Twelve by Twelve

by Micahel Powers

  This wasn’t confined to the capital. Up-country, ArcelorMittal, the world’s biggest steel conglomerate, had a team of Brazilian miners on alternating twelve-hour shifts to extract the best of Liberia’s iron ore rapidly while the postwar government was still weak. Mittal had cut a dream deal with the corrupt interim president Gyude Bryant that created a virtual nation within a nation — a nation called Mittal, inside Liberia, that had sovereignty over the Nimba Mountains, the Buchanan port, and a prewar railroad line linking the two. A nation of greed. The global price of minerals was shooting up as the Flat World demanded ever more — and ArcelorMittal stepped up to do the dirty work.

  I journeyed by rough road into the Nimba Mountains to see what was happening. Schmoozing my way into the mining area and befriending some of the Brazilian mine workers with my awkward Portuguese and love of Brazil, I saw firsthand how Mittal pollutes the water supply, exploits the Brazilians with low wages and few rights, and leaves behind scant technical capacity to prevent Liberians from eventually running their own mines.

  Moreover, ArcelorMittal is owned by London-based Indian billionaire Lakshmi Mittal. At the time, he was considered the world’s fourth-richest man, and the richest in Europe, with a net worth, according to Forbes, of $45 billion, after Americans Bill Gates and Warren Buffet and Mexico’s Carlos Slim. Perhaps to compensate for being just fourth on the list, he created new superlatives for himself. He paid $60 million to host his daughter Vanisha Mittal’s wedding at the Palace of Versailles, making it the most expensive wedding ever. And he dished out $128 million for his residence at 18–19 Kensington Palace Gardens in London, the world’s most expensive house. He even decorated it with marble from the same quarry that supplied the Taj Mahal, dubbing his palace the Taj Mittal.

  As I watched Lakshmi Mittal’s air-conditioned trucks zoom right through the markets in Monrovia where Liberian schoolgirls were selling their bodies for a dollar a day, I pictured his pillaging of Nimba’s beautiful mountains. As I walked along Poo Poo Beach, I felt uncertain. Warrior presence? Was it just a useless concept? I couldn’t hear the murmur of No Name Creek anymore. Liberia’s problems nipped away at my inner reserves, and I spiraled downward. I stopped doing yoga, practically stopped meditating, and had almost no contact with the kind of pristine nature that buoyed my spirit at the 12 × 12. And I began to drink.

  There, at the bar at Monrovia’s Royal Hotel, I had plenty of company. A disillusioned and cynical colony of expatriates was ready to receive me into their circle. Along with UN peacekeepers, Western embassy staffers, NGO workers, and businesspeople, I drank one whisky after another and blocked out the hell around me.

  Get up in the morning. Drink coffee. Look on the positive side. At least my work was having an effect. Amazingly, half the country is still covered in primary rainforest, and Liberia had canceled without compensation all of the concessions to arms-for-timber lumber companies engaging in uncontrolled logging — including the Oriental Timber Company, which as I documented in Blue Clay People, colluded with dictator Charles Taylor to ransack enormous swaths of the Krahn Bassa and Sinoe wildernesses. I spent long days helping to set up a multimillion-dollar monitoring system to ensure that only “legal timber” could be exported to the European Union; only one of every thirty trees would be cut, leaving the forest intact and bringing cash to local people instead of corrupt politicians. Warrior presence helped there; the reserves of strength I’d built up at Jackie’s helped me focus on the job at hand without being overtaken by cynicism and dread.

  Then I noticed a change in the national forest ministry, where my office was housed. Along with the usual crowd of colleagues — Liberian government and NGO officials — were new faces. Asians. Once a week at first, but then at least one group a day — Da Cheng Ltd., China-Liberia Holding, and a dozen other mostly Chinese companies — were arriving or quickly set up to erase Liberia’s virgin forests and thereby supply China’s coastal factories with the wood needed to send cheap furniture to Ikeas in the West. Unfortunately, China was not subject to the supposedly airtight legal timber policies we were putting in place.

