Lemony, floral …

 … winey, citrusey, spicy ….. this is the hotch potch of flavours ascribed to the Fair Trade Ethiopian Yirgacheffe coffee on a poster at my local coffee shop. There must be something wrong with my tastebuds because all I can taste is coffee. Oh well, perhaps that’s because I usually have the decaf, which is Brazilian. Anyway, what I really like about this coffee shop is that it is as much a blend of disparate flavours as the coffee is claimed to be.

Thai-Australian owner and barrista “Harry Roaster” (as he describes himself on a promotional poster) has assembled what seems like an odd assortment of foods to go with your coffee, but are all in their different ways Sydney – if not Australian - culinary icons.

In no particular order:

• The famous Harry’s cafe de Wheels meat pies (established 1938 down on the docks & sampled by people as famous as Frank Sinatra and Elton John)
• Portuguese tarts 
• Banana bread (is there a cafe that doesn’t have it?)
• White & dark chocolate brownies – okay, more American that Oz, but they include that unique Australian nut, the macadamia
• Hot dogs – representing the first incursion of US food imperialism, way before Maccas & KFC - although they seem to have disappeared from the menu in the past couple of weeks
• Chinese steamed & BBQ chicken served with greens & rice. Well actually someone else is selling this, but they share the shopfront.

Take it all together and you have foods and beverages from thousands of years of Australian history, all continents (except Antarctica), and appealing to people from the tendy tops to the Centrelink strata of Australian society. And at $2 a cup, it’s the latter group who seem to most regularly frequent the tables  and chairs on the pavement outside. I’d guess Fair Trade coffee’s usually consumed by middle class lefties like me who don’t mind paying a premium, but here the locals are buying it because it’s cheap and tastes good – and are incidentally supporting people who also struggle on low incomes, instead of the multinational coffee companies. I love that.

I can’t remember the name of the place, it’s on Brown St in Newtown.  I looked for it on Google maps but their satellite pic pre-dates the cafe, which only opened in the past year, so all you can see is an empty shop. But I reckon Harry Roaster is there to stay.

“Its not going to work if we keep hating each other”

These are the words of a boy called Ali, who burned an Australian flag during the Cronulla race riots four years ago. I’m quoting from a documentary about Ali’s life changing walk on the Kokoda Track last year. I haven’t watched the whole thing yet, I only just discovered it today, but I have plans to sit down with a box of tissues and watch it all soon – it’s emotional stuff. Even the first few minutes show the changes in Ali’s life, from a youth angry enough to burn our flag, to a young man holding out his hand in reconciliation. If anything makes me proud to be Australian (I’m very suspicious of nationalism), it’s people like Ali. Well, perhaps that’s what make me proud to be human.

I’ve just embedded Part 1. You’ll need to go to You Tube for the rest.

I found this doco online because I had heard that some boys from Punchbowl Boys High School were walking Kokoda this year,starting on Anzac Day(April 25). I was impressed and wanted to know more. I always think of Anzac day as being just about the (mostly) Anglo Aussies who have fought in wars, and it has meaning for me because my father is a veteran of Kokoda. But I think these boys at Punchbowl are on the money:  to understand  the skippies* you need to understand our history. And war has had a huge impact on how we live and how we think. More than 65 years on since Kokoda,  Australians are more diverse, but we all have wars to heal from. The quote from Ali recognises that.

(* Skippies, or skips, is a slang term for anglo-celtic Australians. It’s not what we call ourselves … you probably won’t find it, ironically, in a dictionary of Aussie slang. It’s derived from the 60’s TV kid’s show about a “Skippy, the Bush Kangaroo”).

Not only did I find Ali’s story, I also discovered that the Punchbowl group is actually a mixed group of Lebanese Australians from Bankstown and life savers from Cronulla. I am pleased and proud that those community leaders are so committed to building respect and understanding between their communities. I imagine it wasn’t an easy trek emotionally, (it certainly wouldn’t be, physically) but I hope that both groups have learned a lot from each other.

