Some random articles and editorials
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conuly
Families’ Every Fuss, Archived and Analyzed
Families’ Every Fuss, Archived and Analyzed
By BENEDICT CAREY
LOS ANGELES — “Get your jacket.”
Dad, shoulders slumped, face grave, is standing over his 8-year-old, trying to get the boy out the door. The youngster shifts, ducks, stalls; he wants the jacket brought to him.
“Get your jacket.”
The boy stalls more, and Dad’s mouth tightens.
“Get. Your. Jacket.”
The boy loses it. “You’re always acting like a control freak!” he cries, turning to throw himself on the couch. “I’m not calling you names or anything, but you’re a control freak.”
At a conference here this month, more than 70 social scientists gathered to bring to a close one of the most unusual, and oddly voyeuristic, anthropological studies ever conceived. From 2002 to 2005, before reality TV ruled the earth, researchers at the University of California, Los Angeles, laboriously recruited 32 local families, videotaping nearly every waking, at-home moment during a week — including the Jacket Standoff.
Filmmakers have turned a lens on the minutiae of unscripted domestic life before, perhaps most famously in “The Osbournes” on MTV and the 1970s PBS program “An American Family.”
But the U.C.L.A. project was an effort to capture a relatively new sociological species: the dual-earner, multiple-child, middle-class American household. The investigators have just finished working through the 1,540 hours of videotape, coding and categorizing every hug, every tantrum, every soul-draining search for a missing soccer cleat.
“This is the richest, most detailed, most complete database of middle-class family living in the world,” said Thomas S. Weisner, a professor of anthropology at U.C.L.A. who was not involved in the research. “What it does is hold up a mirror to people. They laugh. They cringe. It shows us life as it is actually lived.”
The study captured a thin slice of Los Angeles’s diversity, including two black families, one Latino, one Japanese, and some ethnically mixed couples, as well as two households with gay, male parents. The families lived, most of them, well outside the city’s tonier ZIP codes, in places like La Crescenta, east, and Westchester, near the airport.
After more than $9 million and untold thousands of hours of video watching, they have found that, well, life in these trenches is exactly what it looks like: a fire shower of stress, multitasking and mutual nitpicking. And the researchers found plenty to nitpick themselves.
Mothers still do most of the housework, spending 27 percent of their time on it, on average, compared with 18 percent for fathers and 3 percent for children (giving an allowance made no difference).
Husbands and wives were together alone in the house only about 10 percent of their waking time, on average, and the entire family was gathered in one room about 14 percent of the time. Stress levels soared — yet families spent very little time in the most soothing, uncluttered area of the home, the yard.
“I call it the new math,” said Kathleen Christensen of the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, which financed the project. “Two people. Three full-time jobs.” Parents learned on the fly, she said — and it showed.
Dual-earner households with children have existed for years, especially in lower-income neighborhoods. But the numbers have jumped in recent decades, to 46 percent of families with children in 2008 from 36 percent in 1975.
Lyn Repath-Martos and her husband, Antonio, know all about it. With two children, ages 5 and 8, two full-time jobs outside the house and a mortgage, they qualified for the study in 2002. For $1,000, they filled out a sheaf of questionnaires, sat for in-depth interviews and allowed a small film crew into their 943-square-foot house east of Los Angeles to record every moment.
One researcher roamed the house with a handheld computer, noting each family member’s location and activities at 10-minute intervals.
“I would never volunteer for a reality series,” said Ms. Repath-Martos, an administrator at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory. “But I was curious. And I thought that — well, this is going to sound crazy — I thought that it wouldn’t be that invasive.”
The initial sensation was one of being studied by anthropologists.
“I was in the kitchen making kids lunches, the cameras were rolling, and I thought, ‘O.K., observe how this is done.’ ” said another study participant, Aaron Spicker, a businessman who lives in Redondo Beach with his wife, Merrill, a corporate finance specialist, and two daughters.
But after a while, they said, family members shrugged off the cameras and relaxed.
The same cannot be said of the fieldworkers, most of them childless graduate students seeing combat for the first time. “The very purest form of birth control ever devised. Ever,” said one, Anthony P. Graesch, a postdoctoral fellow, about the experience. (Dr. Graesch and his wife have just had their second child.)
In one house, Dr. Graesch was recording locations when an escalating argument threatened to get ugly. He bailed out for air and continued to track people inside by peeking through the windows. “Luckily it was a one-story bungalow,” he said.
