A Bit on Life as a Minority

Tanzania is a country in East-Central Africa that looks a little bit like Wisconsin. Home to around 43 million people, the country is said to contain the earliest traces of human and pre-humanoid remains. Gaining their independence from the United Kingdom, two nations were formed, Tanganyika (1961) and Zanzibar (1963), merging as Tanzania in 1964. 80 percent rural, 20 percent urban, all set against the backdrop of the African Serengeti.

Why the interest? Well, I would not normally associate many of my thoughts in the realm of Eastern Africa, BUT to my delight I will be heading to Tanzania in 5 months to do what? I'm not entirely sure. The class is called "Humanitarian Design" and the professor, Michael Zaretsky, has a medical center/school complex being built there (A link to their blog here). Will we design and build? Will we just build? Is the trip peripheral to the class? When I have the answers to these questions, I will be sure to write about it. I guess the important thing is that I am going. 

The progress on the structure in Roche, Tanzania

For Christmas, my sister gifted me Design Like You Give A Damn, a book featuring humanitarian design projects globally, and charged me to do exactly that, design like I give a damn about the sustainability of our planet, the environment, and its people. The possibilities of my future are limitless, but my focus is very strong on using my talents and interests to help others and improve quality of life for all. I have a particular interest in the rural landscape of America (evident in my blog title), a place abundant in simple resources, but exploited in innumerable ways. I see this opportunity as a chance to make connections between the emerging ‘humanitarian design’ and a field I feel has yet to become fad enough to be heavily investigated, ‘rural design’.

My group, "Orange Door Hinge" in my days as a counselor

In the interview process for the class, Michael asked me if I had ever felt like I was in the minority. I first gave him the answer he might have expected to hear. From the 7th grade until just this past summer I have been involved with Leadership Development Center, a camp sponsored by the American Red Cross, Cincinnati Chapter that, for a few years, lacked diversity that it often preached about. I was one of the few white kids there. I told Michael about the experience, having an inkling that that answer would satisfy his question because Tanzania would be an experience where I would by "the white kid" again. 

Without letting him accept that answer though, I continued with something I felt was considerably more relevant to me. I told him that I am always in a minority. As a citizen, born and raised, in rural America, I am part of just 20% of the US population. My culture is that of the quilt, barn, square dance, bonfire, and main street. And where I find myself even more alone is that I love, love, love, love, love everything rural. In no particular order and not at all a complete list: I love where I am from, I love where I went to school, I love all the people, I love the tiny church, I love the nuns in the convent down the road, I love the gardens, I love the possibilities rooted in the soil, I love the stars... and many people don't. Out of my experience, I have found that there are a few groups of people among that 20%: People who love the land and the people, People who love the land, People who love the people, People who hate the land and the people, People who hate the land, and people who hate the people. I've found in no scientific way at all, that the people who have love in their titles are in an even smaller minority and those who brood in their hate make up a majority, whether they know it or not.

I've grown up in a place where all I've ever seen is people move away. A place where success and prosperity isn't found here, but over there. It wasn't until this summer, after reading Jayber Crow by Wendell Barry that I had the clarity to organize my thoughts and understand my love for the rural environment. The book details the rise and fall of rural America, and in that description, plants the seed of an idea. An idea that maybe there is something salvageable about the place I love. Maybe there is a way to change people's perception of the rural landscape, as something important and integral. To quote a reflection I made at the end of the summer: 

 "In The Giver by Lois Lowry, the main character, Jonas, accounts his experience of seeing color for the first time. Much like Jonas, this summer the rural environment I lived in exploded with color when for so long it had been grayscale. I had seen glimpses of this color growing up but never had the knowledge to understand its significance. Yes, I grew up in a house surrounded soybeans and corn dependent on the year, but I don’t think I ever appreciated the beauty of the landscape as much as I did this summer. I don’t think I ever knew where those crops went after they were harvested either. I don’t think I ever knew how much can change in such a short period of time or, conversely, how long it takes to make change. These bits of knowledge, along with countless others, repainted the canvas of my environment. What was once a dusty image of vestigial America has been reborn as an integral, necessary, beautiful, ALIVE masterpiece of my culture."

