The upside-down saucepan

I met a Kenyan Englishman here in Kenya. That is, he's a third generation Kenyan, with all English descending ancestors. Very interesting fellow.

In the evening, we were looking at the stars and satellites above. It was a lovely, clear night for stargazing, as are most nights in that place, he assured me.

I told him about the stellar constellation that in Sweden we call something like "Charles' wagon" or "Charles' stroller", which in English is often called "the saucepan". It had just risen over the horizon, upside-down as always in this part of the world. I told him how in old Sweden, people used to use it as a rough measure of time, since it is always visible in the sky, so long as it's dark enough. It never sets, it just rolls like a baby stroller around the northern star, much like the hands of a clock. Though a counterclockwise clock. I added:
"And it never looks upside-down like this! That's one of the weirdest things about coming to Africa for the first time, the Charles' stroller being upside-down!!... Baby Charles will fall out!! It's one of those constants of the world suddenly no longer being constant!...
No, you see, in Sweden it's always up there", I pointed towards the zenith of the sky, right above us, "so you can choose to see it whatever way you like. So we always choose to see it as a stroller."
Suddenly my friend exclaimed:
"Oh that makes so much SENSE to me now!!....... You see, I always used to wonder: 'Why do they CALL it the saucepan when it's always upside-down?'. Now I get it!!
...I'm gonna make up a new name for it now!"



Oh how subtle, the long tentacles of colonialism... Calling a stellar constellation something in Africa, that only makes sense near the northern pole... Where the African would never have been, nor will ever go.
















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Ok, so the picture is from Chile and not from Kenya… You can tell, because it's pointing towards a Northern Star significantly below the horizon. Not ON the horizon, as it would be here on the equator… It was surprisingly hard finding a picture of the upside-down saucepan from Africa!

How I've changed in my foundation over the last few years

"May we all have our hopes, our will to try
If we don't, we might as well lay down and die"...

-ABBA

I think maybe I did that... Maybe I died.

Until I was 25, I lived like people expected me to live, more or less. Of course I was always unusual, no way to escape that, but in the large picture, I followed people's expectations.

Then at the age of 26, when I was in university, on my way to becoming an engineer, have a good job, get an intelligent husband and have a house, a car and 2 intelligent children, I suddenly fell out of the bubble and my world came tumbling down... I realized that this rich world that I'd been living in (Sweden) was an exception, both in the world right now and in time, and that it was possible only because it was living on the expense of others, both of the poor world today and of the whole world in future. And it hit me that I was not ok with this!! Not at all!...

I cried. I suffered immensely just going into a supermarket, and realizing how much exploitation of nature and poor people there was behind almost everything that was sold there, to us rich people. The evil behind it all was crushing me.

I thought I would die, but then I found my salvation in escaping the bubble, and in putting all of myself - all my powers, all my talents, all my time - into fighting for good, fighting the evil. At 27, I went to Africa, and I started working with a biogas project. It was meant to empower the poor and save the forest, all at once. It's how I survived, but not only that: I felt more alive than I ever had before! Finally doing things that nobody had ever recommended or expected of me, I felt alive for the first time...

That's 12 years ago now. In that time, I've had two children in Sweden, with my Kenyan husband, and I felt I had to take a little break from saving the world outside, so that I could save my own family... The husband had so many problems, and bringing up children takes a lot of one's time and attention.

But then something else happened. The Green Party, which I had been a member of for 18 years, got into government and started doing everything wrong. Taking massive steps in the wrong direction, and calling it small steps in the right direction... It shocked me! And in the aftermath of that shock, I realized, among other things, that for 20 years, I had been paying extra for organic food, because the other food was destroying the planet and to me it was obvious that if it destroys our planet, we stop it... but it had come to nothing, because the others never followed! I was ok with being the first, I was ok with pulling a bit extra, but after TWENTY YEARS, organic food was still less than 10%... The others were still enjoying the money they saved by buying food on nature's expense, on other people's expense.

