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Bump to baby on the beaten expat track

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New Orleans Saints at the Superdome

20 December 2009 by Nathalie Abejero Leave a Comment

It’ll be almost five years that I’ve been working in Phnom Penh. Like other nomads there is no “home” for me. I miss the familiar comforts of family and friends and a community built around a settled life. I miss the food, the law and order, and the extensive range of entertainment and options. But while memories of my time in New Orleans is not as extensive as those of my husband’s who grew up on its outskirts, of all places I’ve lived it is this much maligned, recently battered and often misunderstood city that inspired most my imagination. Here in this city was one of the more waking periods of my life – my greatest risks and biggest mistakes, and some very big decisions. Photos by Keith Kelly.

New Orleans Saints vs. Atlanta Falcons November 2nd 2009

This year on our visit back we were treated to a surprise by some very good friends – tickets to a Saints game at the Superdome, where they beat their biggest rival the Atlanta Falcons. It’s a side of the city I never partook in, not normally being a sports fan, but it’s a subculture as part of the essence of New Orleans as jazz itself.

Here is an excerpt from an excellent piece on the Saints and the Soul of America’s City, by Wright Thompson. It’s a long piece worth reading, for anyone who has ever lived and loved this amazing city.

Where do you even begin? Maybe you describe the couture shops that have replaced the latest fashions on the storefront mannequins with Saints T-shirts? Maybe you tell how vampire novelist and native New Orleanian Anne Rice, never much of a football fan and now living on the West Coast, recently ordered a Drew Brees jersey with “Anne” on the back. Maybe you use numbers: 84 percent of the televisions in town were tuned to the recent Monday night game against the Patriots. Maybe you use bizarre trends, such as an NOPD cop telling me the 911 calls almost stop when the Saints play and there’s been only one murder during a game this year…

All of them — Besh, LeBlanc, Brees, Payton, Bush — they are all part of this first generation of post-Katrina successful New Orleanians. They are building a city from scratch, and people see them every day, working, adopting charities, enjoying life, sitting at the next table or listening to the same band. Katrina almost destroyed the city but, if you look closely, you’ll find that it did something else: It strengthened it, made the people who loved it love it even more. Everyone left the city, so no one is here because of inertia. They chose to come back…

.. the drive out of New Orleans, through a city still battered, past the exits for the Vieux Carre and Uptown, past the Huey Long, which runs narrow and high out to the leaning oyster and chicken shack. ..It is decayed on the outside, but inside there is life. Here is a citizenry that believes in the power of the underdog. New Orleanians fell first and see something the rest of America is blind to right now: a way back into the light.

New Orleans Saints vs. Atlanta Falcons November 2nd 2009New Orleans Saints vs. Atlanta Falcons November 2nd 2009New Orleans Saints vs. Atlanta Falcons November 2nd 2009New Orleans Saints vs. Atlanta Falcons November 2nd 2009

Filed Under: Travels Tagged With: nawlins, new orleans, nola, Saints, superdome

…hark the Twelfth Night revelries [sic]

17 January 2009 by Nathalie Abejero Leave a Comment

Christmas is amazing for the fact that everyone– even strangers– gets caught up in the goodwill and cheer and carries it forward. But then that atmosphere fizzles after the New Year, and it isn’t even a nice segue into calmness– more like someone pulls the plug and abruptly the party’s over so go home.

Not so in New Orleans. The end of the holidays marks the start of another season also tied to the winter solstice, Mardi Gras. The trees and lights don’t go down, they just get the green, purple and gold ornaments added in. Adults get to be kids again and it all starts with the Twelfth Night Revelers bal masque!

Avoid the French Quarter frat scene– where Mardi Gras is reduced to a tacky garish spectacle that metrosexual yupster tourists looking for fast hard fun so they can feel cool lap right up– and you’ll see the magical transformation of N’awlins into a formalised make-believe world of monarchic rule in all its pomp, finery and regalia. Twelfth Night brings to life the Lord of Misrule, the Goddess of Chance, the enchanted courts with its jesters, the aristocratic pompadours and rituals of old…. Any life list should include this Mardi Gras and an invitation from a Krewe to either the Bacchus, Rex or Endymion Ball. These galas are an entire year in the making and are extraordinary sensory events.

I thought about this because K and I went to a dinner party the other night. One of the couples could hardly speak English and we command just a lick and a half of French, so needless to say our conversation with them wasn’t hopping. Then “la galette des Rois” came out, and suddenly conversation knew no boundaries, starting with this most token of culinary traditions associated with the run-up to Fat Tuesday across cultures.