In weekly meetings, the researchers discussed what they were witnessing.
“Every time we met, I felt like I was on the defensive,” said Tamar Kremer-Sadlik, the research director, who herself has two children and a working husband. “I mean, it’s not like I approved of everything these parents were doing. But I could relate to them. I knew exactly what they were going through.”
Continual negotiations, for one. Parents generally were so flexible in dividing up chores and child-care responsibilities — “catch as catch can,” one dad described it — that many boundaries were left unclear, adding to the stress.
The couples who reported the least stress tended to have rigid divisions of labor, whether equal or not. “She does the inside work, and I do all the outside, and we don’t interfere” with each other, said one husband.
The videotapes reveal parents as at-home teachers, enforcing homework deadlines. As coaches and personal trainers, sorting through piles of equipment. As camp directors, planning play dates and weekend “family time.”
“The coordination it takes, it’s more complicated than a theater production,” said Elinor Ochs, the U.C.L.A. linguistic anthropologist who led the study. “And there are no rehearsals.”
In addition to housework, mothers spent 19 percent of their time talking with family members or on the phone, and 11 percent taking occasional breathers that the study classified as “leisure.” The rates for fathers were 20 percent chatting, and 23 percent leisure — again, taken in fragments.
Still, parents also had large amounts of solo time with their children, a total of 34 percent for mothers and 25 percent for fathers, on average.
Half the fathers in the study spent as much or more time as their spouse alone with at least one child when at home, and were more likely to be engaged in some activity, like playing in the backyard, the study found. Mothers were more likely to be watching TV with a child.
Occasionally, camera crews caught family members spitting into a small vial. This, too, was a part of the study: Researchers measured levels of a stress hormone called cortisol in the saliva, four times a day.
These cortisol profiles provided biological backing for a familiar frustration in many marriages. The more that women engaged with their husbands in the evening, talking about the day, the faster their cortisol dropped. But the men’s levels tapered more slowly when talking with a spouse. (A previous generation’s solution: “cocktail hour”).
Inside, the homes, researchers found rooms crammed with toys, DVDs, videos, books, exercise machines; refrigerators buried in magnets; and other odds and ends. The clutter on the fridge door tended to predict the amount of clutter elsewhere.
Outside the homes, the yards were open and green — but “no one was out there,” said Jeanne E. Arnold, a U.C.L.A. archaeologist who worked on the study. One family had a 17,000-square-foot yard, with a pool and a trampoline, and not even the children ventured out there during the study.
That, of course, would mean leaving the house, which is not always as simple as it sounds.
At the door, having found his jacket, the 8-year-old in the video flops to the floor and is demanding that someone tie his shoes.
Now Mom joins Dad, hovering over the boy, hands on hips, giving him the same hairy eyeball as her husband. Hours seem to pass as the youngster struggles with his laces, his jacket sleeves, his attitude. Finally Dad caves in, and drops to the floor to help him out.
And then, just like that — through some combination of stubbornness, patience and dumb love — it is over. The clothes are on, the door swings open, and father and son go out, into the world.
Moonshine or the Kids?
Moonshine or the Kids?
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF
MONT-BELO, Congo Republic
There’s an ugly secret of global poverty, one rarely acknowledged by aid groups or U.N. reports. It’s a blunt truth that is politically incorrect, heartbreaking, frustrating and ubiquitous:
It’s that if the poorest families spent as much money educating their children as they do on wine, cigarettes and prostitutes, their children’s prospects would be transformed. Much suffering is caused not only by low incomes, but also by shortsighted private spending decisions by heads of households.
That probably sounds sanctimonious, haughty and callous, but it’s been on my mind while traveling through central Africa with a college student on my annual win-a-trip journey. Here in this Congolese village of Mont-Belo, we met a bright fourth grader, Jovali Obamza, who is about to be expelled from school because his family is three months behind in paying fees. (In theory, public school is free in the Congo Republic. In fact, every single school we visited charges fees.)
We asked to see Jovali’s parents. The dad, Georges Obamza, who weaves straw stools that he sells for $1 each, is unmistakably very poor. He said that the family is eight months behind on its $6-a-month rent and is in danger of being evicted, with nowhere to go.
The Obamzas have no mosquito net, even though they have already lost two of their eight children to malaria. They say they just can’t afford the $6 cost of a net. Nor can they afford the $2.50-a-month tuition for each of their three school-age kids.