And my country closed its borders to refugees in the biggest refugee movement this world has ever seen... With the Green Party voting for it! Not even those 7% were with me!!...

Somehow, I think I died. I stopped breathing for a while. I felt that I had misunderstood everything... I had been trying to save the world, because I thought it was important to reduce suffering... but the world never wanted to be saved! It was fine, the way it was! I was the only one who minded, and that was my problem!... Even those refugees, they never cared for anybody else! They wanted us to save them, yeah, but had they grown up safe, they would have also closed the borders! Even those poor people, had they grown up rich, and I poor, they wouldn't have cared for me!... So why should I care for them?...

Nature is nature. It's cruel, and it's beautiful. Death is ever present. The majority of all living creatures on Earth die very young. Only some very few of them reach the age where it's even possible for them to have offspring. In Sweden, this is no longer true for humans... Most of them now live to old age, but that's an exception. One way or another, that will change again, back to the natural way.

Humans were never made for a life without suffering. Without grief. Without death ever present. I don't think it's good for us!...

12 years ago, I came to Africa for the first time, and I discovered something that we in Sweden must have lost. I discovered a joy, an appreciation of life, that Sweden didn't have. It surprised me, and it puzzled me... Eventually, I started asking myself if it was the proximity to death and suffering that was the cause...?

And now I've reached the conclusion that yes, to a large extent, it is. I now live in Kenya since August 2017, and I still feel so much more alive, so much happier, so much better than I ever did in Sweden. I sell biogas digesters. Thus I'm still empowering the poor and saving forest, but only because it gives me satisfaction, and because that's where I now have my expertise. I always felt enjoyment in clever ideas and beautiful solutions, and biogas has all that. But I'll never again care like I did before. I'll no longer try to rid the world of death or suffering. What for? That wouldn't be an enjoyable world anyway! We were made for hardships, and we need some of that to be able to enjoy life. And pretty soon we all die anyway, and then none of it matters anymore. No matter how sweet or terrible our only life was, it will all have come to nothing.

Enjoy it while you can, if you can! And if you are among those who can, congratulations!

My previous life is over. I died... This is afterlife.

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Further reading:

A small bubble of peace and harmony

The US destroyed my world view

Around 9/11/2001 I was having a period of news fast (not consuming any news). I had found that it made me feel less down and stressed, and most often I learnt about the more interesting stuff anyway, through others. When I called my friend A that day, he said, agitated: "Oh yeah, you don't have a TV! You've got to get to a TV Karolina, it's like some totally freaked out action movie!!... Like Armageddon!"

When eventually I got to A's TV I remember Malou (famous Swedish anchorwoman) sitting in front of a big video screen, showing an air plane time after time flying into a skyscraper, while she was interviewing people with any distant connection to the US, and I found it tasteless. So I felt informed enough and left. (And little did I think then about how the towers fell, or why a plane would at all make a building collapse into a neat little pile of dust...)

A bit later I heard that now the US was going to start a war on Afghanistan. It could not be serious!!!, I thought. Why??? Apparently because they believed that he who had carried out the 9/11 attack was located there, but what did that have to do with this? If he had been hiding in New York, would they be bombing New York? Is this not a matter of police work, where innocent are left aside? What do they mean, "war"?!...

Up to that day my perception of the US was based mostly on TV series, like Friends and Full house. There people were nice and funny and said: "I love you daddy!" - "Aaaaaw!" and such things. They had their peculiarities but at large they were much like us (Swedes), rich, developed and therefore peaceful. Unconsciously I was harbouring a notion that war was something that belonged to the past. To the time before we became this civilised. The only reason there were still some wars here and there was that everybody had not yet achieved this degree of civilisation, but they would too eventually, and then all wars would end! Thus my mind turned itself into a knot, trying to understand the US's behaviour now!...