  I met with the Chinese chancellor — China was at the time busy building its biggest embassy in West Africa in Liberia — to try to persuade them to commit to legal-timber standards, but he used every diplomatic sleight of hand imaginable: deflection, flattery, even feigning ignorance of the presence of Chinese logging companies in Liberia. Flat World economic globalization, it seemed, would in the end be far stronger than any legal-timber shield we might construct.

  Physically exhausted one day after banging my head against Chinese diplomatic walls, and then getting sideswiped by a Mittal SUV racing into the interior as I left my office, I beelined to the Royal for a whisky. I sat at a table with some tipsy UN peacekeepers, embassy staffers, and an NGO worker or two and placed my order. One of the UN guys, already fairly loaded, joked about getting some “underage pussy for about a buck,” but he was only half kidding; another couple of drinks and it would probably tempt him. Just as my drink arrived, my cell phone rang.

  It was Toupee, the friend of a Liberian colleague from my civil war work in Liberia. I didn’t know her that well, but that didn’t stop her from asking a big favor. Could I drive a full hour from the Royal into a dangerous neighborhood, at night, to pick her up at a clinic and take her home?

  The whisky in my glass was positively glistening in its ice. Despite the sleazy banter, the cozy cynicism at the Royal was better than what lay outside in the Monrovian night.

  “Now?” I said, weakly.

  “I have plus-two malaria,” Toupee said. Then the phone connection cut.

  Plus-two malaria, I thought, fingering my glass. So what? Malaria is as common as a cold in Liberia. I hardly knew this person. I’d already worked a twelve-hour day. I wanted out of the terrible reality around me, not more of it. Did I really want to drive into a neighborhood full of ex–child soldiers, into a rat-infested clinic in miserable Barnersville? I didn’t need more contact with a world where one person hoards $45 billion while kids die of preventable diseases like malaria, where the kids dying are the same ones being exploited to amass more money for those on top.

  How can we live together on the same planet and bear the psychological strain of such vast inequality? Through denial, of course, but that’s tough in a place like Liberia, where it’s in your face every day. No, I was allowed a little denial. I’d earned it. I lifted my glass.

  Then, under the din of the bar, beneath the tasteless comments and drone of CNN International, I heard it: the murmur of No Name Creek and Jackie’s voice — see, be, do. I visualized Toupee in the clinic, blazing hot with malaria. She was, what, twenty-two? Though Toupee was in college now, how many steps away from prostitution was she? I closed my eyes, and in my mind I beat a narrowing path into the darkest part of the woods. “The narrow gate that leads to life,” as Jesus beautifully put it. It is narrow indeed, just this: these tiny eyes, ears, and fingers touching the present moment.

  I put the glass down, the whisky untouched, and drove into the humid Monrovian night. The slums got progressively dodgier, but I finally found Toupee’s clinic. I helped her sister shoulder Toupee’s feverish body into my car and drove Toupee and her sister back across the city to her room, on my side of town, stopping on the way to buy them groceries. I gave Toupee money for medicine and sat there with them for a long time in her mildew-covered room, a fifteen-dollar-a-month rental. Its dimensions were almost the same as Jackie’s, about 12 × 12. Like 99 percent of Liberians — like Jackie — Toupee had no electricity. We talked for a while but then slipped into silence, the moonlight streaming in through the single window into her tiny square room.

  There I rediscovered something I’d lost: warrior presence, a way of being in the world that slices through negative energy. Instead of letting myself drift into cynical disengagement, I allowed the gift of Jackie’s wisdom to lift me to a different frequency where those negative energies passed right through me, like m
oonlight through a window. Through this, I learned that warrior presence isn’t a shield that repels fear, greed, and other forms of negativity. These emotions entered me, but when I let go of my narrow ego-consciousness, these emotions had nowhere to lodge.

  After that night helping Toupee, I resolved, as a kind of mindfulness practice, to perform at least one selfless action a day. One of my organization’s drivers needed a thousand-dollar loan to meet a payment; I had the money and gave it to him. A Liberian friend’s son needed a job and skills; I created a paid internship for him, and in my spare time I taught him how to use the internet and make spreadsheets. Each of these actions flowed naturally from the warrior presence I’d developed in the 12 × 12, a state in which I felt love for myself, for others, for the world.