“It’s hard to get the money to send the kids to school,” Mr. Obamza explained, a bit embarrassed.
But Mr. Obamza and his wife, Valerie, do have cellphones and say they spend a combined $10 a month on call time.
In addition, Mr. Obamza goes drinking several times a week at a village bar, spending about $1 an evening on moonshine. By his calculation, that adds up to about $12 a month — almost as much as the family rent and school fees combined.
I asked Mr. Obamza why he prioritizes alcohol over educating his kids. He looked pained.
Other villagers said that Mr. Obamza drinks less than the average man in the village (women drink far less). Many other men drink every evening, they said, and also spend money on cigarettes.
“If possible, I drink every day,” Fulbert Mfouna, a 43-year-old whose children have also had to drop out or repeat grades for lack of school fees, said forthrightly. His eldest son, Jude, is still in first grade after repeating for five years because of nonpayment of fees. Meanwhile, Mr. Mfouna acknowledged spending $2 a day on alcohol and cigarettes.
Traditionally, a young man here might have paid his wife’s family a “bride price” of a pair of goats. Now the “bride price” starts with oversized jugs of wine and two bottles of whiskey.
Two M.I.T. economists, Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo, found that the world’s poor typically spend about 2 percent of their income educating their children, and often larger percentages on alcohol and tobacco: 4 percent in rural Papua New Guinea, 6 percent in Indonesia, 8 percent in Mexico. The indigent also spend significant sums on soft drinks, prostitution and extravagant festivals.
Look, I don’t want to be an unctuous party-pooper. But I’ve seen too many children dying of malaria for want of a bed net that the father tells me is unaffordable, even as he spends larger sums on liquor. If we want Mr. Obamza’s children to get an education and sleep under a bed net — well, the simplest option is for their dad to spend fewer evenings in the bar.
Because there’s mounting evidence that mothers are more likely than fathers to spend money educating their kids, one solution is to give women more control over purse strings and more legal title to assets. Some aid groups and U.N. agencies are working on that.
Another approach is microsavings, helping poor people save money when banks aren’t interested in them. It’s becoming increasingly clear that the most powerful part of microfinance isn’t microlending but microsavings.
Microsavings programs, organized by CARE and other organizations, work to turn a consumption culture into a savings culture. The programs often keep household savings in the women’s names, to give mothers more say in spending decisions, and I’ve seen them work in Africa, Latin America and Asia.
Well-meaning humanitarians sometimes burnish suffering to make it seem more virtuous and noble than it often is. If we’re going to make more progress, and get kids like the Obamza children in school and under bed nets, we need to look unflinchingly at uncomfortable truths — and then try to redirect the family money now spent on wine and prostitution.
Confronting Blame-the-Worker Safety Programs
Wealth gap grows between black and white Americans
Another link is here
Disabled Athletes Defy an Unaccommodating City
MOSCOW — The last of winter’s snow had not fully melted, but Sergei Shilov was already racing down a makeshift track, preparing for an array of summer athletic events. With his track and field training, he had barely had time to celebrate the two gold medals for cross-country skiing he won in Vancouver this year.
Having competed in almost every major athletic competition — both summer and winter — since the early 1990s, Mr. Shilov, 39, is one of Russia’s most decorated athletes. Yet few in this sports-obsessed country have ever heard of him.
Mr. Shilov, who is paralyzed from the waist down, is a member of Russia’s Paralympic team, which over the years has come to dominate high-level international competitions, even as the fortunes of Russia’s main national team have steadily declined.
While the Russian Olympic team brought home a paltry three gold medals from Vancouver — along with plenty of excuses — the Paralympians dominated, taking first place with 38 medals, including 12 golds, all without the lavish financing the government provides the main squad.
The feat, achieved half a world away from home, was all the more impressive considering that many disabled people here have a hard time just getting out the front door.
A lack of ramps and elevators and minimal access to public transportation means that only the hardiest of those with physical disabilities can leave their homes on their own, let alone keep up with the rigorous training regimen and travel schedule of a successful athletic team.
“We are used to fighting,” Mr. Shilov said. “Fighting, firstly, for our survival against staircases and other barriers.”
At a practice last month, Mr. Shilov and his teammates had to avoid cars and pedestrians walking dogs while doing laps in their wheelchairs in the parking lot that serves as their training center for summer sports.
Even getting to practice can be a workout. Athletes without cars have to hoist themselves up and down the stairs of subway stations and underground crossings.
