MRC Film Series 2012

Back in January, I saw "Garbage Dreams," a documentary about a community of traditional waste disposal workers in Egypt that was put on by the Middle Eastern Studies Department at the University of Texas and screened at a movie theater. It reminded me of one of the activities of the Fulbright Commission in Kathmandu, a human rights film series. These weekly events were held in theaters and schools and in one of my regular cafes on Lazimpat Road, and through the  screenings of films like "Saving Dolma" and "Sari Soldiers" I met filmmakers and activists and learned about some of the contemporary issues in Nepal. It was a great experience. Halfway through "Garbage Dreams" I decided I wanted to recreate that experience in Austin for the Multicultural Refugee Coalition. I had just reconnected with the MRC, and I thought that this would be a good way to raise awareness for the MRC and to help people understand why the government of the United States is settling people from countries like Bhutan, Burma, Sudan, and Somalia in Austin.


That idea eventually became the MRC Film Series, which is a free public event that will take place on Sunday evenings all throughout August:

Click here to see film info, dates & times!

For this event, I looked at refugee and human rights film festivals around the world (many of them put on by the UNHCR) and picked films that represent different communities within the Multicultural Refugee Coalition. My plan is to screen these films and to have Q&A session after each screening with someone who is involved with the film or a member of the community who can speak to the films. Here are some of the films we will be screening:

Wisps of Language, Dark Breads and Enemas

Lately I've been thinking a lot about the grandchildren of forgotten languages. Much of my current work for the Texas German Dialect Project at the University of Texas involves carefully listening to archived interviews with the last remaining speakers of Texas German. Many of them express regret that this dialect that has existed in Texas for hundreds of years will in all likelihood disappear when they are gone, but it is often a small and resigned regret for something that appears inevitable. Very few of them say that they would describe this disappearance as "sad."

Two generations down, I do think that this is sad, and I wonder if the sense of the loss of a language is something that is often felt strongly by the grandchildren. Although my grandfather's first language was German, my father was raised entirely in English. I also grew up speaking only English, but I had a curiosity about my heritage that lead me to study Standard German in school.

Even before school, though, I had learned a few ancestral words and phrases. They were passed down from my father. They are the "leftovers" of the language, the very few words that I remembered from what my father remembered from what my grandfather said. It is a very odd list of words that survived above all others. Some of them are probably dialect variations, and some of them are garbled by time and the fact that I absorbed them as a child. But these are the words that took hold in my impressionable young mind:

1) Dunkelbrot - the first German word I remember from my childhood, the literal translation is "dark bread." It's not a word that I've ever seen in a Standard German dictionary. I always thought it meant pumpernickel bread.

2) Wurst - homemade sausage is a pretty common conversational topic at family get-togethers. 

3) Jeschismatia - I attributed it to my grandmother when she wanted to say something like "Oh my gosh!" I later learned that it was actually Czech. It never occurred to me that she was saying "Jesus Mary!"

 4) Du liegst mir im Herzen... - I learned the entire first verse to this old German folk song, which I considered to be my family's own personal theme song. My mother told me that she was never quite accepted into the family until the day that she learned the words to this song. I didn't learn the meaning of the song until much later.

5) Huttispritzl - as a young child I was told by grinning relatives that this was the German for "enema." The closest Standard German word I can find is Klistierspritze, which is also pretty fun to say.

6) Es regnet - "It's raining." I guess this one survived because it is such a noteworthy event in Texas.

7) Universität von Ihnen - to me these were nonsense words that my father would say when he was pretending to speak German. It seems to be a strangely formal way of saying "your university."


Across the world now there are people whose grandparents are the last remaining speakers of languages. Many of them have in their minds a similar hodgepodge of random words and phrases. I'm sure that some of them wish that they knew how to do more than sing a song or curse in their ancestral language. 

The Adventures of the Reed Rocket

When I came back to Austin from Nepal, waiting for me was a dusty old broken Sears Silvertone organ that my parents had found for free. I tried to turn it on a couple of times and nothing happened so I kind of forgot about it until December when my good friends John, James, and Jonathan decided to fix it up.