And it was in this connection that it finally came to my knowledge that the US never had been peaceful. That they had already bombed 26 countries after the 2nd world war. (The number of countries has not gone up between 2001 and now, only the number of bombings...) And thus they ruined my pretty, liniary writing of history that went from war to peace. Soon thereafter they enforced immunity to crimes of war for their soldiers in Irak, by threatening to otherwise sabotage a peace project in Bosnia with their veto. Shear kidnapping that is, because they had nothing against the peace project in Bosnia!... Etc. As if they were going out of their ways to make sure my naive, good perception of them would never be restored. And they succeeded.

So where was I now? The country that had been saluted as the great hero nation of the world, was acting like a rogue state! And was still saluted as heroes!!... By other countries that I also considered good, civilised and peaceful... My belief in the ultimate inner good of the world creeked in its foundations.



Now, many years later, I have come to a new analysis of the world. Apparently being rich and developed is not enough for a country to also be good. It's probably more true that money is power, and power always corrupts. Perhaps it can be said that wherever lots of money is involved, assaults will be made and suffering will occur. Diamond trade, sex trade, child adoption, trade between rich and poor countries,... And my new cure against this evil is now instead: The civil society! An involved and informed public that meddles in everything, and forces those in power to behave humanely. But even more importantly: Takes matters into their own hands and create good development wherever possible. Proving it possible by being an example.

It is the responsibility of every new generation to win back the power of the people!

Every note is a vote

A popular view these days seems to be that since it costs more to buy stuff labelled Fairtrade and Organic, let's call it ethical shopping, you can do more good for the world by not shopping ethically, and using the money that you get over for charity! Let us test that hypothesis by a little maths excercise:

Say that your household shops consumer goods for €400 per month, and that nothing of this is marked Organic or Fairtrade, and so is not ethical. If instead you would have bought all of it ethically, it would cost more. How much more depends on what you buy, but perhaps as much as 50%, say. So a total of €600. By not shopping your stuff ethically, you have thus saved €200 that you can now give to charity.

Wow, that much! That must really do good for the world!... one might think. But on the other hand, if you would have shopped all that stuff ethically, for €600, then every single € out of those 600 would have done good for the world. And that's even more.

In addition, let's not forget that by shopping unethically - which involves vedgetables that were grown with poisonous chemicals, animals brought up in stressful factories, clothes sown by child labor or grown-ups in appawling working conditions, without union rights and hardly any salary, etc - of course you also contribute to making the world worse. I mean, the chemical agriculture and the exploitation fo poor laborers don't exist for their own sake, but continue only so long as there are consumers left to sponsor these activities with their money. By laying your €600 on ethical shopping, you have thus not only put €600 in sponsoring good for the world, you have also avoided putting €400 in sponsoring bad for the world. The total difference for the world thus becomes no less than €1000 for the better! :D


So you see how big a difference it really makes where we place our votes, that is, our money! Many of you might donate some €10/month or so to Greenpeace or Amnesty, and that's of course nice of you, but how big a chunk is it out of your economy? Infinitesimal.

So keep donating to charity if you like, but take a good look at what you do with the rest of your money as well. Because every note is a vote! (And every bill is a ballot.) And if you live in one of the rich countries in this world, you have a lot of them.

Calais diary, Oct 14 - False alarms

A school in the Jungle

A cap is being tested in the quality check of the Warehouse

It WASN'T the official date, October 24. To think that it would be this hard to avoid falling for rumors!...

What had officially happened though, was that all restaurants and shops in the Jungle* had been given a written notice that they have to leave the area, or they will be demolished. Apparently this warning must be given at least 48 h in advance, which means that as from 2:30 pm today, the restaurants and shops could legally be demolished.

When it had almost turned 2:30 today, one of our volunteer leaders came in to us who were in the Belgium Kitchen (the community kitchen that serves free dinner to all the refugees every day, not to be confused with a restaurant) and said rather stressed that there were a great number of police cars on the bridge outside the Jungle and they had two water cannons with them, so it seemed they were going to start demolishing today and apparently they expected trouble. Therefore we had to interrupt our onion chopping and potato pealing and let ourselves be hurdled out from the Jungle, to spend the rest of the day at the Warehouse of l'Auberge.