The Moscow government’s attempts to make the city more accessible for disabled people in recent years “have turned out horribly,” said Natalya Bakhmatova, from the Moscow-based disabled rights group Perspektiva.
There are new ramps on street corners and in front of businesses, but many are either too narrow or too steep for wheelchairs, she said. A few buses are equipped with lifts for passengers in wheelchairs, but the bus drivers often refuse to operate them. Wheelchair elevators built in some new subway stations are frequently locked or out of order. And sirens or buzzers to alert the blind that it is safe to cross roads are little help in a city where many disregard traffic signals.
Since the Paralympic team’s success, the Russian government has vowed to do more to ease the lives of the country’s disabled, efforts that will be under scrutiny as Russia prepares to hold the 2014 Winter Olympics and Paralympics in Sochi, a resort town on the Black Sea.
“We have many disabled people in this country,” Mr. Shilov said. “Many who simply cannot leave their homes, to descend five to six steps, and who don’t know that it is possible to play sports or do anything else.”
Despite the obstacles — or perhaps because of them — Russia’s Paralympians have been wildly successful.
In the Winter Games, Russian athletes have excelled since the Soviet collapse first gave them the opportunity to leave the country for international competitions. In the Russian team’s first Paralympics in Albertville, France, in 1992, it came in third in the medal count, trailing the United States and Germany. Since then, the team has been shut out of the top three only once in the Winter Games.
“I don’t know specifically what the Russians are doing,” said Charlie Huebner, the chief of Paralympics for the United States Olympic Committee. “But obviously they’ve been doing a great job both developing their Nordic program and their biathlon program. Just unbelievably outstanding performances.”
Just over two decades ago, in the waning years of the Soviet Union, Mr. Shilov was a teenager coming to grips with the prospect of spending the rest of his life in a wheelchair after a car accident. He had always wanted to be an athlete, but in a country that idolized physical prowess, disabled people were anathema and rarely seen on the street, let alone in athletic competitions.
The Soviet collapse opened the door to competition, but with almost no support from the government or corporate sponsors, Russia’s early Paralympians supported themselves, relying on hand-me-down racing wheelchairs and other equipment from western European athletes they met at competitions, athletes said.
Success eventually prompted the government to take notice. After the team took first place in the 2006 Winter Games in Turin, Italy, Prime Minister Vladimir V. Putin, then Russia’s president, signed a decree making cash prizes awarded by the government to medal winners equal for Olympians and Paralympians.
Also under Mr. Putin, a black belt in judo who has made athletic development a national priority, the government increased training stipends for disabled athletes, as well as money for foreign travel.
While the Olympic team’s poor performance in Vancouver this year was considered by many Russian leaders to be a national embarrassment, the Paralympians’ success provided some unexpected solace. At a ceremony for the Paralympians at the Kremlin in April, President Dmitri A. Medvedev gushed.
“It was so nice to watch and cheer for you, especially since the Olympics held earlier, evoked such ambiguous emotions,” Mr. Medvedev said. “You are all simply fantastic! It is just nice to say that once again.”
Mr. Medvedev acknowledged that disabled people had it rough in Russia, and he promised to allocate funds to develop rehabilitation centers and athletic infrastructure.
For now, however, the Moscow parking lot is sufficient for Akzhana Abdikarimova, who on a recent day was learning how to use the team’s bright yellow racing wheelchair. It was her third training session with the team, which allows those with no athletic experience, like Ms. Abdikarimova, to come to workouts.
“It is really interesting, of course, this feeling of freedom,” she said.
Just over a month ago, Ms. Abdikarimova, 26, was unemployed and wondering what to do with her life. She said she heard about the success of the Paralympic team in Vancouver and decided to give sports a try at her mother’s urging.
“We read about their successes, and were happy for them,” she said. “God willing, I will also have something to cheer about.”
And finally, an article on lying kids
Families’ Every Fuss, Archived and Analyzed
By BENEDICT CAREY
LOS ANGELES — “Get your jacket.”
Dad, shoulders slumped, face grave, is standing over his 8-year-old, trying to get the boy out the door. The youngster shifts, ducks, stalls; he wants the jacket brought to him.
“Get your jacket.”
The boy stalls more, and Dad’s mouth tightens.
“Get. Your. Jacket.”
The boy loses it. “You’re always acting like a control freak!” he cries, turning to throw himself on the couch. “I’m not calling you names or anything, but you’re a control freak.”
