Happy Chinese New Year!

Why is Chinese New Year my favorite holiday?

a) It is dedicated to eating a lot of good food with your family and/or friends

b) Children and unmarried people receive money from relatives in little red envelopes (hong bao)

c) Lion dancing

d) No religious affiliation

This is the first year in many that I won’t be home to celebrate CNY with my family, which is sad. But in preparation for CNY, I did clean my house and made some steamed vegetarian dumplings yesterday. I’m going to invite some friends over for dinner tonight.

Hooray for the Year of the Ox and gong xi fa chai (congratulations and good fortune)!

Rainy Season and its Corollaries

So, it’s rainy season again. I won’t lie, it’s pretty miserable. I have friends who are volunteers in other parts of the country say to me, “But you’re from Seattle. You must be used to rain?”

Actually, NO, the rain here is not at all like rain in Seattle. My hometown gets a bad rap for raining all the time. This reputation is not quite deserved, but Seattleites don’t always refute it – it helps to weed out all the Californians who have moved to Seattle and can’t stand the rain. Kidding (sort of)! Anyway, I admit that in the winter, Seattle can be pretty gray and drizzly. And occasionally, it will pour for an hour or two.

But drizzle is nothing compared to the torrential downpour that is rainy season in the tropics (or whatever southern Ecuador is considered). I’m talking about it pouring every single day, days on end, for months. Rain leaks through the roof. Clothes don’t dry on the line. An hour or two after lunch, the fog starts settling in. By late afternoon, my town is so enshrouded in fog that you can’t see from one end of the central plaza to the other. Then the rain begins. We’re talking about massive quantities of rain. At times when it rains it sounds as if someone opened up a hatch in the sky and let the rain pour. It sounds like the universe is taking a shower, for hours at a time. Last year, rainy season lasted until the end of May. Feo is right.

Admittedly, I do enjoy lying in bed listening to the sound of rain outside. But that only lasts so long. Rainy season washes out the roads and makes it near impossible to get to the communities where we work. Rainy season means I can only go running if I’m lucky enough to catch a few dry hours. Rainy season means I sleep in long johns and have to mop up water outside my apartment every single day. Rainy season makes me wish I could hibernate like a polar bear.

Rainy season also means that I’ve gotten pretty creative in the kitchen. I recently decided to try my hand at making apple pie from scratch. Not that I had any other choice, it’s not as if they sell pre-made pie crusts or anything in my town. A confession: I’ve never been a huge fan of apple pie (shhhh…I know how un-American that sounds) but over the holidays I became a convert. Delicious!  What took me so long?

“It feels like a huge weight has been lifted off the universe”

Something very momentous happened on Tuesday, and unless you were living under a rock you know that Barack Obama was sworn-in as the 44th President of the United States of America. HALLELUJAH!

I have been waiting for Inauguration Day 2009 for the past eight years, after the first election in which I could vote (for Al Gore). I have been outraged again and again by George W. Bush and his Administration for: their contempt of the Constitution, their use of torture and manipulation of the law to make torture “legal,” the existence of Guantanamo, “extraordinary renditions,” the global gag rule, their flagrant disregard for empirical science and the reality of global warming, their blind devotion to the Friedman-esque economic policies that have led us to our current economic crisis, their insistent unilateralism in world affairs, and most importantly, the ongoing tragedy that is the War in Iraq. I’m going to stop before I get too worked up here. Suffice to say, when that helicopter took off for Texas with Bush inside, I breathed a huge sigh of relief, along with the 1.8 million people on the Washington Mall and countless millions around the world. As a friend wrote to me, “It feels like a huge weight has been lifted off the universe.”

I remember exactly where I was in 2004 when I first heard Barack Obama’s voice and his message of unity and hope for the renewal of America. Through the past two years, I have followed the ups and downs of Obama’s presidential campaign. I went home a year ago to help caucus for Obama in WA and again in November to cast my vote for him. And last Tuesday, through an intermittently working CSPAN feed in a small town in Ecuador, I watched Barack Obama become the first African-American President of the United States of America. Words can hardly describe my feelings at that moment.

Now, I don’t think that President Obama will magically solve all of America’s problems. I’m a romantic, but that doesn’t mean I’m not also a realist. The President himself gave a somber, muscular Inaugural Address that didn’t shy away from the many challenges facing our nation. Yet, while the expectations are incredibly high, a recent NYTimes/CBS poll shows that “79 percent [of Americans] were optimistic about the next four years under Mr. Obama,” 58 percent of whom voted for McCain. Americans also seem prepared to give Obama some breathing room, two years, for progress to be made on issues such as health care and Iraq.

I’m already impressed by the first week of the Obama Administration – the order to close Guantánamo and the CIA secret prisons, the ban on torture, reversing the global gag rule, thinking big about green jobs to revitalize our economy and reaching out to Republicans to try and pass an ambitious stimulus bill. I’m also pleased with most of the Obama Cabinet picks; I particularly like Energy, Health and Labor, not so much Agriculture and the Interior. I think choosing Hillary Clinton for his Secretary of State is tactically brilliant. It is heartening to see the President surrounding himself with such a brilliant team.

In these uncertain times, I remain hopeful because we have a President at the helm with the “first-class temperament and a first-class intellect” that we need. Along with the rest of my fellow Americans, I have the highest hopes for you, President Obama.