Punchbowl boys is developing quite a relationship with Kokoda. I also discovered that in 2004 a group of ten boys, most of them Australian-born Lebanese Moslem, walked the track “as a rite of passage to Australian adulthood”. Here’s trek leader Major Charlie Lynn’s report to Parliament. The walk was apparently in response to media headlines that Punchbowl Boys was the worst school in Australia. Well I don’t think it could be the worst any more.  I think other schools could learn a few things from Punchbowl Boys.

I’ve just embedded Part 1. You’ll need to go to You Tube for the rest.

Harmony Day

Saturday 21 March is Harmony Day in Australia, a day to celebrate our diverse society. It is also the United Nations’ International Day for the Elimination of Racial Discrimination. This is not a coincidence – it’s just that our government, in their wisdom, didn’t want to have a day that had the “R” word in its name. Instead they decided to call the day something that emphasised the positives about living in a multicultural society. Well, I’m all for that, but let’s not forget that racism’s still out there.

The date chosen in fact commemorates what came to be known as the Sharpeville massacre – when in 1960 police opened fire gainst a peaceful demonstration against apartheid in Sharpeville, South Africa, killing 69 people. That’s  something we should never forget, although nearly 50 years on we can look back with pride and relief at the changes in the world, and the progress we’ve made against racism, since that shocking event.

Australians for Native Title and Reconcililation (ANTaR) have not forgotten the true meaning of the day and are are celebrating – if that’s the word – with a cute gimmick. By clicking on the lovely faces at left you can go to their site and get a sticker like this one (or smaller) to put on your facebook page, blog or website. You can also sign a pledge against racism.

No more blood chocolate?

Eaten these recently? Ghanaian cocoa beans.

I hear that Cadbury have decided to use Fair Trade cocoa in their dairy milk chocolate bars and hot chocolate powder in the UK. This is very good news.

I’ve been a supporter of fair trade products for many years, even before I married into a family of Ghanaian cocoa farmers, and well before it was easy to buy fair trade products.  It just made sense to me that people should get a fair price for their product and their labour. So it’s been good to see the slow growth of awareness, the appearance of the fair trade logo on supermarket shelves, and to reach a point where chocolate giant Cadbury takes such a progressive step is very, very hopeful.

Although I’ve been interested in the issue for a long time, I actually wasn’t fully aware of the extent of corruption and exploitation that have characterised the production of and trade in cocoa. I thought it was bad enough that my son AM had a two year old cousin with scurvy, and that I’d seen children in his grandmother’s cocoa-farming village carefully rescue a broken egg from the ground so that they could eat it. But thanks to a newish book on the subject, Bitter Chocolate, I am now much better informed, and the importance of a fair go for producers is clearer to me than ever.

Bitter chocolate, by Canadian journalist Carol Off, records both the violent and corrupt history of the chocolate industry, and exposes more recent horror stories in relation to what most of us think of as an innocent treat (apart from the calories!) A more apt title might be Blood Chocolate. I’m not the only one to imagine an action movie of this name – Richard Stubbs in his ABC radio program was actually able to suggest it to the author. The book, which I couldn’t put down, has all the right ingredients: child slavery in Cote D’Ivoire, the disappearance of a journalist investigating the disappearance of cocoa profits into the pockets of corrupt politicians, war over access to cocoa producing territory, purchase of weapons with cocoa profits, greedy multinationals turning a blind eye to the violence and injustice, and deliberately keeping prices low. If only it were fiction. But it is the reality behind our chocolate bars.

So it’s in this context that Cadbury’s announcement is particularly welcome. all me naive if you will, but I think the goal of the fair trade movement should be obsolesence, because all consumer goods and raw materials will be traded fairly in some better, future world. But because I don’t really trust multinationals, I think there will also be a role for watch dog organisations – to keep the bastards honest.  But with this vision in mind, Cadbury’s commitment is an enormously significant step.  And I hope, just the first step of many for this company, which was started more than 100 years ago by a Quaker family. Well done. And pay attention, you other cocoa giants – this is the way of the future.