At a conference here this month, more than 70 social scientists gathered to bring to a close one of the most unusual, and oddly voyeuristic, anthropological studies ever conceived. From 2002 to 2005, before reality TV ruled the earth, researchers at the University of California, Los Angeles, laboriously recruited 32 local families, videotaping nearly every waking, at-home moment during a week — including the Jacket Standoff.
Filmmakers have turned a lens on the minutiae of unscripted domestic life before, perhaps most famously in “The Osbournes” on MTV and the 1970s PBS program “An American Family.”
But the U.C.L.A. project was an effort to capture a relatively new sociological species: the dual-earner, multiple-child, middle-class American household. The investigators have just finished working through the 1,540 hours of videotape, coding and categorizing every hug, every tantrum, every soul-draining search for a missing soccer cleat.
“This is the richest, most detailed, most complete database of middle-class family living in the world,” said Thomas S. Weisner, a professor of anthropology at U.C.L.A. who was not involved in the research. “What it does is hold up a mirror to people. They laugh. They cringe. It shows us life as it is actually lived.”
The study captured a thin slice of Los Angeles’s diversity, including two black families, one Latino, one Japanese, and some ethnically mixed couples, as well as two households with gay, male parents. The families lived, most of them, well outside the city’s tonier ZIP codes, in places like La Crescenta, east, and Westchester, near the airport.
After more than $9 million and untold thousands of hours of video watching, they have found that, well, life in these trenches is exactly what it looks like: a fire shower of stress, multitasking and mutual nitpicking. And the researchers found plenty to nitpick themselves.
Mothers still do most of the housework, spending 27 percent of their time on it, on average, compared with 18 percent for fathers and 3 percent for children (giving an allowance made no difference).
Husbands and wives were together alone in the house only about 10 percent of their waking time, on average, and the entire family was gathered in one room about 14 percent of the time. Stress levels soared — yet families spent very little time in the most soothing, uncluttered area of the home, the yard.
“I call it the new math,” said Kathleen Christensen of the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, which financed the project. “Two people. Three full-time jobs.” Parents learned on the fly, she said — and it showed.
Dual-earner households with children have existed for years, especially in lower-income neighborhoods. But the numbers have jumped in recent decades, to 46 percent of families with children in 2008 from 36 percent in 1975.
Lyn Repath-Martos and her husband, Antonio, know all about it. With two children, ages 5 and 8, two full-time jobs outside the house and a mortgage, they qualified for the study in 2002. For $1,000, they filled out a sheaf of questionnaires, sat for in-depth interviews and allowed a small film crew into their 943-square-foot house east of Los Angeles to record every moment.
One researcher roamed the house with a handheld computer, noting each family member’s location and activities at 10-minute intervals.
“I would never volunteer for a reality series,” said Ms. Repath-Martos, an administrator at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory. “But I was curious. And I thought that — well, this is going to sound crazy — I thought that it wouldn’t be that invasive.”
The initial sensation was one of being studied by anthropologists.
“I was in the kitchen making kids lunches, the cameras were rolling, and I thought, ‘O.K., observe how this is done.’ ” said another study participant, Aaron Spicker, a businessman who lives in Redondo Beach with his wife, Merrill, a corporate finance specialist, and two daughters.
But after a while, they said, family members shrugged off the cameras and relaxed.
The same cannot be said of the fieldworkers, most of them childless graduate students seeing combat for the first time. “The very purest form of birth control ever devised. Ever,” said one, Anthony P. Graesch, a postdoctoral fellow, about the experience. (Dr. Graesch and his wife have just had their second child.)
In one house, Dr. Graesch was recording locations when an escalating argument threatened to get ugly. He bailed out for air and continued to track people inside by peeking through the windows. “Luckily it was a one-story bungalow,” he said.
In weekly meetings, the researchers discussed what they were witnessing.
“Every time we met, I felt like I was on the defensive,” said Tamar Kremer-Sadlik, the research director, who herself has two children and a working husband. “I mean, it’s not like I approved of everything these parents were doing. But I could relate to them. I knew exactly what they were going through.”
Continual negotiations, for one. Parents generally were so flexible in dividing up chores and child-care responsibilities — “catch as catch can,” one dad described it — that many boundaries were left unclear, adding to the stress.
The couples who reported the least stress tended to have rigid divisions of labor, whether equal or not. “She does the inside work, and I do all the outside, and we don’t interfere” with each other, said one husband.
