Nail Clippers

So I understand that my handsome charcoal eyebrows, gently sloping nose, and generally hairless appearance don't exactly fit the All-American caricature, but seriously, TSA? Seriously?

After being not so subtly implicated in a transcontinental drug cartel network two weeks ago at JFK Airport, my patriotism was again called into question as my sweet countenance made its way past the Long Beach Airport metal detectors. The incriminating evidence this time? Ryan and Colin, take it away:

TSA guy: Sir, is this your bag?
Me: Yeah.
TSA guy: I'm going to take a look inside, ok?
Me: Ok.
TSA guy: It was in this side pocket here.
Me: What was in the side pocket?
TSA guy: Let me check it out. I'm not sure what it was.

TSA guy takes out the Ziploc bag containing my toiletry. His pupils dilate.

TSA guy: These are nail clippers?

TSA guy is holding my nail clippers.

Me: Yeah.
TSA guy: I mean, nail clippers are not a problem. These are just big.
Me: Yeah they are.
TSA guy: Hey, check out these nail clippers. This is the biggest nail clipper I've seen.

TSA guy calls over TSA girl and TSA guy #2.

TSA guy #2: Wow.
Me: I guess they don't make em like this anymore.
TSA guy #2: Did they ever? Damn.

Just leave your nail clippers at home.

The Originals

How do you change the culture of always finishing second in a U.S. footwear market that's growing more competitive by the second? You recruit Snoop Dogg, Game, Dwight Howard, a brilliant director's mind, and two unnecessary booties to shoot the dopest shoe commercial since Jason Williams appeared in one. I'm still not buying Adidas though.

Tanzania Part 3 - Serengeti

Damn it's good to be home. Good to be home because here, I can walk around without being called a "chino" all the time - in the U.S., people only think I'm Chinese and that's a big difference. Also good to be home because my home is Southern California, and Southern California has authentic Mexican food, which I haven't had in a long time, and authentic Mexican girls to order them with me, which I haven't... yeah. But home is home, no matter the latitude and longitude, and I had been away from mine for far too long. It's good to be back, fam.

My return journey to the States, which spanned more than 24 hours inside cabin doors across five cities, went as smoothly as my pick-up lines for all but one stop. As I passed through security at JFK Airport, the TSA official womanning the carry-on X-ray machine vigilantly but mistakenly nabbed the Nicaraguan coffee stowed away in my backpack for the dark, powdery goodness it shares with a far more nefarious substance. For some reason, she must've not taken me for a delinquent youth trapped in a lifestyle of wheeling and dealing for tuition fees because her method of divining its identity was to administer only a quick sniff. Still counts as scientific method, I suppose, although a conniving cartel leader who reads this blog (probably has a tattoo that reads "Surk14") could now easily traffic cocaine to homies all over the world by giving it some coffee aroma.

Anyway, on we proceed with my adventures in Tanzania. Our next stop is Serengeti National Park, a place I never thought I'd get to visit in my lifetime. All in all, it's probably the most beautiful sliver of the natural world I've seen, if we set the scale of a sliver to a full rotation panorama, etchable in our retinas only in discrete frames. The conditional statement is probably necessary because I've been blessed to come face-to-face with some pretty incredible wonders of the world - Grand Canyon, Sedona, the Canadian Rockies, and Bahia de las Aguilas Beach in the Dominican Republic come to mind - that command their fair share of desktop wallpapers. But it's also because when I am walking in the fields behind my apartment complex at dusk, smelling the greenery, faint perfumes of passerbys, and barbecued meats in back yards unseen, feeling the wave of warmth generated from all that life, and watching the violet, vermillion, and cobalt of sunset, dulled by the granular slate of Los Angeles smog, tint the grass a thick metallic glow, I think it's pretty wonderful as well. And you could not tell from my endorphin levels where I'm wylin out.