World AIDS Day 2008

Today is World AIDS Day. Ignore the date on the post, for some reason its reverted to US time. I am definitely writing on December 1.

World AIDS Day is relevant to this blog because globally, sub-Saharan Africa is the world region most heavily affected by HIV/AIDS.  Two thirds of all people living with HIV (67%) are in that region, which also accounted for 75% of all AIDS deaths in 2007. An estimated 1.9 million people in sub-Saharan Africa became infected with HIV in 2007. The majority of these cases are in southern Africa, with over one third of both new infections and AIDS deaths. (More recent figures than 2007 are not available. It takes time to collate them and so my source, the 2008 UNAIDS Report on the Global AIDS Epidemic, is really mostly about the epidemic a year ago. )

I don’t imagine it’s changed much in a year anyway. And those are staggering figures. You can read more detail in the UNAIDS fact sheet for the region.

The good news is that the epidemic in some of those southern African countries seems to be stabilising, and also that South Africa is doing an about turn on earlier policies based on scepticism about HIV as the cause of AIDS. It’s no coincidence that this scepticism has coincided with the largest epidemic in the world - 5.7 million with HIV, according to UNAIDS – so the change is more than welcome.

I read an interesting book earlier this year that attempted to explain what many consider a nonsensical and dangerous position. In her book on HIV/AIDS in Africa, The Invisible Cure, Helen Epstein suggests that South African President Thabo Mbeki clung to the belief that HIV does not cause AIDS because to do otherwise might play into the hands of racists who blamed the African epidemic on stereotypes of African sexual promiscuity and perversion. She argues that he has been a proponent of an African cultural, economic and political renaissance and such a negative explanation of the devastating epidemic did not fit well with trying to project a positive image of Africa and Africans. But he couldn’t come up with any other reason why HIV – in other countries almost exclusively associated with homosexuality, sex work and injecting drug use – has so disproportionately affected heterosexuals in Africa. 

Whatever his reasons, Harvard researchers last week claimed that Mbeki’s policies are responsible for 300,000 deaths in South Africa. I wonder what he thinks about that? And of course it’s not just deaths – HIV has had a profound effect on African economies in South Africa and other hard-hit countries. It would be a heavy thing to have on your conscience.

Epstein does offer an alternative explanation for the African epidemic. Her theory is that in countries like the US, people practice serial monogamy, but in Africa, people are more likely to have more than one relationship going on at the same time. This can be for cultural or economic reasons – such as marrying your brother’s widow, or young women relying on financial support from older men when structural adjustment programs have eroded their employment opportunities. Or it can just be a different way of approaching relationships. Over a lifetime, an individual African may indeed have fewer sexual partners than a serial monogomast in the west, and they may also, Epstein suggests, remain more committed to the ones they have.

Epstein withholds moral judgement on either system, but points out that it’s a lot harder to pass on HIV through serial monogamy than it is when you’re part of a network of “concurrent” relationships, as she calls them. I won’t go into the details – it’s a complex theory worthy of more space than I can give it here.  If it’s an issue you’re interested in, buy the book, I strongly recommend it.

Epstein isn’t just concerned with dissecting African sexuality, you may be relieved to hear. (Though I think she does it with great sensitivity and integrity). The “Cure” of the title is community mobilisation, an open approach to the problem, and honesty about both the causes and the impact of HIV.  She’s fairly critical of mega-bucks projects financed by western money and inspired by western ideas. The solution, she says, pointing to successful campaigns in Uganda early on in the epidemic, lies with Africans who know their own communities best.

 *****

With the epidemic so bad in Africa, it’s no surprise that our own recent figures on the HIV epidemic indicate that in Australia, proportionally more people from sub-Saharan Africa have HIV/AIDS than other communities for the years 2003 – 2007. I stress that we are talking very small actual numbers here. The proportions are calculated according to numbers with HIV per 100,000, and the 2006 Census indicated there were only 248,699 people born in Africa resident in Australia. The National Centre for HIV Epidemiology and Clinical Research (phew, what a mouthful) which has provided the HIV stats, has a graph showing we’re talking maybe 25 per 100,000, as compared to 4 per 100K for Australian born. But there are far, far more Australian born people with HIV than African born (63% of all diagnoses for 2003 – 2007).