We took it out of its crumbling, bulky formica case and were surprised to find how small the actual musical part was: the reed and keyboard structure resembled a giant harmonica a couple feet long, and  most of the wiring went to a simple electronic beatbox.

You can actually almost play it like a harmonica by blowing into the bottom, but I wouldn't recommend it.

We took off the air pump and separated the ancient broken Italian motor, replacing it with a better one that we found from discarded vacuum cleaners behind a vacuum supply shop (we also replaced the crumbled hose with a vacuum cleaner hose). 

We went to a battery store and weeded through their discarded non-lithium chargeable batteries and hooked them up to our new contraption, and then put the whole thing onto an old external frame backpack. It looked like this:

can't... reach... the 'on' button

It was finished on December 31st, and the stroke of midnight found me strapped into that contraption. We walked up and down Burnet with a banjo and serenaded the partygoers, and up into Billy's Bar where we played Auld Lang Syne in front of the revelers. ("Wooo!" they said. Also: "Play Metallica!") When we first switched it on and the air pump started purring, the bartender nervously asked me if I was about to take off. Because of that and because of the giant motor on the back, we decided to call it a reed rocket. 

Here is a grainy youtube video of the Reed Rocket

A few weeks later Jonathan and John and I took a road trip up to Washington DC to stay in for an indeterminate amount of time John's apartment above a Mexican restaurant in Adams Morgan. I was there for a good chunk of January. My motivations were to check out job prospects and to learn about punk music. We saw Trophy Wife in Baltimore and rented some practice rooms in DC. It was a lot of fun. I also got to visit Casey from Pomona and Nepal Fulbrighters Kent, Hattie, Mikaela, Marissa, and Hannah. They do seem to cluster around DC, these people I know who do interesting things. 

As a member of Occupy Austin, one of Jonathan's main motivations was the January 17th Occupy Congress Rally, and he was excited about the prospect of using the reed rocket as a tool of democratic discourse. The night before the rally we were at HacDC, a DC Hackerspace. They were all involved in crazy interesting projects, but they very kindly helped us out by putting connectors onto the wiring of the reed rocket and building a battery charger. They also gave us some twine and helped us paint and heat-dry a giant canvas Texas flag for the rally. 

They took this video of us fiddling with the reed rocket.

While Jonathan stayed at the Occupy camp, I spent the night soldering connections and charging batteries.

The day of the rally I spent the morning researching awesome protest songs like this, this, and this (with minor lyric changes). Meanwhile, Jonathan was at the rally, livestreaming through his phone to Giant Pipewrench Media and generally protesting and being like a stinging fly on the donkey of society and all that good stuff. Neither of us took pictures, though, so here are few I found on the Internet:

I eventually made it down there and played some songs from within the contraption. Unfortunately, battery and motor troubles caused a premature end to the music (to be honest, I probably could have used some more practice and, er, voice lessons). As I packed the now useless reed organ into the trunk with the keyboard on the bottom, a policeman wandered over and asked me what exactly I was loading into the car:

This doesn't look suspicious, right?

But we were able to convince him that we were musicians and that we were unlikely to cause an (intentional) explosion. We spent the next week wandering around the monuments of DC and getting research passes to check out books at the Library of Congress (this is where Jonathan found Legions of Babel). 

It took me a day to cut a donated bicycle box down to size so that it was small enough to pack on a plane, determine that everything on the organ could legally be placed in checked luggage, and slap large labels on everything that looked suspicious. The reed rocket is now in Austin and after some minor repairs will soon be put back into the service of agitating for democracy. 