The videotapes reveal parents as at-home teachers, enforcing homework deadlines. As coaches and personal trainers, sorting through piles of equipment. As camp directors, planning play dates and weekend “family time.”
“The coordination it takes, it’s more complicated than a theater production,” said Elinor Ochs, the U.C.L.A. linguistic anthropologist who led the study. “And there are no rehearsals.”
In addition to housework, mothers spent 19 percent of their time talking with family members or on the phone, and 11 percent taking occasional breathers that the study classified as “leisure.” The rates for fathers were 20 percent chatting, and 23 percent leisure — again, taken in fragments.
Still, parents also had large amounts of solo time with their children, a total of 34 percent for mothers and 25 percent for fathers, on average.
Half the fathers in the study spent as much or more time as their spouse alone with at least one child when at home, and were more likely to be engaged in some activity, like playing in the backyard, the study found. Mothers were more likely to be watching TV with a child.
Occasionally, camera crews caught family members spitting into a small vial. This, too, was a part of the study: Researchers measured levels of a stress hormone called cortisol in the saliva, four times a day.
These cortisol profiles provided biological backing for a familiar frustration in many marriages. The more that women engaged with their husbands in the evening, talking about the day, the faster their cortisol dropped. But the men’s levels tapered more slowly when talking with a spouse. (A previous generation’s solution: “cocktail hour”).
Inside, the homes, researchers found rooms crammed with toys, DVDs, videos, books, exercise machines; refrigerators buried in magnets; and other odds and ends. The clutter on the fridge door tended to predict the amount of clutter elsewhere.
Outside the homes, the yards were open and green — but “no one was out there,” said Jeanne E. Arnold, a U.C.L.A. archaeologist who worked on the study. One family had a 17,000-square-foot yard, with a pool and a trampoline, and not even the children ventured out there during the study.
That, of course, would mean leaving the house, which is not always as simple as it sounds.
At the door, having found his jacket, the 8-year-old in the video flops to the floor and is demanding that someone tie his shoes.
Now Mom joins Dad, hovering over the boy, hands on hips, giving him the same hairy eyeball as her husband. Hours seem to pass as the youngster struggles with his laces, his jacket sleeves, his attitude. Finally Dad caves in, and drops to the floor to help him out.
And then, just like that — through some combination of stubbornness, patience and dumb love — it is over. The clothes are on, the door swings open, and father and son go out, into the world.
Moonshine or the Kids?
Moonshine or the Kids?
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF
MONT-BELO, Congo Republic
There’s an ugly secret of global poverty, one rarely acknowledged by aid groups or U.N. reports. It’s a blunt truth that is politically incorrect, heartbreaking, frustrating and ubiquitous:
It’s that if the poorest families spent as much money educating their children as they do on wine, cigarettes and prostitutes, their children’s prospects would be transformed. Much suffering is caused not only by low incomes, but also by shortsighted private spending decisions by heads of households.
That probably sounds sanctimonious, haughty and callous, but it’s been on my mind while traveling through central Africa with a college student on my annual win-a-trip journey. Here in this Congolese village of Mont-Belo, we met a bright fourth grader, Jovali Obamza, who is about to be expelled from school because his family is three months behind in paying fees. (In theory, public school is free in the Congo Republic. In fact, every single school we visited charges fees.)
We asked to see Jovali’s parents. The dad, Georges Obamza, who weaves straw stools that he sells for $1 each, is unmistakably very poor. He said that the family is eight months behind on its $6-a-month rent and is in danger of being evicted, with nowhere to go.
The Obamzas have no mosquito net, even though they have already lost two of their eight children to malaria. They say they just can’t afford the $6 cost of a net. Nor can they afford the $2.50-a-month tuition for each of their three school-age kids.
“It’s hard to get the money to send the kids to school,” Mr. Obamza explained, a bit embarrassed.
But Mr. Obamza and his wife, Valerie, do have cellphones and say they spend a combined $10 a month on call time.
In addition, Mr. Obamza goes drinking several times a week at a village bar, spending about $1 an evening on moonshine. By his calculation, that adds up to about $12 a month — almost as much as the family rent and school fees combined.
I asked Mr. Obamza why he prioritizes alcohol over educating his kids. He looked pained.
Other villagers said that Mr. Obamza drinks less than the average man in the village (women drink far less). Many other men drink every evening, they said, and also spend money on cigarettes.