If you look at the whole picture, in Africa and here, it means a growing new group of people in Australia who are affected by HIV. As I’ve said, there not actually many African people here with HIV, but add in partners, families and friends in Australia and relatives back home, and it starts to be an issue that those of us who are part of African communities need to address. Indeed, African communities here have been doing so. A couple of years ago Africans held a World AIDS Day soccer tournament in Sydney to raise awareness about it.

So here are some resources that may be useful if you, or people you care about, are closely affected by HIV/AIDS:

The Multicultural HIV & Hep C website has  info about HIV in quite a few African languages. 

PozHet, Straight Arrows and Positive Women are all organisations for heterosexuals with HIV and I think all have had experience dealing with positive people with some kind of African connection. If you’re gay, the National Association of People Living With HIV/AIDS can refer you to local groups. Here’s some info for partners, families and friends of people with HIV/AIDS, and here’s another list of a range of HIV organisations in Australia, including AIDS Councils.

I’ve left it a bit late in the day to post this, but in Australia www.worldaidsday.org.au lists events and actions for World AIDS Day. If you’re not here in Oz, just google the term. Or go out on the streets and buy a red ribbon. This matters to me personally because I have known people who have died of AIDS. So this is for:

Robert Ariss, who died before my son’s birth, Dodj Trafic & Andrew Morgan, who didn’t get to see him grow up, Simon Nkoli who welcomed us to South Africa the first time we passed through, but never since, plus Amelia,  Megan and Richard, Tony, Jacques, Vaughan …

… and for all those still fighting to stay alive & live good lives with HIV.

More to the point

I’m back home in Sydney after the Making Links conference and reflecting on some of the great things I learned about. A couple that may be of interest to readers of this blog are:

The Home Lands Project. Coordinator Kirsty Baird gave a great presentation on this internet TV project, which seeks to link young people from refugee communities in Australia with their homeland communities by making TV programs about themselves, on the premise that such connections build stability for young people settling in a new country. They are working with two communities in their pilot project – Karen and Sudanese. Young people from both communities in Melbourne have already started making programs, and young Karen in a refugee camp on the Burma/Thai border have also started. The project is still trying to establish links with a suitable Sudanese community back in Africa – they are looking in Southern Sudan, Kenyan Kakuma refugee camp, and Sudanese communities in Egypt. Wish them luck, it’s a great intitiative for which I can see loads of potential down the track, in linking many communities of different diasporas. Including, perhaps, mixed kids? Who needs Fox studios anyway?

The other initiative I want to mention is Africa on Screen. This link doesn’t give you a lot of recent info about it, but I think it’s a group of film-makers that formed after some Sierra Leone journalists made a  film in Australia – Darkness over Paradise – with footage they’d smuggled out of their country during the conflict. Bouyed by film-making tuition at Information and Cultural Exchange, a growing group of Africans in Sydney, from a wider range of countries, have been making more films. One, Colourblind, was screened at the Making Links conference digital arts festival. It was a moving short film about how racism can affect even people who are blind. It’s told entirely without words; very effective.

And finally, I didn’t get to finish my last post about the Aboriginal language Awabakal – just wanted to tell you that apparently the clergyman who wrote down the language in the 19th century was a Yorkshireman – and so when the community was trying to figure out how it would have been pronounced, they had to get in a linguist to ‘de-yorkshire’ it before they could proceed any further. Made me laugh – also made the token Yorkshireman who was at the conference laugh when I told him about it. So I leave you with this thought: how many other languages have been the victim of accent attack?

Making links with language

I am shamelessly promoting a conference that I helped organise – Making Links 2008, a conference for not-for-profits on information technology, web development, multimedia & stuff like that. It has nothing whatever to do with bicultural parenting, but … yesterday there was a fantastic session about a database and training program called Miromaa  which has been set up to record Aboriginal languages in Australia.

