that my daughter was unlikely to have the milky complexion and blond hair of my sons. And I don't love her less because she's darker. However, I wasn't prepared for the confusion of emotions I would feel when I look at her.

When I was pregnant and people said things like "Ooh another little blonde one, then?" I would explain that her father was Indian and they would then execute a swift conversational handbrake turn and coo about how pretty she would look, usually mentioning some friend who had a white/Asian child and finishing with: "They are beautiful, aren't they?". This treating of mixed-race babies like dolls who come in a range of attractive hues like options on a Dulux colour chart shocked me. My daughter should not be defined by her colour. She is an individual with unique talents and qualities - now, there is my mother talking. And in an ideal world, the way she looks shouldn't be an issue.

But we don't live in an ideal world and the way we all look matters. My daughter's appearance is an issue to others as well as myself. A (white) friend visited yesterday and having examined the baby, she announced: "She's getting quite dark, isn't she?" And I am ashamed to admit that in a reversal of what happens on holiday when you study your skin in the mirror every day hoping for a deepening tan, I too now find myself examining my daughter for signs that her skin is becoming a deeper shade of brown and being perturbed if I find them.

As I read that, I am horrified. But, then, having a mixed race baby forces you to face uncomfortable truths about yourself and the outside world that it is possible to be entirely unaware of if you stay within an easy, uncontroversial all-white sphere.

All parents have fears for their children. We worry they will be knocked over by a car, or snatched like little Madeleine McCann. I now look at my daughter and wonder whether her future will be in some way proscribed by the colour of her skin? And, if I, her own mother, am already so acutely aware of it, am I not already narrowing her horizons for her?

I console myself that my swirling emotions are part of a process. I am coming to terms with my daughter's existence in exactly the same way I had to process the reality of having first one son, then another, when I had always imagined myself the mother of girls. I am now quite good at building Bionicles, but I had to get over my grief at the loss of the pink, girly fantasy first.

Part of the grief I am going through with my daughter is the loss of the possibility that she will look like me. Both mothers and fathers, not to mention grandmothers and grandfathers, routinely bend over the crib, examining a newborn's face for some sign of their own genetic heritage. People say my daughter has my eyes or my mouth, but I know they are just trying to be kind. She looks as similar to me as I do to Naomi Campbell. I didn't expect this to matter to me, but it does. I look at my baby and wonder if people will look at her and assume I am not her mother?

I realise that this is a deeply shallow and vain thing to say.

There is also an inescapable issue of status. Judgments are made about a white woman who gives birth to a black child. She is stereotyped as a Vicky Pollard figure, eking out her days pushing a buggy through a supermarket car park, wearing saggy leggings and fagging it. This image has been captured on screen by Kathy Burke as Waynetta Slob, who memorably declared that she wanted her very own "little brown baby" just like all the other mums she knew on the estate. Am I one of these women now? Apparently, yes - particularly since I am now a single parent, having split up from my daughter's father.

Similar judgments are made about white women who go out with black men. When I was dating the man who my mother wanted to hear was "nice", he helped me carry some luggage into a taxi and then got in. The driver asked me incredulously: "Is he coming with you?" as if he was some sort of porter. Black women had a habit of looking daggers at me in the street. But it's not until you have a baby with someone of a different colour that you feel the full weight of the judgment of strangers.

While I genuinely don't think that my not being Indian was a factor that counted against me with my husband or his family, I did underestimate the difference between our cultural backgrounds when we were first together. Our daughter will have to cope with being the product of two very different cultures. She will have to negotiate her own cultural identity, and I know too little to really help her.

I am intending to leave the Indian side of my daughter's upbringing to my in-laws. This may seem a cop out, but, frankly, I'm too knackered to do otherwise. If I had adopted her, social services would probably whip her away. However, working and bringing up three children, I haven't the energy to learn Hindi or make my own lassi.