Abraham Lincoln and George Orwell at the School of Architecture

Reading about the International Brigades in Legions of Babel: The International Brigades in the Spanish Civil War, it is hard to escape the feeling that for the volunteers (many of them students), the war started out as a crusade of high-minded ideals and intellectualism that became more and more bloody and disillusioning. For example, the International Brigades named each of their battalions after socialist or revolutionary figures:

"Generally organized along ethnic lines, the batteries included the "Anna Pauker," largely French and Belgian rather than Rumanian, the "Thälmann" (German), "Skoda" (Czech), "Gramsci" (Italian), the "Daller" (believed to be French) and later the "John Brown" (predominantly American)." (pg. 59)

"The Abraham Lincoln Battalion; the 428-man battalion included an all Cuban section and an Irish section..." (pg. 64)

"Half of the Americans of the battalion wanted to name their unit after Patrick Henry and the other half after Thomas Paine. While they bickered, Canadians, about one-third of the unit's volunteers, submitted and secured the name Mackenzie-Papineau in honor of two nineteenth-century fighters for independence from Britain, one of whom was the grandfather of the then Prime Minister of Canada." (pg. 86)

So it is surreal to read about these revolutionary figures from different periods of history duking it out against the Blackshirts and other elements of Franco's forces. Though they constituted only a small part of the Republican Army, International Brigades were instrumental in the Battle of Madrid. Here it begins to sound like Lewis Carroll:

"General Emil Kleber, the brigade commander, set up his headquarters in the Faculty of  Philosophy and Literature in the University... The rebels penetrated into the University City and eventually reached the School of Philosophy, where they were finally stopped by the Commune de Paris... the rebels secured the School of Architecture, the Clinical Hospital (where Moors happily seized rabbits and other culinary delicacies only to discover that they had been inoculated with various germs), the School of Agriculture and the house of the painter Velazquez, while the Loyalists held the Schools of Science and Philosophy and Medicine." (pgs. 50-51)

Doesn't that sound like bad allegorical fiction? The war for higher learning in the battleground of the mind. There's even a racist-sounding portrayal of the Moors as the barbarians at the gate.

And then you have a literary figure like Ernest Hemingway driving an ambulance and reporting that the casualties of Americans in the fighting were "the sort you never know whether to classify as hysterical or the ultimate act of bravery." (pg. 124)

George Orwell joined the war with a faction that was caught up in the Barcelona May Days, in which Soviet-backed factions fought against other factions of the Republican Army and purged them violently (pg. 106). Orwell escaped because he was recovering from being shot by a sniper. He later wrote many reflections of that time, including Looking Back on the Spanish Civil War, which includes my favorite story of humanity in wartime (part three of that essay), which explains why it is impossible to shoot at a man who is not wearing any pants. The essay captures the feeling of disillusion and frustration at the squabbling and propaganda machine of the Republican Army.

Interview with Maya Manandhar and Shanti Manandhar of Jagat Sundar Bwonekhuti Secondary School

During my last few weeks in Kathmandu, I sought out people that I thought had interesting opinions on language rights and language education in Nepal, and sat down with them for informal interviews. I wrote about some of these interviews here and here.

This last interview is with Principal Maya Manandhar and Vice Principal Shanti Manandhar of Jagat Sundar Bwonekhuti Secondary School, one of the first mother language schools in the country. It is located near the bank of the Bishnumati River, in a traditional Newari community not far from Swoyambhu. This interview was transcribed and the parts of it that were in Nepali were translated into English:

What is the history of your school and what makes it unique? How is Newari a part of the curriculum?

The school is twenty years old. After the democratic revolution the government gave us the permission to start the school. This was the first, and now there are many. It is a committee-run school, not a private school - there were six members in the first year. This is a mother language school, which means that every subject is taught in the Newari language: that is the teaching methodology. We use the Lotus Books that we publish in Newari for grades 1-5, and we use the English language government books in 9 and 10 (with the optional Newari subject books). The SLCs are taken in English. We teach Newari as a subject, and we choose one out of many different Newari scripts. We teach prachalit, as opposed to the more artful scripts, or Devanagari, which is a script from India, not Nepal. We have a problem with the books in grades six, seven, and eight. There are no Newari books and we use different materials, including photocopies. We teach Media in Newari.

An organization from Japan sponsors students here. Forty per cent of the students are sponsored by individual Japanese donors.

What is the benefit of a Newari component to the curriculum?