The presenter, Daryn McKenny from Awarbukarl, was passionate abnout this project, which is really interesting. The fact that the database includes pix and video of words & concepts and that he made his whole presentation using digital stories (including some cute animationes) rather than PowerPoint, made a potentially dry subject fascinating. I also learned that the Awabakal language – I think it’s from the  Newcastle area, where he’s based, was recorded by missioaries in the 19th century and the very first book of an ABoriginal language was published somewhere around the 1890s. So I cornered him after the session to talk about language preservation, and how his organisation Awarbukarl are figuring out how to rebuild a language which, except for a few words,  no one speaks anymore. He seemed happy to be cornered, it is his passion, after all.

Others at the session seemd more interested in the techie bangs & whistles, and I can’t say I blame them – although another presenter, open source advocate nancy Mauro-Flude later expressed concern about his reliance on microsoft technology. Gotta go, my internet credit’s running out! I feel like I’m back in Ghana …

Yes, it’s still true

Almost 24 hours later, Barack Obama is still President elect of the US! It’s not a dream, McCain conceded, Florida’s all okay this time, it’s really, really true. (ActionMan even tried to fool me yesterday that McCain had won, such is his warped sense of humour, but he was too late, the truth was out).  Yay!

Run around in excited circles for five minutes jumping up and down and squealing. 

Although his election looked a sure thing, I was so anxious it would get derailed by racism at the last moment – but no, in fact the opposite. It’s a very hopeful thing.  

And it’s an indication of real change in a society when a US President stars in a reggae song.  Yay!

I still don’t know how to embed YouTube videos, it doesn’t seem to work for me - but you can sing along with Coco Tea at http://au.youtube.com/watch?v=Zxn9jhypHfo

The US has come a long way since Buffalo Soldier.

And then there’s the Kenyan comedians staging a mock election in Kisumu.

Quite apart from his compassionate outlook, progressive politics and wonderful oratory, (etc., etc) having a Black President is going to inject a lots of great African culture into politics.

And I guess I just have to say, a trifle smugly, just look what can come of a mixed race marriage …

Yay!

101 ways with water

Today is the last day of National Water Week. Sorry I didn’t alert you to this fact earlier, but I have had to compete with ActionMan’s homework for computer access recently and his assignments on flatback turtles, postmodernism and medieval monks won out. But I’d been planning a post on water for some time and even wrote the first draft sometime back in June or July. So National Water Week, a special week to draw attention to water conservation strategies, seems an appropriate time to publish.

In 2007, between 70% and 90% of my home state of New South Wales was in continuing drought. And even though the torrential rains this year have Sydney looking greener than ever, the percentage of NSW in drought is still 71.6% according to the Sydney Morning Herald’s Green pages on Wednesday. A quick internet search failed to come up with a confirmation of this exact figure, but the Bureau of Meteorology recently released a statement on the Australia-wide drought, which has been going on now for eight years.

Australia has always been dry, a fact which people who only know the country from maps may fail to appreciate. You might wonder why there are so few people in such a vast space – it’s because there’s not enough water. I’m not going into all the details of why. Deserts, El Nino, Southern Oscillations, inappropiate farming practices and climate change all play a role, and you can easily research it if you want to. Suffice it to say, drought is part of the natural cycle here and as a nation we have to figure out better ways of living with it, not exacerbating it.

Given this state of affairs, you can see why water occupies a lot of attention in Australia. Newcomers to the country or city-dwellers without country connections may be puzzled by our obsession with the weather, but as well as being a hand-me-down conversation starter from British ancestors, discussions about rainfall and sunshine reflect our concern about our water supply.

I mention country connections because it’s easy if you live in the city to be ignorant of the true state of affairs - it’s mostly green and lush along the coastal strip. Only when Sydney’s main dam dropped to below 40% capacity a few years ago did people really start to ‘get it’. But if you have a connection with the inland you more easily understand what the issues are. I grew up bathing in three inches of water pumped from the river which bordered our farm and drinking rainwater collected from our roof. Dripping taps or wasting water were not tolerated. Even if we’d had access to a town water supply, it would have been pumped from the same river. Skimpy baths were not the worst of it, however. Two of my cousins went bankrupt in the 1980s drought, among the many who lost farms and businesses in that decade, and again now as the drought bites again.