  The day before I left Liberia, at my going-away party, I was surprised to find the love flowing back in my direction, as those same people I’d helped showered me with beautiful African clothing, long heartfelt speeches, and even an African name. It had been only three months, but what does that matter? I’d spent two full years in Liberia the previous time and did not receive a fraction of that warmth and love at my going-away party.

  One more quite remarkable moment occurred before I left Liberia. Toupee sang to me. She’d recovered from her malaria, and we met for lunch at Sam’s Barbeque on 16th Street in Monrovia. She looked so much better. Her hair was tied back in a bunch of thick braids, and her eyes were aglow over our now-finished plates of jollaf rice. I don’t know exactly when she started, but I slowly became conscious that she was humming, something wordless, staring out into the busy street.

  A Mittal truck raced by on the road the Chinese were paving into the interior; the rainforest and minerals needed to feed the global economy. Probably one of five people walking by Sam’s Barbeque had AIDS. Toupee herself was a war child, having grown up in refugee camps in Guinea and the Ivory Coast as two hundred thousand people died in her country’s civil war. Something was tipping in me. I balanced between negativity and peace on that humid early afternoon: a full stomach, the walk-and-jive of the passersby, Toupee humming next to me. The details smashed together, and suddenly I was living one of those atmospheric moments in a Geoff Dyer or Murakami novel, where an expansive, breathing setting transports you beyond plot. A hum, now a song, as smooth as the 12 × 12 creek’s flow.

  I’ve rarely heard more beautiful sounds, part slightly off-key African pulse, part North Carolina gospel. Liberia was settled by freed US slaves in the early nineteenth century, and many elements of antebellum plantation culture, including gospel music, mixed with Kpelle, Mano, and Grebo culture; Pine Bridge flowed into her song. The lyrics touched on greed and exploitation — AIDS walks by, ecocide rolls by — but the refrain kept coming back to love. “Praise,” she sang, each time more beautifully. “Praise confuses the enemy.”

  A post-malaria war child hummed, but someone else now sang: a third-year sociology student, who went to school in refugee camps and was home again, in a changing Liberia. The international community had just canceled Liberia’s national debt. Many Liberians were coming back from a global exodus to help their country heal. These details, Toupee sang, were the correct objects of our attention. Her song, at a plastic table at Sam’s Barbeque, reinforced the lesson I learned on the banks of No Name Creek. The lesson that kept slipping, that I kept rediscovering, in the most unlikely of places. Praise confuses the enemy, Toupee sang. Don’t let the enemy into your glorious inner space.

  PRAISE CONFUSES THE ENEMY

  POST SCRIPT

  “DADDY, HAY LUZ.” — “There’s light.”

  It’s a year after my time in the 12 × 12, and I wake up in Bolivia, next to Amaya. She’s become interested in transitions, like the one between night and day. We cuddle for a while, I kiss her cheek, and it’s time to start the day.

  I’m living in the village of Samaipata near Santa Cruz, where I’ve been for six months. My mother is here for a two-week visit, and she and Amaya spend the morning together while I finish a freelance essay. They sing and pantomime songs (“The Wheels on the Bus” and “Barnyard Dance”), and then Amaya shows her grandmother, her Mama Anna, the garden she and I have been cultivating together: squash, green onions, and flowers. A Quechua neighbor joins them. He tells them about how his ancestors farmed, suggests some changes, and then reaches into his pocket and passes some seeds into Amaya’s cupped hands.

  Finishing my work, I notice the peace around me. I look down from a bougainvillea and passion fruit terrace toward the village, a couple hundred modest, whitewashed adobe homes with clay-tiled roofs. Above them, on the cliffs at the far side of the valley, crouches a jaguar-shaped Inca temple.

  I reflect on how profoundly the 12 × 12 experience has changed me. When abroad, I used to live in large homes or apartments. Now I live in a rustic two-bedroom bungalow without a television or any other appliance besides a refrigerator. I’ve put my secular missionary days behind me — no more converting the Idle Majority to a Western idea of Progress. Now I try to join the Idlers as much as possible, thereby freeing up time to grow my own food and be with my daughter, who is with me on the weekends. I don’t own a car anymore. Instead I walk, bike, or take public transport.