Students learn about the script and the culture, Nepal's historical culture. The script is important to preserve, as well as the culture, a very old culture.

Does education in the mother tongue help students to learn?

Little kids need to learn in their own language. What takes two days to learn in another language will take one day in their own language. Our school has gone through three groups of SLC, above 50% with distinction. So the system has been working so far. Also, language are dying all over the world, and that's why we need to preserve ours.

What are the good things and the bad things about the program?

The good things: if it was not taught in school, the knowledge of old songs and dances would be disappearing. We teach traditional dance and music in our school, also sitar (which isn't traditional). We teach old games as well.


There are also some bad things. Learning only in Newari, students can sometimes have no "scope." In college there's no scope for Newari students. The government has not made room for Newari colleges and jobs for Newari speakers. Some of our students have jobs in newspapers and etc.

I see a book of children's stories by Hridaya here on the table. Can you tell me about him?

He was very big. He wrote some famous books in Newari and was given the title of Kabikeshar by King Mahendra. Of course he was persecuted and put in jail before that. We have statue of him in our school.


The main statue belongs to Jagat Sundar Malla, a great Newari scholar who our school is named after. He saw the need for mother language schools, but he was put in jail for this and after he got out he flew to Japan. He saw the schools there and decided to come back to Nepal and sell all of his property to help establish a school. He had to hide his books, and then he died before the school was established. But we established it in his honor.

Chant Révolutionnaire (von den Brigadas Internationales)

Between 1936 and 1939, some 35,000 foreign volunteers from fifty-three different countries came to Spain to fight against Francisco Franco's Nationalist Army. They were drawn by the ideological struggle against fascism, and backed by socialist, communist, and democratic movements. They became the International Brigades of the Republican Army, and this is one of the songs that they sang:

This scan is from Legions of Babel: The International Brigades in the Spanish Civil War by V.B. Johnston. My friend Jonathan found this book when we were at the Library of Congress in DC. I count five languages in the song: English, German, Spanish, French, and Russian. It was published by The Volunteer for Liberty, the newspaper of the International Brigades of the Republican Army during the Spanish Civil War, which was published in French, German, Italian, Polish, and English.

What I love most about the mishmash of languages in the song is all the spelling and grammar mistakes. I think most of them are intentional; the anarchic grammar gives a colloquial feel to the song that enhances the feeling of international brotherhood. As Jonathan pointed out, spelling  'comment ça va' as 'comment savar' and 'working shirt and pants' as 'woiken shoit and panties' makes it sound like this is being sung by a New Yorker who is just now getting a handle on all of these languages being spoken around him.

Because I apparently have nothing better to do, I decided to translate the song (preserving the grammar mistakes as best I could). Black is English, Red is French, Orange is Spanish, Blue is German, Green is Russian:

The Internationalist

I came to Spain in January

I speaks only English

But now I say Comment Ça Va

Wie gehts, Que Tal, Comrade

I driving with my ambulance

In woikin' shoit and panties

I have no time for romance

And work much harder than before

When evening comes I say good night

My blankets all lost

I'm very cold, but I am told

This is war, dat's the war, there's a war on

But other things I has learned

That eats is not much

Our meat is sometimes burned

With garlic, also oil

But one idea is above all

An idea very profound

We'll work hard for Franco's fall

And the United Proletariat Brothers of the whole world

Here multilingualism is used to underpin the message of international solidarity. It strikes me as counter to the Esperanto Movement, which views linguistic confusion as a source of international discord and seeks to propagate a single international language. 

Austin Life

Since I came back to Austin, I've continued helping out at the Multicultural Refugee Coalition as a Language Coordinator. That mostly means I've been helping to run their software reading program, IBM's Reading Companion.

Here is a short film about what the MRC does:

This Austin Life

The Nepali speakers that I know in Austin have come from refugee camps in Nepal. Their homeland is Bhutan, and they are ethnically Nepali. They make up a pretty large percentage of the people who use the MRC.

Here is a Euronews feature on the Bhutanese refugees that was brought to my attention by my friend Ram:

Focus on Bhutan Refugees