In the minibus on the way to the Warehouse, I said:
"That was the last time we saw the Jungle as we know it", and felt intensely that I wanted to hug somebody and cry.

I spent the rest of the day sorting donations to be handed out to refugees. When the working day was over, I asked the person who had picked us from Belgium Kitchen if she had any news about what had happened after we left. She had. Nothing had happened... The second false alarm in two days, and I cannot do it!! There was some talk that there had been a demonstration for open borders planned for this day but that for some reason it hadn't happened, and that maybe that's why the police had mobilized, but what do I know... Maybe they just want to break us down? It's working pretty well, in that case...

My great, wonderful partner came and hugged me while passing by, and in his arms I felt how it burst. The crying broke out. Then he walked on, before I had time to communicate that I probably needed him a bit longer, so I ended up sitting in a chair hugging my backpack. After a while he came back and saw that I was sad, so he hugged me again, longer, and now I cried even more... Why, why, why are our societies so cruel? Why don't we remember our Geneva convention which states that people must be allowed asylum from war and persecution? Why can we only demolish and destroy, but not build up and welcome?

Because of course, even if there wasn't any demolition done today, it will still come. Mattias said that it would be a good strategy for them to take down the restaurants and shops first and use lots of force, so that they make an example, while also destroying some of the infrastructure of the camp. Both these things mean that both the inhabitants and the volunteers become less inclined to defend the Jungle later, when they come to demolish the actual accommodation tents. Another volunteer added later that it however was too early to take down the restaurants now. It's better 3-5 days before the eviction, so that people don't have time to reorganise and build up something again in between.

That is, the restaurants and shops will probably be demolished next week. Because there was after all some basis for this date, October 24. This is the date that a big shelter will open in Paris, and before this opens the government has no place to put the thousands of refugees, even those of them who want to apply for asylum in France.

I woke up screaming a few nights ago. I sat up straight and screamed in full panic, just like my 6-year-old back at home. I don't think I've had a single nightmare for 10-15 years, and screamed I haven't done since I was a kid. And hardly like this, even then. I dreamed that I was in the Jungle. I remember what I dreamed, but it was rather abstract. I did not dream about police or violence, rather of ghosts or aliens... Some vague, undefined evil... Yes, volunteering with refugees without the right to asylum, without the right to be reunited with their families, and nowadays often without shoes, warm clothes or blankets in the ever colder weather, is much, much harder than volunteering with the miserably poor people of Kenya. Sure, the people I worked with in Kenya were quite destitute, and many of them silently hated their lives and longed for a different one, but they were not desperate. And there were, after all, many things in their lives that they loved, and would have sorely missed had they actually made it away from there...

But nobody will ever say:

"Oh, how I miss my time of fleeing! Oh, how I miss not knowing where to go, not knowing where I could turn to so that I wouldn't be sent back to the war in Sudan or Afghanistan or some other place! Oh, how I miss the feeling of never being welcome anywhere! Of that my death would be a relief for them, ridding them of the burden of my life in their countries..."

Note: By now we know that the eviction in any case started on the 24th of October

*The Jungle = The informal settlement in Calais where thousands of refugees live in tents and home made shelters, many after having tried to go to the UK but failed

(To be continued)

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Parts in this series:

Calais diary, Oct 6 - A journey begins

Calais diary, 11 Oct - Some reflections

Calais diary, 11 Oct, part 2 - The first day

Calais diary, Oct 12 - The second day

Calais diary, Oct 13 - The official date

Calais diary, Oct 13 - The official date

And so the official date has finally been given: On Oct 24 the Jungle* will be demolished, the people evicted. They fly their helicopters over us all the time, and the other day everybody who wanted to enter the Jungle had to show ID to them. They collected them, went into their police van and spoke on the phone a lot, and after quite a while had passed, they finally came out, called our names one by one so that we could have our IDs back and carry on. Though I managed to sneak past this ID check and got in anyway... They weren't too attentive...

