En Casa Latina

This Saturday I started volunteering at Casa Latina, a nonprofit community center in south Seattle which serves the Hispanic immigrant population with English classes, a free clinic, and most importantly, a call center for day jobs. The Casa's basic model of empowerment is to provide immigrants with a community that speaks their language (including Hispanic and non-Hispanic volunteers - I've never met so many Americans fluent in Spanish in one place before, outside of Peru), equips them with education or resources, and gives them access to day-labor that will hopefully lead to more work and enough regular clients (ie employers who call them back on a regular basis) that they can support themselves and their families without having to go through the Casa's day worker program anymore.

It's a pretty good idea - using a trustworthy organization to obtain work and advocate for unprotected workers - except that day labor is not exactly recession-proof. This Saturday we only had about 5 phone calls; normally Saturday is the busiest day of the week, with employment for most of the 30-40 workers who come in early every morning to wait for work. According to one of the staff I talked to, the workers themselves are no longer just undocumented recent arrivals, but people who've been here for years, had jobs, and lost them. A lot of them have also migrated north from California after that state's economy took a nosedive. (Washington is doing slightly better.)

I will be working every other Saturday morning as a day work dispatcher. Every Friday, workers go flyer neighborhoods offering services from weeding to painting to building; phone calls come in asking for 2 people to come over to help with an all-day move, or for one worker for a few hours to do some gardening. Once I take down the info, if they've requested a drop-off I reserve the Casa's van to transport the worker to the job, and then I file the job under the correct date so that it can be "dispatched" from whatever pool of workers is there that day. Work is usually granted by raffle unless specific skills are needed.

The worker's waiting area is a little warehouse just over from the office building where we take calls. This Saturday it also featured stations for getting your blood pressure checked (by UW med students), your hair cut (by an enterprising new member of the Casa's women's program), or getting a snack or a 25 cent cup of instant coffee (from a "tienda" that is formally run by the women's program). Even on a slow day with little work, there was at least a spirit of camaraderie, and it feels great to be in a Spanish-speaking environment again. I even met two Peruvians, one of them a half-Chinese guy from Chiclayo who was there as a medical volunteer, not a day worker.

I hope to report more as I get to know the immigrant community here.

Things I love, and don't love, about living in Seattle

I moved here a few months ago. Now that I'm telecommuting I can live anywhere, and I decided it was time to reconnect with my West Coast roots. However, I'm new to Seattle, and here's what I've found so far:

Things I enjoy:

• Fewer people. You can actually get a table at Barnes & Noble! The rents are lower, there's room on the sidewalk, and you feel like you can breathe.
• Nature. Even while driving the freeways, your view is of water and trees.
• Summer weather. I don't think I've had such a long stretch of sunny, dry days in the 60's and 70's since growing up in Southern California.
• Food. Great seafood, great produce, and if you ever get a chance, try something called a marionberry pie...
• Good music. Haven't seen any great live bands yet, but even the radio stations are head and shoulders above what I've heard in other towns.
• Relaxed fashion. People are very dressed down. I feel right at home in jeans and sweaters.
• Eco-friendliness, &
• Social justice. After living in Peru for a year, it's nice to live in a place that is conscious of eating local, buying & selling used stuff, and supporting causes around the world.
• Great walkable neighborhoods. Fremont, Wallingford, Capitol Hill, Greenwood... there's an endless list of little neighborhoods that feel like the Village or Cobble Hill.
• Proximity to Vancouver, Portland, and California.
• Seattle Public Library. Tons of people use it, and it's got everything, so you literally almost never have to buy a book again.

Things I don't:

• The weather during the rest of the year. I got a taste in March and April, and it was pretty demoralizing to be cold and wet all the time.
• The homogeneity. Seattle ain't New York.
• Traffic. Seattle has very few main arteries, and they are full of bottlenecks.
• Public transit. Again, Seattle ain't New York.
• Distance from everywhere but the West Coast.
• Lack of directness. There is an odd awkwardness to social interactions here; people are friendly, but afraid to disagree with each other. For this New Yorker, this is a real shame; you learn so much more about people and life when everyone feels free to disagree and still be friends.
  

Forget giving a man a fish - give him broadband

One of the exciting trends I observed in Peru was that while the country might be underdeveloped in terms of roads, running water and electricity, young people in cities that had even partial coverage were already pretty wired. You might not own a watch or a refrigerator, and you might make only a few dollars a day, but you could easily have a cellphone, an email address, and be on a social network. Internet and mobile phone technology allow you to skip entire stages of industrialization, saving tons of time and money.

This article's title basically says it all:

East Africa gets broadband: It may make life easier and cheaper | The Economist

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Thoughts on the Financial Crisis

Last week, while in New York for work, I went to an event hosted by the Center for Faith & Work at Redeemer Presbyterian Church. The speakers were Pastor Tim Keller and Julian Robertson of Tiger Management, who I hadn't heard of before but apparently is a titan in finance, one of the inventors of the hedge fund or something like that.

It was basically a mini-panel discussion and Q&A about the financial crisis and what the Christian perspective on it is. They covered all the hot topics from executive compensation to gov't regulation. A few of the highlights:

• On how long the crisis will last. Julian: "for many, many years." 'Nuff said.
• On how to get out of it. Julian again: Making our education system more competitive. He spoke of the need to re-structure education and lessen the power of teachers' unions.
  
• On the Wall Street types who've lost their jobs. Both Tim & Julian felt that too many young people had gone into finance drawn by the money & glamour, and it was probably a good thing that from now on the talent would be distributed across more industries and more cities. (Tim also gave a plug for going to work for a non-profit or school, which need ppl with finance & administration skills.)
  
