expert generalist

Originally posted on August 10, 2001 on Geekhalla.org, the Geekcorps volunteers’ site:

I am now part of the G3 group of geeks. I am leaving San Francisco for four months. I have been here since the early 90’s, when the city was sleepy and cafes were filled with people writing novels and at parties everyone wore cool purple hats and sparkly clothing but didn’t have jobs. By 1995, I was working in a web company out of a garage and we knew what to do on weekends because Craig Newmark sent some of his friends an email list. I had gotten the job after reading Laura Lemay’s Learn HTML in a Week and I did. At my interview, I sat on a ripped couch in the garage and talked to a bearded Stanford computer science graduate who still had a Brooklyn accent after 20 years in the Bay Area. He asked me to describe a technology goal that I had.

Before coming to San Francisco, I had spent a lot of time in a small village in the north of Bali where the local rice farmers didn’t have electricity, and making a phone call meant borrowing someone’s motorbike and driving nine kilometers to the nearest town, going to the telephone office there and waiting while the operator tried to reach Jakarta. I imagined that one day technology could improve the communication in that village, that the junior high teacher with his tattered books could find materials online, that there could be a kind of clean economic development that wouldn’t rend the landscape with Industrial Revolution smokestacks and blackened rivers, wouldn’t mar that green and shimmering rice-paddy landscape filled with tree spirits. Continue reading »

My 5-year-old American son, whose father is from Ghana, knows that Barack Obama’s father was from Africa too. I have wondered, as his white mother, how race issues will affect him. I didn’t know whether to be happy or sad when one day when I picked him up from preschool, he announced:

“We are all beautiful.”

“Yes, we are all beautiful,” I agreed.

“Even if we’re brown like me and Jackie, we’re beautiful,” he said proudly, climbing into his carseat.

I hated to hear him say even. And then…one day he told me he wished he had hair like my hair. I didn’t know what to think or say – did every 4-year-old with hair different from his mother say such a thing? Or was he starting to view himself in a certain way based on having a certain kind of hair?

Then, today, as we await the inauguration of President Barack Obama, my son announced to me, proudly: “Barack Obama has hair like my hair.”

I wish I were better at remembering names, but I suck at it. Especially if the name is in a language I am unfamiliar with, such as Zulu. But faces and presence and story I never forget.

He was working the bar at the Protea Hotel in Johannesburg, where I was staying for the MobileActive ’08 conference in October 2008. I had had a long and fascinating day learning about such topics as mobile banking. I ordered a glass of South African red, the kind he recommended. He commented on my Obama t-shirt, which those who spent time with me during my week in South Africa and Swaziland will attest I wore quite often. We discussed Jacob Zuma’s trial and he told me he was a Zulu like him. He asked why Americans voted for George Bush. I didn’t have an answer.

Before turning away, I handed him my card, which on the back had an image of me and my five-year-old son, who like Barack Obama, has a father from Africa.

I went back to hang out in the bar with the MobileActive ’08 attendees, and wine and merriment and social mobile case studies flowed. Whether because of jet lag or a second wind brought about by spending much of the day in intense concentration in the media room documenting the conference, it was nearly 3 AM, near closing time, but I and Marty Lucas, a documentary filmmaker who teaches at Hunter College in New York, remained.

Zulu Bartender came over to us to see if we wanted anything else, but then sat down to talk more. He grew up in Soweto, he said, and told of the police entering his home and beating his parents. He spoke of what it was like to be in Soweto during the youth uprising in 1976. He gestured around the lobby of fancy hotel we were staying in, which was in the north of Johannesburg, and said he would not have been allowed on the grounds during apartheid. He spoke of getting in trouble visiting his mother who worked cleaning the home of a white family.

I was only a week in South Africa, but his story and his eagerness to share it touched my heart, and taught me more about what really happened during apartheid than reading any history book.

Back in the States, the amazing happened, and Barack Obama won the election. The next day, I looked down at my cellphone. I had missed a call, and there were only a few digits of the number showing up so I couldn’t call back the caller. I played my voicemail message, and it was Zulu Bartender:

“This is your bartender from the Protea Hotel. I wanted to say thank you for voting for Barack Obama, and thanks to all Americans for electing him. My God bless you and your son.”