But Serengeti is Serengeti for a reason, and I found myself in otherworldly landscapes unlike any I had seen before. For about the first half hour of the drive from the park entrance, our 4X4 vehicle traversed a vast sea of brown prairie grass entirely uninterrupted in all directions; the world was endless, flat plains and sky that met in a neat line. Then an invisible painter began to add signs of other life - termite mounds, riots of stubborn shrubbery, and giant trees with lush cover - but so sparsely such that each of them stood utterly alone and no more than one occupied a single field of vision. The eeriness of the scene was only allayed when I noticed crepuscular rays streaming through some cloud cover. The sky was so grotesquely large and the rays radiating from a point so far away that the light ceased to be light and became a barely visible wrinkle of space, a slow decay of hadrons into quarks. Most of these gossamer threads disappeared into the sea of grass, but I saw one kiss a lonely tree, as if the tree existed because it had been the benefactor of some vital essence in the light. It must be a blessing and a curse, I thought to myself, to flourish but flourish alone.

As we ventured deeper into the park, Serengeti became anything but uniform. The grasses yielded space to dense communities of towering trees, thorn bushes, and even wildflowers, and the brown dissolved into every shade of yellow and green imaginable. There were archipelagos of rocks, red clay valleys, rivulets and watering holes, and vast, gently sloping hills that unfurled millions of trees with capillary branches and brain canopies like Murakami's mushrooms. And then there were animals. A lot of them. There are no words to describe the feeling of being surrounded by thousands of zebras and wildebeest. So even though the pictures don't do justice, they will do a better job from here. Get your PokeDex out, boys and girls.

Baboon



According to National Geographic, baboons "have a taste for meat" and "eat birds, rodents, and even the young of larger mammals." According to my friend in elementary school, baboons can also rip your balls off with their hands. Now I'm a grown ass man at the age of 21, but I don't feel confident, with my 5'8'' frame, that I can necessarily convince an adult baboon to leave me alone. So when one jumped inside our 4X4 vehicle through the pop-up roof and perched 2 feet away from me, I was practicing the guillotine choke in my head. Luckily, no submission attempt was made, as our driver's honk scared it away.

Vervet Monkey



This one probably can't rip my balls off.

Ostrich



An ostrich in Tanzania!

Dangerous Birdies





The bottom one looks scarier. Probably a male because it wanted my sandwich.

Gazelles





Gazelles are one of the most common animals you can find in Serengeti but I never tired of seeing them. Very elegant and probably impossible to catch unless you are a cheetah. I witnessed a stare-down between a pride of female lions and a herd of gazelles - the gazelles broke off into a run as soon as a lion attempted anything close to a trot.

Zebra





Zebras are one of the most common animals you can find in Serengeti, and I tired of seeing them. Also, one of them chased me to the bathroom on my last night of camping.

Wildebeest





I missed their famous annual migration to Kenya, but for someone who had never seen a single wildebeest before, sights like the above were just mind-blowing.

Warthog



It's pretty amazing that the creators of Lion King made a hero out of this animal.

Elephant



Chances are you will get to see an elephant in your lifetime even if you don't get to Tanzania, and that's a good thing because elephants are so damn lovable.

Giraffe



I still have yet to see a giraffe in any kind of hurry or distress. So it's like the Confucius or Buddha of the animal kingdom but it's too tall.

Gator



Crocodile or alligator?

Hippo



Seeing a hippo out of water is about as rare as seeing me without a shirt on.

Jackal and Hyena





Both low-tier carnivores that scavenge on the leftovers of lions.

Leopard



Spends most of the day sleeping on trees...

Lion




I'm a grown ass man at the age of 21, but I felt pretty awkward when this happened. I mean, does the male lion really expect the female to carry him on her back just because he is tired? Pitiful. But watching the lions do it, I have to say, was kind of reassuring because even the king and queen of the Serengeti kingdom are figuring love out. Even though the male's expression in the top picture screams triumph and conquest, I can tell you he lasted maybe 7 seconds in that lionny position. I can also tell you that in his frustration, he attempted to swallow the female's head whole and the female, equally frustrated with his timing and flaccid underachievement, dropped to the prairie grass and writhed in disappointment. Relationships ain't easy, mane.