“If possible, I drink every day,” Fulbert Mfouna, a 43-year-old whose children have also had to drop out or repeat grades for lack of school fees, said forthrightly. His eldest son, Jude, is still in first grade after repeating for five years because of nonpayment of fees. Meanwhile, Mr. Mfouna acknowledged spending $2 a day on alcohol and cigarettes.
Traditionally, a young man here might have paid his wife’s family a “bride price” of a pair of goats. Now the “bride price” starts with oversized jugs of wine and two bottles of whiskey.
Two M.I.T. economists, Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo, found that the world’s poor typically spend about 2 percent of their income educating their children, and often larger percentages on alcohol and tobacco: 4 percent in rural Papua New Guinea, 6 percent in Indonesia, 8 percent in Mexico. The indigent also spend significant sums on soft drinks, prostitution and extravagant festivals.
Look, I don’t want to be an unctuous party-pooper. But I’ve seen too many children dying of malaria for want of a bed net that the father tells me is unaffordable, even as he spends larger sums on liquor. If we want Mr. Obamza’s children to get an education and sleep under a bed net — well, the simplest option is for their dad to spend fewer evenings in the bar.
Because there’s mounting evidence that mothers are more likely than fathers to spend money educating their kids, one solution is to give women more control over purse strings and more legal title to assets. Some aid groups and U.N. agencies are working on that.
Another approach is microsavings, helping poor people save money when banks aren’t interested in them. It’s becoming increasingly clear that the most powerful part of microfinance isn’t microlending but microsavings.
Microsavings programs, organized by CARE and other organizations, work to turn a consumption culture into a savings culture. The programs often keep household savings in the women’s names, to give mothers more say in spending decisions, and I’ve seen them work in Africa, Latin America and Asia.
Well-meaning humanitarians sometimes burnish suffering to make it seem more virtuous and noble than it often is. If we’re going to make more progress, and get kids like the Obamza children in school and under bed nets, we need to look unflinchingly at uncomfortable truths — and then try to redirect the family money now spent on wine and prostitution.
Confronting Blame-the-Worker Safety Programs
Wealth gap grows between black and white Americans
Another link is here
Disabled Athletes Defy an Unaccommodating City
MOSCOW — The last of winter’s snow had not fully melted, but Sergei Shilov was already racing down a makeshift track, preparing for an array of summer athletic events. With his track and field training, he had barely had time to celebrate the two gold medals for cross-country skiing he won in Vancouver this year.
Having competed in almost every major athletic competition — both summer and winter — since the early 1990s, Mr. Shilov, 39, is one of Russia’s most decorated athletes. Yet few in this sports-obsessed country have ever heard of him.
Mr. Shilov, who is paralyzed from the waist down, is a member of Russia’s Paralympic team, which over the years has come to dominate high-level international competitions, even as the fortunes of Russia’s main national team have steadily declined.
While the Russian Olympic team brought home a paltry three gold medals from Vancouver — along with plenty of excuses — the Paralympians dominated, taking first place with 38 medals, including 12 golds, all without the lavish financing the government provides the main squad.
The feat, achieved half a world away from home, was all the more impressive considering that many disabled people here have a hard time just getting out the front door.
A lack of ramps and elevators and minimal access to public transportation means that only the hardiest of those with physical disabilities can leave their homes on their own, let alone keep up with the rigorous training regimen and travel schedule of a successful athletic team.
“We are used to fighting,” Mr. Shilov said. “Fighting, firstly, for our survival against staircases and other barriers.”
At a practice last month, Mr. Shilov and his teammates had to avoid cars and pedestrians walking dogs while doing laps in their wheelchairs in the parking lot that serves as their training center for summer sports.
Even getting to practice can be a workout. Athletes without cars have to hoist themselves up and down the stairs of subway stations and underground crossings.
The Moscow government’s attempts to make the city more accessible for disabled people in recent years “have turned out horribly,” said Natalya Bakhmatova, from the Moscow-based disabled rights group Perspektiva.
There are new ramps on street corners and in front of businesses, but many are either too narrow or too steep for wheelchairs, she said. A few buses are equipped with lifts for passengers in wheelchairs, but the bus drivers often refuse to operate them. Wheelchair elevators built in some new subway stations are frequently locked or out of order. And sirens or buzzers to alert the blind that it is safe to cross roads are little help in a city where many disregard traffic signals.