Even though I’ve had this experience, I admit to having become more wasteful of water since living in the city where it flows without end from the tap and water saving is only now becoming part of the culture. But I do pay attention to what’s going on, and during our trip around the world this year I was been thinking a lot about water. We visited Los Angeles, a city that should be desert, where water is piped in from the Colorado River and wasted with a profligacy that is truly scary. Watering public lawns with sprinklers in the middle of a hot summer day? Mad. And then we were in Ghana, where water is plentiful but so poorly managed that it carries disease, causes heavy erosion, and most people only have limited or difficult access to it. Our last stop was South Africa, a land as dry as Australia and also in drought. It was weird, when we arrived, to no longer be surrounded by endless greenery. The rest of this post though, will mostly be about Ghana.

Early this year Ross Gittens, a Sydney Morning Herald economics journalist, wrote an op ed in which he suggested that a good way to save water would be to shower less often, i.e. not daily (and certainly not twice daily). At the time, this long hot shower addict thought that he was only suggesting this to justify his own lack of personal hygiene. (And yes, Ross, showers can be both pick-me-ups and therapeutic). However I also had to admit to myself, through gritted teeth, that he had a point. I hope no-one at the Sydney Water took it seriously, I’d hate to see a shower roster included in the water restrictions along with the garden watering roster and the no hosing of concrete. But hey, I have a better suggestion: the bucket shower.

I realise this will probably only work for most people in the summer months, and I haven’t been able to face doing it myself since we got back to Australia, but with a bucket you can wash thoroughly twice a day and still use less water than your average four minute shower.

One morning in Ghana I washed and conditioned my hair, soaped up all over and rinsed, washed my underwear, rinsed out the sponge, still had a litre to spare at the bottom of the bucket, and felt clean, cool, refreshed and also extremely smug. There is something deeply satisfying about being able to accomplsh so much with so little. I didn’t manage to repeat this parsimonious feat every day, but I often had enough water left in the bucket to tip into the toilet cistern. If I can manage to repeat this in a Sydney summer I will be feeling very smug indeed.

Owaruku pouring water

In Ghana, I had no other choice but to bucket shower. DadaK’s house had 3 showers and 3 flush toilets but it was not connected to piped water. The entire suburb was not connected. Asuoyeboah is a new development and the government has not put in the pipes. DadaK thought it might never happen, because many of the people who live there (mostly in houses built by expatriate relatives) have put in bore holes and pumps, and if enough people do it the government won’t bother. Our water came from a neighbour’s bore. Every morning Afia Serwaa, Marta, Yaa Ketwaa and sometimes Owaruku would collect the water the old fashioned way (see pic at right). It’s stored in basins, buckets and barrels beside the bathrooms and in the hall near the outdoor kitchen.

It looks clean enough, and I was told that Ghana’s ground water supply is fairly safe, but if the bore’s supply is at all connected to the stream at the bottom of the valley I’d be most concerned about its quality. All the storm water rushes down there, carrying with it plastic bags, empty medicine blister packs, dead lizards, you name it. Plus I wonder how closely the pit toilets in people’s backyards might be connected to the groundwater, in such an urban environment. I didn’t trust it and DadaK said any of the Australian family who drank it got diarrhoea, so he wouldn’t allow the children to drink it. Everyone else does though. Every night Yaa Ketewa would filter it through a sponge into bottles for the family and into plastic bags to sell chilled or as ice.

We drank filtered water that we bought in bulk in 500 ml plastic bags. Five pesewas each from the ubiquitous water sellers, or one cedi for about 15 bags at the corner store. (ActionMan was at one time considering exporting these water bags to Australia to solve our water crisis. He wanted to get in early before the anticipated global water wars settle on tropical, moist Ghana as their first target.)