We Pause for a Black Mamba Update

There was much ado about the resurgence of Asian stocks following the U.S. debt ceiling deal, but we, vigilant citizens of the basketball world, all sensed a second coming far more spectacular. Little did we know that the second coming would be deposited on the face of LeBron James. In case you missed the first remotely cool-looking dunk completed by someone of Asian descent:



Nearly simultaneous with the tumble of BronBron stock was a cool 43-point increase in BMI, which usually stands for Body Mass Index but here stands for Black Mamba Industries. Congratulations to James Harden and his orange shoes for being the last buyer of the championship-winning venom.

Tanzania Pt 2 - The Work Life

I am not sure how it exactly works, but humans somehow possess the ability to pick out a few tidbits of their existence that are worth their attention and consciously neglect others, often in a manner that suggests they are not sure what they really care about, or don't really care about what they claim to care about. It can be contagious and in worst case scenarios, festers into a myopia of an entire population such that they will ignore the pain of others' poverty, despite acknowledging the arbitrariness of their fortunes, or demonize those who hold views that differ from theirs, despite coming home to wives and husbands who disagree with them about whether it's appropriate to take their children out to Chipotle for dinner (it is) and whether foreplay should last longer than five minutes (I have no wisdom to offer in this department). I suspect it is this same capacity for selective processing and double-think that can explain how I drifted through much of this summer not doing a lot of critical self-reflection or meaningful engagement with pressing issues around the global community and still learned quite a bit in my area of interest. It's scary, really.

As an intern working for Neovita, a randomized controlled trial investigating whether Vitamin A supplementation for babies within their first two days of life improves their chances of survival at 6 months, I have had the incredible opportunity to watch a pretty important project unfold from backstage. Neovita is a massive effort orchestrated by the World Health Organization to obtain sufficient evidence to evaluate an intervention considered a cost-effective candidate for reduction of neonatal mortality. "Massive" and "sufficient" are really the key words here because the trial is simultaneously occurring at three sites chosen for their high infant mortality rates - Tanzania, India, and Ghana - each of which is slated to enroll a whopping 32,000 babies. 32,000! Just imagine the response you'd get from Vegeta.

The Tanzania project itself is grounded in sites at two major geographical areas: Dar es Salaam, the country's urban center with high population density, and Ifakara, the more rural neighbor to the north. I've spent all my time in the former, mostly working from a small office that serves as the home base for our trial management staff. The field operations are based in maternity wards at different hospitals around the city, where nurses consent delivering mothers for participation in the study and research assistants receive their daily assignments for follow-up visits. It is also at these hospitals that any data collected from women and babies are uploaded wirelessly from the field staff's handheld PCs to servers located at our office.

There was something that the professor who taught my health policy class last year emphasized over and over, and now I know it to be true: ideas and plans can sound great, but figuring out how to make them actually happen is often incredibly difficult. There is nothing mind-boggling about the design of our study - you recruit babies in the trial, you give some of them Vitamin A, and then you compare the health outcomes of the groups that got and didn't get Vitamin A. But to actually do it? Quite mind-boggling, it turns out.

I could dedicate an entire blog post just to problems encountered with Vilivs, which are the mobile devices nurses and research assistants use to fill forms when they interview mothers. A simple issue like reduced battery life or missing chargers, for instance, can actually cripple field operations. When research assistants set out to perform follow-up visits on the assigned households without adequately charged Vilivs, they may not be able to collect all required data from mothers in time. So they will either fill forms incompletely or use paper forms. In the latter case, someone has to go through the trouble of re-entering the data from paper to web. If the research assistants do it themselves, they lose time that could be spent on more follow-up visits. If the paper forms are given to data clerks and double entry is not used, data quality takes a hit. The Vilivs may also run out of battery while they are uploading entered data to the servers. The challenge is that the servers cannot tell you whether data are missing because data have not been transferred from paper to electronic form, the upload was unsuccessful, or research assistants actually failed to collect the data. So the data manager informs the RA supervisor about the missing data, the RA supervisor tries to ascertain the reason, and then the reason is communicated back to the management team so they can respond accordingly. At least that's what would happen in an ideal world, where servers are always functioning, electricity and gasoline in Tanzania are in good supply because government officials are feeling not corrupt, RAs are not fabricating data, and uh, RAs are not striking.