• On government regulation. Both worried that the gov't was overstepping its bounds. Julian suggested we all tighten our belts and suffer through a sharper, more painful downturn without gov't spending or "more leveraging" to speed up the recovery. Tim, in typically balanced fashion, talked about the role of the family, the church or social institution, the gov't, and private enterprise, and how each of those had its role to play. He also warned of trusting either gov't OR business too much, since both are made up of people and therefore are corruptible. He also brought up the very interesting example of Deut. 24:6, "Do not take a pair of millstones—not even the upper one—as security for a debt, because that would be taking a man's livelihood as security," as an example of the kind of gov't regulation that IS needed to prevent a lender from driving a borrower into financial ruin.
  
• On the bailouts. Julian pretty much affirmed that the bailout of AIG and other "too big to fail" institutions may have been necessary. Tim observed that bailouts are better than slavery! (Slavery, or indentured servitude, was how people worked off their debts in the ancient Middle East, hence its mentions in the Bible.)
  
• On what the Bible has to say about debt and over-leveraging. Tim said basically all the major religions are extremely cautious or negative on money-lending & indebtedness, and recommend paying down your debt and living within your means.
• On how to get through the financial crisis. Both Tim & Julian affirmed that family & friends are what's really important at the end of the day, not career or income. Tim observed that in all his years as a minister, having visited many deathbeds, no one had ever told him, "I wish I spent more time at the office."
  

I dug this postcard for the event.

Work Less, Pay Less

Two things I said years ago, half-jokingly, are now coming true.

When I left New York, I told some of my friends that I would come back when the economy tanked, when people left the city, rents fell, crime rose – basically, when it returned to what it was before it priced people like me out.

The other thing I started saying a few years ago, as I compared my salary and hours to that of my friends, was that I'd rather work less and make less. Even though I made half the salary of many of my friends in finance or law, I felt I was getting a fair deal, because I had time to maintain friendships, be active in my church, volunteer, etc. while they pretty much lived at work.

Well, I can't afford to move back yet, but NYC is definitely undergoing some major changes, and the silver lining is that rents are officially falling! (Of course it will take a long time for those prices to fall to earth - see previous post.) Also, I'm now working part-time (about 25-30 hrs/week) – I tell people I have a "job of the future," off-site, flex hours and no benefits – and I'm making even less than I used to!

I'm actually saving more, though, since life also costs a lot less these days. More on my new living situation in a future post...

Cost of living and who's really "rich"

Since leaving New York nearly two years ago, I've heard several offhand comments made by people from other parts of the country about how wealthy New Yorkers are, as if they're on a completely different level than ordinary Americans. This has left me scratching my head. Are they really?

After living in New York City for nearly ten years, four of them as a college student and the other six in publishing (an infamously low-paid industry), I got used to Craig's List rentals in pre-war buildings, walkups, trash, rats, and hauling groceries or laundry home on foot every week. I jostled through crowded sidewalks and subways filled with a mix of rich and poor people, but I would venture to say there were more poor.

New York has its glamour, it's true. You do see people wearing all-designer wardrobes, and power lunching at fancy restaurants, and making 5 or 6-figure bonuses.

However, even corporate lawyers are lucky to live in a decent-sized one-bedroom apartment (say 1200 sq. ft.) in Manhattan. And the highest paid work very hard; one first-year investment banker told me that if you divided his salary by the number of hours he was working, he was making a blue-collar hourly wage, which I have no doubt is true. I've often thought New York City is a place where the rich paradoxically live like the poor.

Meanwhile most of the people in my world – students, starving artists, low-level corporate drones – lived in sketchy neighborhoods, often with sketchy neighbors, and used recycled Ikea furniture in our closet-sized rooms. We ate at cheap ethnic dives and only saw Broadway shows with $20 lotteries. We couldn't afford to take cabs except in case of emergency. We didn't entertain much because we didn't have room, or lived too far out in the boroughs, or lived in a share with tenuous roommate relationships.

By contrast, so many people in Houston drive SUV's and live in big houses with huge flat-screen TV's that I can only assume this is attainable on a middle-class salary. How do you compare wealth when the cost of living is so different?

The conundrum has only gotten more interesting since coming back from Peru. On the one hand, the workaholic lifestyle and preoccupation with career in New York feels very divorced from the reality of billions who barely scrape by every day. On the other hand, the isolation afforded by the low cost of living (and good economy) in Texas, with each family comfortably ensconced in a big house with an entertainment system and a two-car garage, is just so... comfortable, so self-sufficient, which is the opposite of poverty too.

So I guess what I'm trying to say is, it's easy to look at someone else and say, "They have it so much better than I do." And assume that we're the only ones who are struggling. The truth is, if you live in America and make a middle-class salary or higher, you're pretty fortunate. No matter where you live.

And if you're laid off or otherwise hurting right now, you might want to consider moving somewhere with a lower cost of living.

¡Viva la globalización!

Today a new HEB Mart opened in Missouri City, Texas, about 20 min. from my house. Over the years I've noticed an increasing number of American grocery stores have an "International Foods" aisle, with a small assortment of couscous, teriyaki sauce and basmati rice. However this gigantic supermarket, with a very ethnically diverse clientele, actually has 3-4 shelves just for products from South America!

I have been looking for ají, i.e. chili peppers from Peru used to season everything from rice to chicken to vegetables, ever since I got back from Peru. Today I was overjoyed to find them at last...

Hooray, or as they say in Peru, "ji ji... ra!"

"Ají Amarillo, Product of Peru"

Inca Kola, national soft drink of Peru...