So, what is the future for my multi-coloured family? We may look a bit peculiar, but we love each other. I parked the car at the petrol station the other day and, when I returned from paying, I saw my four-year-old asleep, with his head slumped sideways so that it rested, face down, at his sister's feet in her car seat. His seven-year-old brother was lying on the other side of my daughter, the thumb of one hand in his mouth, the other hand holding a bottle, feeding her. I thought how natural it all looked.

When I had my sons, I knew it was my job, as a parent, to help them learn about the world. With my daughter, it is she who is teaching me fundamental lessons about myself, even if not all of them are comfortable.


and an article on the race/mixed-race issue in the new york times

Editorial Observer: Contemplations on Being of Mixed Race in America

By EDUARDO PORTER
Published: August 10, 2008

As a multiracial and somewhat foreign person I have on occasion found myself on the receiving end of the same kind of unease that many Americans seem to have about Barack Obama’s ambiguous identity. He is either not black enough or too black. His name sounds odd. He had a weird childhood with kids who didn’t speak English.

Mr. Obama is not just politically atypical. He is unusual demographically. A recent paper by economists from Harvard, Yale and the University of Chicago said that in 2000 only one in 70 births in the United States came from mixed, black-white parents. In the 1980s it was one in 200. In the 1960s, when Mr. Obama was born, there were virtually none.

Black-white teens are so rare today, the researchers argued, that they feel they have to engage in more risky behavior to be accepted by others: drink more, fight more, steal more, do illegal drugs more than either blacks or whites — a pattern of behavior known to social scientists as the “marginal man.”

Perhaps this is true. Yet I would suggest that these outcomes say more about the context in which American multiracial kids grow up than about the kids themselves. The United States practices cleanly defined racial slotting.

I’m not an avid TV watcher, but when I watch, the black man gets the black woman and whites date whites. I have yet to see an ad with a mixed-race family. Whites marry blacks, but rarely. Over all, 5.7 percent of married couples in 2000 crossed racial boundaries.

The American approach to race is unique, in a way. In Brazil, with a history of slavery and racism as brutal as America’s, some 39 percent of the people define themselves as mixed race or “pardos.” By contrast, when the United States census in 2000 first allowed respondents to tick as many racial boxes as they wanted, only 2.4 percent ticked more than one. Never mind that genetic testing suggests a great deal of intermixing between Americans of African and European decent.

The son of a tallish, white father from Chicago and a short, brown Mexican mother of European and Indian blood, I’m not the same mix as Obama. As a colleague recently told me, I “read white.” Growing up in Mexico City, where power and skin color correlate at least as well as in the United States, I led a privileged existence. Still, being a mix was never an issue; most of my peers were too.

This is not to suggest Mexico has dealt with race any better. Racism just took different forms. European colonizers of modern-day Latin America encouraged the whitening of Indians and blacks. In the century after independence, ethnic loyalties were subsumed under a mixed Mexican identity as a way to merge Europeans and pre-Columbian indigenous nations into a modern Mexican state.

Today the Mexican census doesn’t even ask about race, and it only started asking about indigenous ethnicity in 2000. José Vasconcelos, a politician and philosopher, wrote in the 1920s that Mexicans were of the “cosmic race” — that which included all others. Yet Mexico’s state-sanctioned mestizo identity allowed its rulers to ignore its beleaguered indigenous populations — virtually defining them out of existence.

In the United States by contrast, racially inspired policies, whether they resulted in Jim Crow laws or affirmative action, fueled an urge to define and redefine hard racial boundaries. Close attention to race has forced uncomfortable issues of racial inequity into public debate, but has also gotten in the way of embracing a blended racial identity.

Fortunately, Americans seem to be slowly becoming more comfortable with racial intermingling. Newer immigrant groups with different experiences of race are already chipping away at the racial divide. About 10 percent of Asian Americans ticked two or more race boxes in the 2000 census. More than 15 percent of Hispanics marry non-Hispanics. And Hispanics are so confused about American racial categories that half of them can’t find an appropriate race box on the census form and tick “other race” instead.