As for my niche in this complex ecosystem of humans, money, responsibilities, and feelings (is there anything else?) I have really just helped out in any way I can. For a while, that entailed organizing and storing all consent forms in numerical order and creating a database of IDs for which they are missing, in preparation for the WHO audit that happened just a week ago. All that means is if we held a contest to see who could more quickly pick out the bigger of two 6-digit numbers, I would beat you. Since then, my responsibilities have ranged from writing a Standard Operating Procedure about consent forms and doing site visits to make sure the field staff understand and follow it, to re-creating a staff contact list because the existing Excel spreadsheet has a virus. But mostly, I've learned a lot. And I've marveled at the many challenges and rewards that don't show up in the PubMed papers.

Some of these challenges and rewards, though, have been personal ones as well. My first official "global health" experience is one that had me feeling anything but global healthy, and it's not just because I was asked to perform tasks that feel small in the big scheme of things. It's the fact that when I am flipping through the consent forms and reading the names of mothers - or glancing at their thumbprints, in the case that they are illiterate - I know nothing about what it's like to be a mother in the district called Kimara, how many little kiddos already in broad daylight will be eating her ugali tonight, or what burgeoning hopes and brooding worries graced her mind as she walked back from the clinic. It's also the fact that global health, much less neonatal Vitamin A supplementation, does not come even close to getting at the heart of the matter, in Tanzania.

But disheartening moments like these seldom last long, thanks to my darker co-workers. Whether it's food, first dates, or Tanzania we prattle about in that stale, dingy 5th floor office, my data team bros are always reminding me, with their wit, compassion, and love, why I'm in this journey, exactly what and who is at stake here. And as for the daunting challenges beyond the realm of global health? We are taking a collective deep breath and tackling a small one together. Stay tuned, boys and girls.

Tanzania Part 1 - I May Never Get to Part 2

All things considered, it's probably safe to say this summer has seen more action than the rest of my post-puberty existence combined. And while females have featured not insignificantly in the experience because I am down with black girls of every single culture, my time in Tanzania has been different for the main reason that more of it has been spent living than reflecting. I've always thought that a truly meaningful inhabitance of Planet Earth - where human beings find it worth their while to search for truth, to be generous and selfless despite the blow to their survival fitness, and to attach some moral weight to cuddling after sex (which encompasses the first two items, by the way) - is a fine balance of the two. But the circumstances were a bit different this time around. I was halfway around the world from the place I call home, and the only way to do this incredible opportunity justice was to indulge in the sensory cosmogramma that may not come again. So now seems like the right time to retrieve some memories from the backburner and give them a nice, slow roast. Juices be dripping, brah.

Perhaps the most logical place to start is my home. Every morning, I awake from my mefloquine-immune REM slumber neatly tucked in a beautifully embroidered golden blanket like a kangaroo joey. The gold is a nice touch because the bed sheet is light salmon and the wooden headboard deep mahogany so if you throw in my temporarily burnished complexion, you probably have enough permutations on the painter's palette to finish at least one section of the Serengeti plains. The gold is also nice because it shimmers on the white marble tiles and then diffuses toward the ceiling, giving the appearance that the room is well lit even at dawn.

My room is one of four bedrooms that opens into a narrow corridor, interrupted for a brief stretch by a cavity holding the washing machine and drying board. The amount of light in the corridor is never the same at any given moment, depending on the amount of light received by the outside world and transmitted through each bedroom between the curtains, as well as its interplay with the blanket's gold. The bathroom is the only other repository on the second floor, and always full of surprises, since I have shared it with rotating rosters of two or three guests that have never included a male. So my Irish Spring soap and Head &Shoulders 2-in-1 Shampoo & Conditioner are mere pawns in an impressive procession of bath and hygiene products, and despite my pride in simplicity, I must confess that the names, packaging, and scents of this collection are damn creative, if not downright seductive. But what's more curious, perhaps, is that the site, after a female has showered, seems to retain some of her vital essence such that any combination of these artificial scents is always enveloped in a thin veneer of raw freshness reminiscent of a spring brook. Another discovery worth sharing is that the straightener and curler are in fact real devices.

