Boykot G4S

hullo hullo again!

Two posts in two days, Hege and my mother will be so pleased. Susan - thank you for reading! My Aunt Mary told me that you had been checking in earlier this summer and I was very touched.

Today was my first day with Copenhagen-freedom aka a CYKEL! Ohhh it's the best feeling.... really the way to get in the flow of the city, to feel like you're a bit a part of it. Pubic transport is excellent here - at least compared to Seattle and many other cities I've been to. But biking, that's the way the city really moves. On my first day with a bike I had to start out by getting the tires pumped which, luckily for me is extremely easy in Copenhagen. There is a bike shop on any somewhat major street and every bike shop pumps up your tires for free - many even leave the air hose outside the shop for people to use after hours. Let's hear it for social cohesion and community trust!

I ended up biking almost 50 kilometers today.... I am going to have one sore rear end tomorrow, that is for damn sure. First off to a meeting with the World Food Program, which has one of its headquarters in Copenhagen. More on that later... then I walked ALL OVER with a "treasure hunt" get-to-know you thing for my masters program, THEN to Albertslund and back to Brønshøj. I know that doesn't mean much to most people who might read this... but Albertslund is a WAYS away - it's a suburb of Copenhagen where, among other things, the headquarters of G4S is located.

G43 is a security corporation, like I said in my post yesterday, that does some "normal" routine security jobs - at Aalborg University for example. But they also are the company that provides the equipment and surveillance for Israeli prisons which we know have violated human rights repeatedly. They contract all over Gaza and the West Bank, policing the borders - in other words enabling Israeli occupation and exploitation. (** For the record, I am not against Israel being a state. I oppose the forced displacement and/or ghettoization of Palestinians and existence of a second-class citizen regime within Israel.) This is a "week of action" for the group calling for an end to G4S involvement in Palestine. The route we took included stops at prominent businesses that use G4S. One of the really empowering things about Denmark, from my perspective, is that national change seems so much more tangibly possible. Already some companies have left G4S and G4S has said that it is talking about leaving Gaza by 2013. The US can seem like such a leviathan at times. Good to remind myself, though, that we have local communities, smaller units as well.

The demonstration was extremely fun! So many happy, open minded people. And so much bike riding! My first biking demonstration, I have to admit. There were plenty of signs and some bell ringing and horn tooting, but mostly just a happy group of people cycling around with a police escort. Most people were young, unsurprisingly, but also a fairly sturdy middle-aged to older contingent. Older protesters really have a soft spot in my heart. My two friends from my masters program who invited me we very protective of me, made sure I was having a good time and not biking in front of oncoming traffic or anything exciting like that. The weather was very nice... which I think contributed to quite an upbeat protest atmosphere given the content of what we were demonstrating against!

One of the friends from my program, was one of the people who organized the demonstration... she grew up in Nørrebro, Copenhagen's most multiethnic neighborhood, and was politicized about Palestine from an early age due to having plenty of friends who are Palestinian refugees. We talked a bit about challenges of being in Denmark as a foreigner - it was so reassuring and fascinating to hear her perspective. Though she was born and raised here she is very much bicultural, and didn't have the same childhood exposure to Danish tradition and culture at home. She's also a invisible minority - she easily passes for Danish and her name blends in as well. Denmark can be a very rigid place to join. It's open in some ways - open to new ideas, to exchange... but when it comes to what is "normal" and what is "done" I have felt that there is a pretty narrow idea of what to do here. 

About the World Food Program: 

Quite an interesting presentation - among other things I have been shifting my opinions on the important differences between humanitarian and development aid. It's pretty easy for these statistics that can really knock the wind out of you slip into your mind and off the radar very quickly. And of course we can always say - yes, this is an important cause but there are SO many important causes. But then again.... 1 in 7 people in our world go to bed hungry every night? A billion people? I've heard before that we have enough resources to feed the world it's just political will, infrastructure, societal stability, and other human factors standing in our way. It's not a matter of fancy science or over population. Though, of course, over population is something to think about.... especially since we haven't proven that we can manage a world humanely with the number of people we already have. But I hadn't intended to go off in this direction... suffice it to say - I used to be highly skeptical of the type of development that you see in movies - bags of rice dropping from the sky, etc. I still am, and I absolutely believe that we must remain skeptical and critical of the ways this type of aid casts recipients as "less-than". It was heartening to hear the director of WFP talking about the need to not simply say, "Hello poor Africans - here's some rice and beans, off you go." They try, when possible, to use food aid toward sustainable development. But the sad fact is, a lot of their work IS patching up crises. WFP is the largest humanitarian aid organization in the world. They are able to reach about 90-100 million out of the 1 billion hungry people in the world.