For all the mistrust of Mr. Obama’s ancestry and ethnicity, he might even help this trend along, allowing blacks and whites to take a fresh look at each other. Then maybe people like me won’t need to engage in extreme behaviors to fit in.

Poem: Where Broccoli Comes From

Where Broccoli Comes From

Not many people know
that broccoli grows in the armpits
of very big green men
who live in the forest
and brave broccoli cutters
go deep into the forests
and they creep up on the
very big green men.
They wait for the
very big green men
to fall asleep
and the broccoli cutters
get out their
great big broccoli razors
and they shave the
armpits
of the very big green men.
And that’s where broccoli
comes from.
Not many people know that.

Just thought I’d let you know.


Michael Rosen

While clearing out...

... I found some notes I had taken from way back when doing my History GCSE (more than a decade ago now), and found something I had noted down from a textbook - probably an advertisement from the time of prohibition in the United States:

'Ordinary law abiding citizens began to break the law by drinking:
" 'Come in and take a drop?' The first drop led to other drops. He dropped his position, he dropped his respectability, he dropped his fortune, he dropped his friends, he dropped finally all his prospects in this life, and his hopes for eternity; and then came the last drop on the gallows. BEWARE OF THE FIRST DROP."

Unfortunately, I don't know which textbook my teenage self noted this down from, or what the original source was, but an interesting take on the impact of alcohol, from early in the 20th century.

Back to the Facebook phenomenon...

... which I still find freaky.

An excerpt from the Guardian

Eric Schmidt, Google chief executive, recently reiterated his suggestion that internet users may one day be able to change their identities in order to distance themselves from personal information shared so freely in their formative years. "I don't believe society understands what happens when everything is available, knowable and recorded by everyone all the time," he told the Wall Street Journal.

Zuckerberg takes a different tack. "You have one identity. The days of you having a different image for your work friends or co-workers and for the other people you know are probably coming to an end pretty quickly … Having two identities for yourself is an example of a lack of integrity," he was quoted as saying in David Kirkpatrick's book, The Facebook Effect.

Guardian - issues of facebook and privacy in the technological age

For me, this indicates that either Zuckerberg is behaving like a businessman and defending his business against logic, or that he really does not understand that as you get older, do different things, and interact with different people, it is perfectly normal and natural to behave slightly differently to different people, and exhibit different facets of your personality in different situations. Of course, we have one identity. But not in the way Zuckerberg either understands it, or cleverly chooses to state it. There is no lack of integrity in behaving in one way with close family members and friends, having more private and in-depth conversations, and in a more superficial (but no less polite) way with acquantices or collegues. Not everyone needs to know everything about everyone one. And only the abnormally nosy (and those who potentially lack integrity) would want to have to have that level and depth of information on so many individuals.

Never understood taxes...

Tax code introductions


The three types of tax code
Suffix codes
One or more numbers followed by L, P, T, or Y Example: 345L, 456P or 0T The number plus ‘9’ is the amount of pay an employee can earn from you in a tax year before they pay any tax. For example a tax code 508L means the employee is entitled to £5,089 of tax-free pay in the tax year.
The letter determines how we’ll ask you to adjust the number part of the code to take account of any Budget changes that may affect the employee’s tax-free pay.
Prefix codes
Start with D or K Example D0 or K123 The code D0 means you must deduct tax at the higher rate from all pay.
The letter K means your employee has already used their tax-free allowances for the year. The number plus ‘9’ indicates how much must be added to their taxable income to make sure they pay tax on all the taxable income they have received. This may mean you end up deducting tax from their pay at higher rates than normal.
For example, K123 means £1,239 needs to be added to their taxable income to ensure they pay the right tax.
Letter only codes
BR or NT BR means you must deduct tax at the basic rate from all their pay.
NT means you mustn't deduct any tax from their pay.
Note: Only refund any tax deducted from an employee before the issue of an NT code when HMRC tells you to operate it on a cumulative basis.

DIY accounting


HMRC tax guidance for doctors

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