Whether it's the frequency of use, the slowness of morning light to trickle through the windows in the first floor, or the difference between stone and marble, the white winding staircase down to the first floor does not have the same immaculate or bright character as the tiles in my bedroom. But this is usually the optimal site for sightings of small geckos that often match the white of walls and steps. As is customary of creatures in developing countries, these little buggers have remarkable footspeeds and athleticism and may or may not have secret parachutes hidden in their underbelly. A short left turn after the descent brings me to the mouth of the kitchen, which, I'm ashamed to say, really gets no love from me. The microwave has done a lot of heating take-away lunches on my behalf, and the refrigerator has been great about preserving my bananas but I leave the oven and cutting board to the residents with two X chromosomes. The living room, which leaks out to meet the hallway, is well-furnished with two comfortable opposing couches, a one-seater that directly faces a flat-screen Samsung TV, and a coffee table with a curious fiction collection headlined by Tom Wolfe and Jhumpa Lahiri, which, if you connect the obvious dots, says many Indian immigrants go on to study at prestigious schools and are now more sexually active.

Once I go out the main door, I waddle through a kind of stone garden until the security guard at the gate asks about my morning or sleep in Swahili. Sometimes he engages me in a longer conversation during which he will drop some not so subtle hints about the little salary he is getting and little food he's had in the last 24 hours. I have always considered stinginess one of my worst moral failures, and my conduct in Tanzania has done nothing to prove otherwise. After a few instances of coughing up some change and buying cheap bread for him from the supermarket, I started to ignore his requests. The truth is that despite where I stand and all that I have in my current position of life, and despite my full cognizance of the fact that others, through no fault of their own, are much worse off than I am, I still can't shake off memories of the daily sacrifices my parents made to get me here. Not yet.

The walk to my workplace is otherwise benign and even quite pleasant. The lushness that sets Tanzania apart from many of its African neighbors is apparent even in Dar es Salaam, the country's ultra-crowded urban center. Every morning I pass by probably a few dozen species of trees planted along sides of the road and outside houses, some of which are so random in character and distribution that I am convinced if there were ever a Noah called upon to preserve two of each flora and fauna, he must have been a Tanzanian. Coconut trees and other tropical vegetation with broad fronds fight for sunlight against flowering trees and thick-waisted behemoths with overhanging canopy, the latter of which is particularly useful for hiding litter (I have yet to see a public trash can in Tanzania) and underground sewage lines. My favorite tree, though, is this wooly spool of wrinkly leaves wrapped around a thin trunk - when it sways in the wind, it reminds me of those tree monsters from fantasy movies.

As you can probably infer from my earlier description of the guesthouse, the neighborhood where I reside is not like most in Tanzania, or even Dar es Salaam. High-rise apartments and lavish private homes are dwarfed by sprawling arrangements of run-down concrete block houses around the city, many that lack running water, electricity, and sanitary facilities. And though the guesthouse has been paid for and arranged by Harvard, it's an awkward position that I find myself, to count myself an advocate for social justice and human dignity while living the lifestyle of many who undermine them.

But for the hard-working Tanzanian folks who are building the to-be apartments and private homes in my neighborhood? A few poorly pronounced overtures in Swahili from my end have been enough for them to welcome me as a member of their community. Every morning when I approach the dozen or so workers eating breakfast in front of the skeleton of "Swiss Towers", I become nuthin but a G thang as I gratefully receive high-fives, handshakes, and fist bumps. I return their "Habari" with "Nzuri", "Mambo" with "Poa," and soon I will have already rounded the bend in the road, where James the security guard and Samuel the shoe polisher will get up from under their parasol to shake my hand and ask how I slept. The Swahili phrase that won them over, though? Weka mikono juu - Put your hands in the air.