Why am I going to Tanzania if I am so concerned with the cultivation of my home? I believe that I have much to unlearn. Rural America, at one time, was independent, and if anything, depended upon. In the last century, the landscape has become exploited and its people used as pawns in a money making endeavor and we have forgotten why we are here. I want to see how people live off the land in an unadulterated way (one could argue that my group's intervention in Tanzania is adulterous, I suppose). I want to relearn the way of life from the earth. I believe that, only then, I will be able to add to my store of observations that piece back together a livelihood that was lost and restore a fondness that is being carried around by a minority of people. 

Architect(R)ural Reflections' Baptismal Entry

Is it too early in my life to have found a concentration? I've always been a passionate person who obsesses over my interests, praying daily that I don't become bored of them.

An anatomical wonder!

In one of my earliest memories, I remember being enamored (not that I knew that word then) with the collection of zoo animals on my baby blanket. A zebra, a lion, a bird of some type, maybe a turtle, and the one that stood out the most, a giraffe. That giraffe spoke to me. Its height inspired and empowered me. I wanted, so badly, to be a giraffe. "When I grow up, I WILL be a giraffe." I can remember thinking that every time I looked at our clothespin basket too (which had a similar scene). Maybe the most telling tale of my obsession with giraffes was a drawing stretching about 4 feet on a wall in our basement. This green giraffe, with a neck stretching as far as my tippy-toes would take it, decorates the wall upon which my siblings and I would record our growth over the years. Every time I see that green giraffe, I am taken back to an image of my childhood bedroom: pale blue, light gray carpet, a curtain with buttons blowing the warm summer air, and my baby blanket pinned up on the west wall. While I have no recollection of sharing this passion with anyone as a child, it remains a strong force in my memory today.

Thanks to my mom for sending me these pictures

My passions certainly shifted through the years. Most pictures of me before 1996 probably featured me in one of many One Hundred and One Dalmatians shirts (the 1961 cartoon of course). By bedsheets and pillow cases were even themed after the adventurous pups. 1996 brought on an obsession with nationalism due to the Olympics, which my parents made a huge deal about (at least in my memory) by taping up posters in our basement of the Olympic Rings (which I took for a mutated Mickey Mouse and still do today). My mom had to wash this Red, White, and Blue polo shirt for me 2 to 3 times a week just so I could wear it as much as I wanted. The late 90's and early 2000's brought on obsessions with Power Rangers, Pokemon and Digimon (Digimon was always my favorite but the least among my friends). And after cartoons took the best of me, I got to drawing my own.
I was always drawing. I found that it garnered me a delightful amount of attention. As long as I could draw, I didn't necessarily have to worry about being second fiddle to anyone... an important thing for a pre-teen. My drawings were often times of people I made up. My own versions of Greek Gods and Goddesses, Bible Scenes, or what the characters of the books I read would look like. Slowly I began drawing the built environment.

Sketches like this (circa 2003)

didn't take long to develop to this (circa 2005-6)

It began with simple house plans. I used gridded paper for these, so the most primitive plans I have are shamelessly rectangular. Breaking out of the rectangle was the most pivotal moment in my drawing history since I had mastered the profile eye from the frontal (such an astonishing realization could have only been matched by those who followed the Egyptians). For some reason (maybe a minor, or major if you ask my family, obsession with The Sims) house plans absorbed my time. I drew the plans for no site, no family, no program. I just drew. Elevations became the next step in my development. Most of my elevations were a complicated mixture of isometric, perspective, and true elevation, and appeared to be extruded versions of their foot print. It would take some time for me to move on from that. Needless to say, my habit of drawing has turned itself into my field of study, architecture. Taking a look at my sketches from middle school (which is largely the earliest recording of my sketching career) it is fun to see what a budding architecture student did to nurture his interest. I painstakingly look through these pictures knowing now so much more than I knew then, but still aware (as I probably wasn't then) that I have so much to learn.

In a post about... what did I begin this blog post with? Concentration too early? I guess I got carried away telling a different tale. I'm not going to re-do anything. I'm content with this word vomit. I feel like I hardly hardly discussed the things I am/was passionate about. In my next blog post, perhaps I'll talk about concentrating and how that concentration has developed. My other passions will expose themselves I suppose.

Note to self: do not lose focus in next blog post