DadaK imported a water cooler from Australia and after I and my bank account arrived, we purchased twenty litre bottles of filtered water and used that instead of the bags most of the time. This was DadaK doing his bit for the environment. Like me, he was appalled at the amount of waste plastic littering the streets and choking drains and waterways. My bit for the environment (apart from funding the water bottles) was to buy a laptop bag made out of recycled plastic water bags.  You too can find out more about recycled bags online at Trashy Bags, although I suspect mine, which is unlabelled, may have been made by their competitors. Who cares, it gets some plastic off the streets.

I was planning to buy the family a rainwater tank, but on looking into it, it didn’t seem such a great idea, although I let go of it with great reluctance. To buy one big enough was more than I could afford, it would be of no use during the dry season, dust off the roof contaimantes the supply at the beginning of the rainy season and DadaK thought it unnecessary. He wants to put a bore in instead, when he has the money, so I may help with that, in spite of my misgivings about the quality. It is his house, after all. He wasn’t concerned at the amount of work the girls put into carrying water, he’s done it as a youth, it’s “nothing” … ahem, your sexism is showing my dear … My position was that they worked so hard all day, a water tank would relieve them of one task, at least.

It was all a bit frustrating, especially because the house had been built in such a way that rainwater couldn’t be collected easily. The downpipes only opened just above ground level, so there wasn’t space to put permanent barrels underneath them. But when it rained – and we were there in the rainy season, so that was often – all household members between the ages of 23 and 14 (plus me and excluding ActionMan) leaped into action to collect the rainwater. One would stand in the downpour and scoop it from a basin underneath the downpipe into buckets which the rest of us would empty into the assorted barrels in the house. This was the best workout I got in Ghana. The family laughed at me for doing it, but I wanted to contribute in some non-financial way both to household labour and to replenishing the water we used. No-one stopped me. I think they would have liked a rainwater tank.

I imagine it’s clear by now why, though surrounded by water, we were having bucket showers, urinated in the shower cubicles, and only the most fastidious and privileged among us used the flush toilets. The other reason we were asked to urinate in the shower (I think the family all did it behind the house) was that the contents of the toilets went into a huge septic tank in the back yard and DadaK didn’t want to have to pay extra to have it emptied more frequently. The less that went into it, the better. Water from the showers on the other hand, just drains out into the roadside gutters to join the stormwater mentioned above, thereby becoming a public, not a personal waste disposal problem. Under the circumstances, who can blame people for shifting the responsibility? What else can you do, without a public sewerage system?

Anyway, it occurs to me that weeing in the shower isn’t such a bad idea for drought stricken Australia – you could flush it down the drain with a cup of the water you collected while waiting for your daily shower to heat up and save, save, save. Take note, Ross Gittens.

I see red

On Wednesday my plans for this week got turned over in the space of half an hour. At 9.00am I was expecting to visit one of my brothers for our regular Wednesday dinner, and then on Thursday morning hop in the car and drive up to the mid-north coast to see my parents. By 9.30 I was instead planning to go to the 18th birthday dinner of a family friend that night, and ActionMan had been invited to go camping for the long weekend. This meant no trip north until next week, and instead, the luxury of four whole days without my child around!

So this is why I got to go to the 4 Rs conference on Friday, which I mentioned in my last post. I decided to attend the racism stream, although there were lots of other tempting sessions, such as “Popular politics and climate change”, or “Ethnocultural diversity and sport”.

The racism sessions were structured around presentation of the data from the Challenging Racism study (also mentioned in previous post). Mostly academics and policy makers discussed the accumulated evidence for racism in our society, the different areas of life where racism occurs, and what kinds of anti-racism  ”interventions” are, or might be effective.

Researchers from the Challenging Racism study, which began in 2001, gave presentations on the geographic breakdown of racism in Australia (based on interviews with people about their attitudes to people of different ethnic groups), and how people who are targeted experience racism.

It was an interesting day with stimulating discussion of a complex issue. I hope the conference organisers will put some of the presentations online. I’m not going to go into a great deal of detail about it right now, because really I’m just using it as a launching pad to have a gripe about another - related – issue.