Since the Paralympic team’s success, the Russian government has vowed to do more to ease the lives of the country’s disabled, efforts that will be under scrutiny as Russia prepares to hold the 2014 Winter Olympics and Paralympics in Sochi, a resort town on the Black Sea.
“We have many disabled people in this country,” Mr. Shilov said. “Many who simply cannot leave their homes, to descend five to six steps, and who don’t know that it is possible to play sports or do anything else.”
Despite the obstacles — or perhaps because of them — Russia’s Paralympians have been wildly successful.
In the Winter Games, Russian athletes have excelled since the Soviet collapse first gave them the opportunity to leave the country for international competitions. In the Russian team’s first Paralympics in Albertville, France, in 1992, it came in third in the medal count, trailing the United States and Germany. Since then, the team has been shut out of the top three only once in the Winter Games.
“I don’t know specifically what the Russians are doing,” said Charlie Huebner, the chief of Paralympics for the United States Olympic Committee. “But obviously they’ve been doing a great job both developing their Nordic program and their biathlon program. Just unbelievably outstanding performances.”
Just over two decades ago, in the waning years of the Soviet Union, Mr. Shilov was a teenager coming to grips with the prospect of spending the rest of his life in a wheelchair after a car accident. He had always wanted to be an athlete, but in a country that idolized physical prowess, disabled people were anathema and rarely seen on the street, let alone in athletic competitions.
The Soviet collapse opened the door to competition, but with almost no support from the government or corporate sponsors, Russia’s early Paralympians supported themselves, relying on hand-me-down racing wheelchairs and other equipment from western European athletes they met at competitions, athletes said.
Success eventually prompted the government to take notice. After the team took first place in the 2006 Winter Games in Turin, Italy, Prime Minister Vladimir V. Putin, then Russia’s president, signed a decree making cash prizes awarded by the government to medal winners equal for Olympians and Paralympians.
Also under Mr. Putin, a black belt in judo who has made athletic development a national priority, the government increased training stipends for disabled athletes, as well as money for foreign travel.
While the Olympic team’s poor performance in Vancouver this year was considered by many Russian leaders to be a national embarrassment, the Paralympians’ success provided some unexpected solace. At a ceremony for the Paralympians at the Kremlin in April, President Dmitri A. Medvedev gushed.
“It was so nice to watch and cheer for you, especially since the Olympics held earlier, evoked such ambiguous emotions,” Mr. Medvedev said. “You are all simply fantastic! It is just nice to say that once again.”
Mr. Medvedev acknowledged that disabled people had it rough in Russia, and he promised to allocate funds to develop rehabilitation centers and athletic infrastructure.
For now, however, the Moscow parking lot is sufficient for Akzhana Abdikarimova, who on a recent day was learning how to use the team’s bright yellow racing wheelchair. It was her third training session with the team, which allows those with no athletic experience, like Ms. Abdikarimova, to come to workouts.
“It is really interesting, of course, this feeling of freedom,” she said.
Just over a month ago, Ms. Abdikarimova, 26, was unemployed and wondering what to do with her life. She said she heard about the success of the Paralympic team in Vancouver and decided to give sports a try at her mother’s urging.
“We read about their successes, and were happy for them,” she said. “God willing, I will also have something to cheer about.”
And finally, an article on lying kids
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no subject
Date: 2010-05-26 01:40 am (UTC)That seems to have worked for me. I distinctly remember learning not to lie as a child. I had made a lying promise about doing something in the immediate future, didn't do what I said I'd do, and then boasted about it. My mom took me aside and explained that if you lie even once, then people stop trusting you and don't trust you even when you tell the truth; I was probably punished as well, but it's the explanation that I remember, and it was very effective. I determined then and there that I would not lie any more, and since then have almost never lied with forethought. Several of my friends have been surprised by my story of how I learnt not to lie, because they assumed my strict truthfulness was an innate quirk, and that I'd just never learnt to lie.
no subject
Date: 2010-05-25 06:11 am (UTC)Perhaps part of what is needed are cheaper alternatives for entertainment and stress relief. Ideally something that also allows the moms some relaxation too, because I suspect the women are just getting totally shafted in this setup.
I don't really support parents not making their kids a priority, but when birth control isn't very feasible, and I doubt it's very feasible for them, then having kids is less of a choice, which makes it much less reasonable to expect parents to prioritize their children to as large of an extent. I much prefer that parenting always be a choice. But that'd require a whole host of changes too.