The French “King Cake” is a flaky puff pastry with a dense center of frangipani– totally unlike our King Cake (I sooo want a Gambinos king cake delivery right now!). It’s served traditionally to draw the King to the Epiphany, with the youngest person in the group (likely a child) sent under the table to pick at random who gets the next slice of cake. The slice with the trinket in it (a collectible porcelain baby jesus in olden times) designates that person the new “King” (regardless of sex), and it becomes her/his turn to bring a cake to the next party.

(Ours had a glass duck, and I had the treat of finding the first trinket of the season. And we’re having dinner again with that couple tomorrow!)

So N’awlin’s King Cake (brought over by the French settlers) kicks off the Mardi Gras season, with the Twelfth Night Revelers using it to choose the Queen for their Ball… The Gambinos family is renowned for the past decades for their King Cakes. They will even deliver… So we are in the Carnival spirit, along with all the Tulane alums and Louisianans(sp?) in Phnom Penh. Unfortunately this year won’t be the year of the masqued gala (we’re too busy celebrating Bush’s departure to plan another event!), but the annual festivities must continue– even if it’s just a Pimps and Hoez murder mystery affair ;-)

Filed Under: Life Tagged With: gambinos, king cake, louisiana, mardi gras, new orleans, nola, twelfth night

Shakespeare

27 September 2005 by Nathalie Abejero Leave a Comment

Beware the leader who bangs the drums of war in order to whip the citizenry into a patriotic fervor, for patriotism is indeed a double-edged sword. It both emboldens the blood, just as it narrows the mind . . .

And when the drums of war have reached a fever pitch and the blood boils with hate and the mind has closed, the leader will have no need in seizing the rights of the citizenry.

Rather, the citizenry, infused with fear and blinded with patriotism, will offer up all of their rights unto the leader, and gladly so.

How do I know? For this is what I have done. And I am Caesar.

— William Shakespeare

Filed Under: Interests, Life Tagged With: hurricane, katrina, levy, louisiana, new orleans

Dire Straits… please wake up

9 September 2005 by Nathalie Abejero Leave a Comment

The Katrina disaster presages dire times. The status quo will drastically alter life in the coming decades. It needs the attention of an astute citizenry and a responsive, able leadership.

Consider our suicide economics. As if five years of steadily growing cutbacks to programs in environment, poverty reduction, welfare, and healthcare were not enough, the 2006 budget deliberated prior to Katrina contained $35 billion in further reductions. Billions in tax cuts for the wealthiest build brass at corporate offices instead of supporting much needed public investments ie. levee systems and emergency response networks. For the poor, that paltry check from Uncle Sam in effect adds up to significant cuts in health coverage and social security. Those lacking flexibility and capital are the most affected, as we’ve seen in the appalling news feeds from New Orleans. This drains the federal budget, compromising response to more urgent security matters. How dry can we squeeze an already record deficit?

The petroleum predicament. The period since the end of WWII saw the creation of a mammoth infrastructure that is extremely dependent on petroleum. Vast investments in this sector make it politically challenging to develop a clear energy policy exploring alternate power sources. But soaring global demand are straining low inventory levels. The bulk of our petroleum comes from repressive regimes in the Middle East, a region becoming increasingly unstable. The supply of natural gas that heats half the homes in the US also faces a bleak future. With depleted land-based wells, we now depend on the tenuous supply from the Gulf of Mexico.

If you follow the stock market you’ll have noticed the steady impact of the energy crisis, prior to Katrina. This has bearing on our monetary landscape, where dramatic shifts in processing and pricing such as we’ve seen in the past two weeks traditionally portend inflation. Thankfully the federal reserve on diligent watch have kept it at bay. But energy supply shocks affect more than just the Dow Jones and mortgages.

It ripples to other sectors, ie trade. Higher transportation and logistical costs attributable to the energy shortage from Katrina alone is wreaking havoc on crucial trade talks. The World Trade Organization (WTO) has been pressuring the US to lift agricultural subsidies to level the playing field for other countries that want access to US markets. But disaster relief programs in Katrina’s wake will depress commodity prices, leading to billions in government payments to farmers. This in turn compromises the administration’s effort to win new export markets for American production, where almost 30 percent of American farm receipts come from.

Globalization. Life has sped up, for everyone. A virus here in SE Asia can land on your doorstep in a mere seventeen hours. And medical technology have never kept pace with pathogenic ambitions, despite what the pharmaceutical sector might want to believe. We did not conquer SARS, Avian Influenza, or Japanese Encephalitis. These microbes lie waiting. The US Centers for Disease Control is part of homeland security. Are our assets ready?