  These external changes flow from inner change. I’ve released most negativity: no more Nazi dreams, no more anger toward the people who physically assaulted me or guilt over the shape of my fatherhood. I realized that such negativity does no good and I gradually let it go. Above all, the 12 × 12 experience catalyzed more mindfulness in everything I do. I’ve come to increasingly inhabit “the other world inside of this one,” that state of consciousness that Jung and Einstein talked about, where durable change happens. It’s not about “me,” but rather about overcoming the dim, narrow space of ego — and humbly dedicating my life energy toward a broader process. I find myself listening to my intuition every day, and it tells me, very clearly, about my place in the whole.

  I walk over to my daughter and mother. On a large sheet of paper, they’re now painting the idyllic village below, a place where corporate globalization touches lightly. Samaipata has little advertising, absolutely no chain stores, the town’s three thousand people surrounded by some three million acres of nature. Inca culture goes back to 1500 BC and is still present in the village’s robust way of living with instead of against the earth. Amaya and my mom paint some of that: the neighbors spinning raw wool into yarn and gathering medicinal herbs.

  A side of me wishes to freeze this scene. But can we? Amaya, for one, doesn’t seem to think so. She’s added something to the painting, above the brush-stroked circular garden and the Inca temple: a rainbow-colored airplane with butterfly wings.

  In the past this might have saddened me: “globalization” in the form of noisy 747s roaring over this traditional village; my daughter, disconnected from place. Now I’m less fearful of change. There’s a suchness in that detail, something to be traced to its source and transformed. Jackie doesn’t suggest that we constrain ourselves to cookie-cutter eco-austerity, copying her. Quite the contrary; she suggests we be still, look deeply inward, and then act.

  Change will come; it is coming. For me personally, Amaya’s mom may accept a master’s scholarship in the United States, and she would bring our daughter there for a time. And a think tank in New York has asked me to use my years of field experience to help shape US global warming legislation aimed at conserving the world’s last rainforests because of their role absorbing greenhouse gasses — in other words, work toward a paradigm shift.

  There are trade-offs. I admire my expatriate friends who have come to settle in Samaipata for good — one runs an organic café, Tierra Libre (the Free Earth); another manages a sustainable farm, La Vispera (the Eve) — and I aspire toward a more physically rooted life. But I know that my place in the whole, for now, remains global.

  Even in large cities, it is possible to maintain warrior presence and scale back from overdevelopment to enough. By planting a windowsill
or community garden; doing yoga; walking and biking; and carrying out at least one positive action for others every day. Nor do we need to live 12 × 12 to experience the subtle joy of being. Whether in the city or the country, leave your cell phone, books, and other distractions behind and sit or walk — very slowly. Pay attention to your senses; feel the breeze, notice smells and sounds. Try the meditation three-times-ten: Breathe in to a slow count of ten, drawing in light and gratitude. Hold that abundance for another count of ten. Then let your breath out slowly, counting to ten, exhaling any fears, negativity, or resentment, all that inner charcoal. Doing this during a busy day, I find myself much more patient and relaxed with myself and with others. We decide what gets globalized — consumption or compassion; selfishness or solidarity — by how we cultivate the most valuable place of all, our inner acre.

  As I cultivate that acre, it naturally links with others. There is enormous hope for more mindful internationalism. One million community groups, NGOs, and other grassroots efforts have sprung to life around the world, the biggest upswell of people power ever. Thinking of this, I feel new questions bubble up: If we are globalizing, why not globalize a reverence for the still, the small? Can we globalize planes with “butterfly wings”: ones that run clean? Can we globalize maladjustment to empire by linking those one million soft spots within the flat — Samaipata and Pine Bridge; Quechua culture and permaculture? While the current global economic downturn might challenge these NGOs in the short term, in the long term it might get people living on less and closer to the earth, and turning away from a life of excess. Because of the financial crisis, even some of the captains of industry I’ve talked with are finally understanding that another kind of globalization is necessary. The current world — built on a shaky platform of blinding wealth and grinding destitution — is not in their interest, either, because it makes the whole system unstable.