The ID controls, the helicopters and all the rumors I could handle, but the official date has brought me down. I'm sad and hopeless. I know they're not bluffing now, since they have already demolished the Jungle twice before... Both times it rose again, right next to where it had been. What will happen this time? Because there is no plan! There is no alternative! Of course there problem is not that people are so very keen on living in wet tents in the rainy, windy, 0 degrees winter of Calais, that they do so, despite it being forbidden! The problem is that they can't get asylum anywhere, and therefore have to choose between a tent winter in Calais and something worse!... Their only hope of something better is to make it to the UK and live there illegally. Many even have the legal right to permanent residency in the UK, but don't receive their papers. Some have been granted asylum in France but lost their papers, or they were destroyed in the Jungle, and incredibly they had to start over!... Despite the authorities of course having taken their finger prints to be able to identify them, when they applied for asylum.

Hey, stop this! If you have a wound and think that's bothersome, don't try and rid yourself of it by knives, corrosive acid and force! Take care of it instead, and let it heal! Which it has the capacity within it to do, by itself, with only perhaps a bit of help with hygiene right in the beginning. Force, on the other hand, only makes damage worse!

*The Jungle = The informal settlement in Calais where thousands of refugees live in tents and home made shelters, many after having tried to go to the UK but failed

(To be continued)

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Parts in this series:

Calais diary, Oct 6 - A journey begins

Calais diary, 11 Oct - Some reflections

Calais diary, 11 Oct, part 2 - The first day

Calais diary, Oct 12 - The second day

Calais diary, Oct 13 - The official date

Calais diary, Oct 14 - False alarms

Calais diary, Oct 12 - The second day

On the second day here, I went to the Warehouse of the British organisation l'Auberge des Migrants. They receive loads of donations, sort them, check them and hand them out to refugees if they are suitable, and if they are not, but still good, they sell them and use the money to help refugees. We signed a paper, and then we were insured while working with them. They had a little warm-up with us, and then a briefing of what we are doing and why. Everything was aimed to getting as high efficiency as possible in our work, so that as much as possible of our efforts and donations would actually go into a good use for the refugees. I especially enjoyed the advice on toilet paper:
"We've noticed that some volunteers use extra toilet paper to try and cover up what they've done in there. Ehm, we do know what you do in there, it's a toilet, and if you cover it up with paper it only means that they fill up faster so we have to go and empty them more often, and of course buy more toilet paper, and all this eats in to our time and resources."
It creates such a lovely relaxed feeling of community and normal, simple humanness when a beautiful girl with long, blond hair stands there talking like that!

But she also said more important things, like that we only hand out to refugees clothes that are flawless, that is they don't have any wholes, stains, missing buttons etc. This is because our gifts reflect how we think about them, and where they come from, torn clothes are not a fashion thing but a marker of poverty and despair. When later I was standing in the quality check station for clothes, I therefore sorted the best clothes for refugees, and those clothes that were a bit torn or broken but still cool and good-looking, for the charity shop, well aware that the volunteers would buy them and love them. Because for us, it's a choice. We CAN walk around in tuxedo and evening gown, if we really, really want to.

She also explained that we newcomers would not be sent into the Jungle*, the way things were now. In the normal case, some of us would be going there every day, and she said that she realized that it makes it more difficult to be working with the relatively hard physical labor that we are doing here, if we never get to see it for ourselves when the help reaches its destination, but the thing is that president Hollande has promised that the Jungle will be demolished, and since there is some kind of a law in France that nobody can be evicted from their homes in winter time, no matter how illegal this home might be, it will probably happen any day now, and the atmosphere in the Jungle is therefore very tensed and stressed. A number of thefts have suddenly occurred, cars have been looted and fights and arguments break out easily. Therefore nowadays only experienced members of l'Auberge go into the Jungle.