The Iraq War. The Middle East’s autocrats and theocrats are stronger than ever. This was a war designed to prevent further terror; to create a compliant, free-market, pro-American client state; and to restrain Iran. Instead we accomplished the complete opposite by destabilizing the region, strengthening and fueling religious fanaticism and terrorist cells, and replacing Saddam Hussein with a worse alternative: a pro-Iranian regime. Iraq is now on the brink of a revolving civil war between the Kurds, Shiites, and Sunnis (read: millions dead in ethnic cleansing such as in Afghanistan 1979-92), if not a regional bloodbath sucking in Iran, Syria, and the rest of the Gulf States. This chaos will trigger a devastating disruption to our oil supply.

And through an intricate, inter-connected fiscal scheme, this foreign policy quagmire can catastrophically affect the dollar. A collapse in the dollar will bring down the world economy. We were forewarned against faulty and misleading information by a litany of esteemed Middle East scholars around the world before we attacked Iraq, yet we did not see past the mainstream media hype about “weapons of mass destruction”. Speaking of which, do we realize there is a monopoly on our media outlets by the same corporate interests (read: non-objective, interests-based soundbytes)?

The world order. By contravening the UN’s operational mandate in invading and destroying a sovereign state, we essentially revert to a pre-UN world order of alliances and unavoidable wars, with resumption of the arms race. Radical unilateralism and Pax Americana aspirations such as we’ve been pursuing cannot continue without incurring severe casualties on an already overextended military covering two fronts and the homeland.

The point. Our ambitions exceed capacity. US security is based on the strength of our socio-economic arrangements. We prioritized tax cuts and military offensives, and in a world of finite resources that decision has consequences. Katrina accomplished what a host of evidence-based rhetoric and literature could not: she exposed festering ills that threaten our national security and prosperity.

Our nation is barreling towards a calamitous disaster– and not necessarily by one spectacular act of terrorism. Decisions made in the US have global ramifications, and it rightly boomerangs back in a domino effect. We see that the structural integrity of our nation has been compromised by our leaders’ negligence. And it is buoyed by our apathy. We have to think beyond party lines, past faith-based divisions, and outside our small bubbles of existence. Are we confident in the direction our leadership is taking us? Because the security of our children’s America depends on it.

Filed Under: Interests, Life Tagged With: hurricane, katrina, levy, louisiana, new orleans

Time for Civic Action

5 September 2005 by Nathalie Abejero Leave a Comment

If you are reading this then you know someone who was tremendously affected by our government’s stunning ineptitude, at all levels, across party lines.

Think beyond the spin of mainstream media. Let your legislators know how you feel about this catastrophe, and begin your letter with a statement that you are a constituent. One vote is a valuable asset to your elected officials, especially in the projected overhaul of the political landscape. With midterm congressional elections coming up in 2006 your letters will not go unread. And we all have a stake in this.

The following websites list contact information for our elected House Representatives, our elected Senators, and our President.

It’s time to inspire our policy makers towards responsible governance.

Contacting Policy Makers 101

US House of Representatives: Congressmen Contact Information

US Senate: Senators Contact Information

Filed Under: Interests, Life Tagged With: hurricane, katrina, levy, louisiana, new orleans

Blame Game My Ass

4 September 2005 by Nathalie Abejero Leave a Comment

I understand many are still reeling and recovering from a direct hit of this past week’s events. I understand media fatigue. I understand the need to start the recovery period.

But I refuse to believe that complacency, which has graced the path of every bungle of the past five years, will follow this phenomenal failure of government. We the American people are more intelligent than that. We have to wake up and smell the rot that is fast enveloping our country, long before Katrina hit, long before conditions allowed the the White House to be put up for sale.

“This is the Law and Order, Terror and Morality government, and it cannot save its citizens from a biological weapon called standing water.”
Listen to or read the transcript of a searing editorial by MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann.

It is a staggering and dangerous incompetence, and it is unacceptable.

Filed Under: Interests, Life Tagged With: hurricane, katrina, levy, louisiana, new orleans

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Those little feet pitter-pattering about rule our lives lately. But on the occasional free moment I get to tap out scatterbrained bursts of consciousness about raising toddlers in Cambodia, traveling with them and working abroad. These posts are my personal updates to friends and family. But since you’re here, have a look around. Thanks for stopping by…

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