Several of the presenters showed data which indicated that one of the areas people experience racism is in housing. For example, they’re told a property is available but when they turn up to view it, it’s suddenly “already leased”. I’ve had my own experience of this. At one time after I’d separated from DadaK I was looking for a house with a young Ghanaian friend. The agent seemed friendly and after we looked at the flat she asked us to come back to the agency to put in an application. Mysteriously, in that half hour interval before we got back there, the owner had called and told the agent it was no longer available. Well, you have to wonder.

There have been a couple of other occasions where we’ve been evicted when I’ve wondered if racism wasn’t a factor, although with evictions landlords can shelter behind “moving in” or “renovating” and never need show the real reasons, even though it’s written all over their faces.

Most recently, and on the other side of the rental fence, I wasn’t able to find anyone to sublet my room to while I was overseas. For some unknown reason, perhaps the gentrification of this area, or just the general property shortage, I had a lot of anglo 30-something men look at the room. Ive been subletting for years and never had this particular demographic very interested before. It became increasingly apparent that – athough they were very polite about it – they just weren’t comfortable moving in for four months with my dark skinned Moslem Bangladeshi flatmate.

Perhaps it’s a bit harsh to think of this as racism. They didn’t want to move out of their comfort zone, and of course everyone has a right to live where they feel comfortable and happy. So maybe those individuals weren’t being racist. But the fact remains, its white anglo 30 something men who have the absolute luxury of staying in their comfort zone almost all the time, if that’s what they want.

Migrants to this country, on the other hand, are usually already outside their comfort zones just by virtue of being here. Add in those arch enemies of (almost) all landlords – children – plus a low income, an accent and a black skin, and you are almost assured, if you want to live in Sydney in the middle of the current housing crisis, of being forced to live outside your comfort zone. You will have to compromise on several or more probably all of the following: quality, cleanliness, space, security, location, proximity to work, school, friends and family, and of course price.

I mention this because the other thing I have been doing with my ActionMan-free weekend is a bit of househunting for DadaK and Obaapa. DadaK returns with the children in a few weeks, and Obaapa hasn’t yet been able to find a home for them to return to.  She’s busy with work on Saturdays so I cruised around the internet rental market and popped out to a few inspections. The last place I looked at was a bit small but in great condition and close to her work. But there were also about seven other groups of people looking at it, including two white middle aged couples without children. Was there really any point in rushing around to get the application in before 3.00pm? I called her up and we agreed not.

If there were more properties available, it wouldn’t matter so much, but there aren’t.  I only looked at three today and gave her phone numbers for two more – which are at the top of what she’s prepared to pay and a long way from work. Of the others I looked at, one was in bad condition and the other was too small.

Real Estate agents are starting to complain of harassment and violence from people who are being evicted or haben’t been able to find a home - no wonder! The prospect of being homeless could make anyone lose their cool. Some research institute claims that the rental crisis is exaggerated, but they’re basing this on an internet search that hauled up 20,000 homes in Sydney. Mine today pulled up 7,500 or so, for all properties under $1,000 per week, in the entire Sydney region, including the Blue Mountains, Northern beaches and Camden, so I’m sceptical about the sceptics. Plus I’d estimate at least 3/4 of these were old listings.

Of course if you’re pulling in 100K a year or can fit your family into the ”Funky one bedder with stunning views!” for $400 a week that I saw advertised in beachside Clovelly, perhaps they’re right. Umm …. I don’t know many families with budgets like that. Three bedroom places in our area start at $400 a week (just under half the average weekly wage) and the third bedroom is more like a cupboard. And it’s just been announced that Sydney needs 900,000 more homes by 2031 to accomodate the anticipated increase in population. Eeek!

Anyway, the point I wanted to make is, if people are already experiencing racism in housing, then with so few homes available, and the market getting tighter it’s pretty obvious that blue-collar migrants with kids are going to find it tougher than almost anyone else to get decent, affordable housing. Alongside, perhaps, working class single mums on the pension. So this is why I see red.