(We in Utopia are of course there daily anyway, picking trash.)

Then she still went through briefly what rules they had for those who did go into the Jungle, just to give us some understanding of how we work. Among other things, she said that the refugees' own organisations (the ones organised by the refugees) had requested that we female volunteers wear clothes that cover legs and upper body, including shoulders and chest. This was partly because they wanted us to be respected as guests in the camp, and not suffer any sexual harassment which might otherwise easily be the case, since bare shoulders, deep neck lines etc, symbolizes something else in several of the countries that many of the refugees come from. But also because if the atmosphere becomes sexual in daytime when we volunteers are there, the sexual assaults increase in nighttime, against mostly the women and children living in the camp, that is, the refugees themselves.

Another rule was that we must never take any refugee's picture in which they could be identified, because if one of those get out, it might jeopardize their asylum process later, and even if we don't have the intention of publishing the photo or hand it over to anybody, it makes people nervous and anxious and they have a rough enough situation already. There have also been a number of journalists here and they generally don't write nice things. The camp is not very popular around here...

I met a German volunteer, Carola, who said that we should focus more on the decisions that our leaders make, bring people's attention to them and thereby try to change them. So I told her how I had sent an e-mail to every single one of our green party MPs, after they had voted through the decision to almost completely close the door to refugees (with the support of the most right wing party Moderaterna and the racist party Sverigedemokraterna and nobody else) asking them how they could stay in a government that did that. How they could claim that it was better to stay and have an influence, after this. I wrote:
"WHAT then, are you going to do, in those two years remaining of the current period, that will have such an enormous impact that it balances up for what you just did?!"
She said:
"I guess nobody answered?"
But oh no, many answered. They answered things like accommodation, trains and green fuels... They just haven't realized that they made history with the decision of closing the borders. (At this point, several other international volunteers around us agreed and said that they had believed Sweden would be the final outpost, those who would never give up on humanism, the living example that an other way is possible that they always have been... and that when Sweden also failed, that's when they lost hope.) You can't make history with green fuels today. 20 years ago, yes, but not today. The same goes for accommodation and trains...

And anyway, who cares! Who cares if there is accommodation and trains! Who cares if the planet survives! What's the point of even being alive, of having societies with people and activities in them...... if this is what we do to people.

I met another volunteer who said:
"They're waisting a good 10 years of their lives, trying to find a home in countries that don't want them"
Mattias told me that he had met a person in the Jungle who was fluent in Swedish. You see, he had lived in Sweden for 9 years, before finally having received his final denial of his asylum application, after appeals, and been deported back to Afghanistan. Now he was in the Jungle to try and get into the UK instead, to live there illegally. No more asylum processes for him!

Another person that Mattias met had lived illegally in London for 6 years, working as a taxi driver, until one day he was caught and deported. Now he was back in the Jungle...

A 14 year old boy died on the highway the other day, run over by a truck, while trying to sneak onboard a truck to England. The driver took off. Maybe they never even noticed having hit anything. Maybe... no, I won't write that. The boy who died had a brother and two uncles in England, thus having the legal right to come and live there. He had started the legal process to do so, but after having heard how very long time that takes, he decided to still try and get there on his own. He was 14! He was marked by war and violence! He needed to be with his family, in a safe environment, to be able to heal and become a whole human being! Now he will be united with his family only in heaven...

How can we be this wasteful with human lives.

And how can we talk about green fuels, while this purely human made, politically constructed catastrophe is still going on?

*The Jungle = The informal settlement in Calais where thousands of refugees live in tents and home made shelters, many after having tried to go to the UK but failed

(To be continued)

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Parts in this series:

Calais diary, Oct 6 - A journey begins

Calais diary, 11 Oct - Some reflections

Calais diary, 11 Oct, part 2 - The first day

Calais diary, Oct 12 - The second day

Calais diary, Oct 13 - The official date