The Global Scavenger Hunt is for fun. It is like doing an exhausting and exhilarating puzzle. New and weird things come at you. You try to get enough sleep but can’t. When you finally hit the pillow, it’s hard to turn off your brain.
But with all the running around fun, it isn’t until you sit still and talk with people that you can think about the issues just below the surface.
I’m thinking about the female Filipino taxi driver who picked us up from the fish market in Abu Dhabi. She and her sister work to send money back home. But the pay isn’t nearly as good as it had been. They are thinking of New Zealand or Canada where they might try for better opportunity. But in Abu Dhabi as a woman driver, she enjoys an advantage. Under Abu Dhabi’s Muslim rules, it is extremely rare to find a woman driver. The local Emirati women and their husbands prefer that the women be driven by women. But that isn’t enough to make a difference in her life. And what new hurdles would face her if she tried to move to a new country?
On a plane back to the United States, I caught a headline that the Myanmar government again ruled against the journalists whose work exposed governmental abuse of Rohinga people. I’m replaying in my head the conversation I had with the Buddhist meditation master. My guess is that he would not sympathize. He could say that the journalists wrote inflammatory stories. Perhaps they don’t deserve leniency. When he and I spoke, he had volunteered his opinion questioning whether there even was such a thing as the Rohinga people. He referred back to the time when the British ruled Burma, and the British imported Pakistanis and Bangladeshis to work in the colony. According to him, those were the legitimate immigrants into Burma. He got himself all worked up, angrily asking, "Who are the people that are called Rohinga? Where are they from?"
Those are troublesome questions at this stage of this controversy. I have since learned that United Nations' probes revealed that a segment of Buddhists (maybe my meditation instructor?) incite hatred and religious intolerance against Rohingas. The Myanmar government is accused of human rights violations for arbitrarily arresting and torturing Rohingas. Moreover, the journalists’ basic rights are at stake. And the Buddhist master, who won’t hurt a mosquito while it bites him, is annoyed at the suggestion that Rohinga people deserve any rights at all.
Grabbing points doing scavenges such as eating weird things or climbing pagodas is comparatively easy. When you try to process complicated political and economic issues, hunting globally is dramatically more challenging. And an appreciation of the issues sticks around a lot longer.
Those are troublesome questions at this stage of this controversy. I have since learned that United Nations' probes revealed that a segment of Buddhists (maybe my meditation instructor?) incite hatred and religious intolerance against Rohingas. The Myanmar government is accused of human rights violations for arbitrarily arresting and torturing Rohingas. Moreover, the journalists’ basic rights are at stake. And the Buddhist master, who won’t hurt a mosquito while it bites him, is annoyed at the suggestion that Rohinga people deserve any rights at all.
Grabbing points doing scavenges such as eating weird things or climbing pagodas is comparatively easy. When you try to process complicated political and economic issues, hunting globally is dramatically more challenging. And an appreciation of the issues sticks around a lot longer.