Dear Folks, I should be writing a column right now, but what I feel like doing is writing to you, spilling out all the experiences and feelings and thoughts I’ve stored up over the last 3 weeks.
I got back last night, delighted to discover, swooping into the Lebanon airport, that while I was gone the snow disappeared, the ponds turned from solid to liquid, the grass greened up, and the forests had taken on the subtle pink of the maple bloom. I stopped at Foundation Farm first of all, got warmly welcomed by a bouncing Basil, and dashed into the back yard to see the new lambs. The Farm family did a fine job of managing the lambing — there are 13 little black babies over there, also bouncing. Lily had TRIPLETS (!), which Dennis delivered by himself with no recourse to the vet (this is only the second set of triplets in Foundation Farm history). All mothers and babies seem to be fine; Lily is mothering all three of hers, which is quite an achievement, given that sheep only have two nozzles. The sheep got sheared while I was gone — they look sleek and goaty. I used to like their looks better when they were carrying all the glory of their fleeces, but I’ve learned to like them better sheared. You can see their conformation, how their bones fit together, what shape they’re in
Richard has rototilled the garden, and the greenhouse is up and full of plants. Ruth has planted peas already. The daffodils we put in last fall are in bloom. I got home just in time for the first big planting of spinach, onions, lettuce, and peas, which will take place this weekend.
This morning when, still on European time, I woke up at 5:30, all sorts of bird voices were singing, birds that have returned to the Valley while I was gone. It’s nice to be back!
It was nice to be traveling too. What a wonderful trip it was, what a wonder this planet is. I hardly know where to start. Chronologically, I guess, is the only way to go.
Somehow in the week before I left I wrote 4 columns and got them all ready to send to the papers. I also got a call from the Los Angeles Times which, thanks to Hunter Lovins, had asked me about writing special pieces for them, not columns but longer pieces for their features page. I had sent them two samples and they wanted to run one of them — on the ozone layer — immediately. I had to edit and cut it and get it through to their computer — all this on the day before I left. Well, it got done, and I was so busy I almost didn’t have time to rejoice. The LA Times! Circulation over a million! $350 for a single piece! Wow! I don’t know how often I’ll be doing pieces for them — I hope it will be once a month or so.
Suzanne took me to the Lebanon airport, I flew to Boston and transferred to what Dennis and I have come to think of as our commuter flight, Swissair 128, Boston to Zurich. It’s our usual opening flight to almost anywhere, partly because we have developed an emphatic preference for Swissair, and partly because Joan Davis’s house is just 15 minutes from the Zurich airport, and we love to spend time with Joan. I wonder how many times she has hauled me off an overnight flight, as she did this time, put me to bed, and had a cup of tea ready when I finally surfaced to consciousness.
This stop at Joan’s was especially welcome because I was between two overnight flights, the second a very, very long one, Zurich to Bombay to Singapore. The world is a lot bigger around at the equator than it is up here at 42 degrees north latitude. Bombay sounds like it’s nearly to Singapore, but it isn’t, not by a long shot.
About all I remember of that flight was the plane coming into Bombay. We flew inland and circled low for our landing, and I had a breathtaking view of the desiccated plain, all carefully divided into mud-walled fields, all brown and dry and hot and poor and cramped. Powerful memories came up of our drive through that region twenty years ago, the dusty villages, the oxcarts, the hardworking, beaten-down people. So much has changed in my life over these twenty years, and so little in theirs. For all my ups and downs I have had hope and a feeling of progress, of importance, of my actions having a meaning and making things somehow better. I have insisted upon my life having a meaning. They haven’t had any opportunity for such arrogance. They just get up every morning and tend those ancient, dried-up fields.
We crossed the bony coastal mountains and came down over the city, all the hovels mashed together near the airport, rusty tin roofs going every which way, no apparent openings or pathways between them, all the rickety houses holding each other up. I saw the shadow of the lowering Swissair jet flickering over the miles of slums, and I was overcome with sadness, not only sadness at the cruel contrasts of the world, but sadness at my own forgetfulness. Most of the time the people of those slums are not real to me, not part of my world at all. If I can’t remember them, I who have looked them in the face and who have several times sworn my commitment to them, who else can? No one. Though intellectually we know they are there, they are forgotten people. In just a paragraph or two, about the time my mind gets to describing the glittering wealth of Singapore, I will have forgotten them again.
By the time I arrived in Singapore I was so confused about what day and time it was that I decided not to have jet lag, so I didn’t, not ever again on the whole trip. The airport was a magnificent structure full of orchids and fountains, the passport and customs checks were as effortless as they are in Europe (Americans don’t need visas for Singapore). I got into a taxi and found myself traveling through a spotless tropical city, bursting with flowers, vines even climbing up the light poles. It was unbelievably hot and humid to a person acclimated to a New Hampshire winter. When I got to the hotel I thought I should sleep and get ready for the seminar the next day, but I got fascinated with the television. The Singaporean stations were in Chinese, Malay, and English and featured U.S. sitcoms. I could also get Indonesian and Malaysian stations. The Malaysian stations had a lot of pious stuff about Islam and about their Sultan who was celebrating a birthday. They also showed in graphic detail the hanging of a guy who had been caught with 260 grams of hashish. In both Malaysia and Singapore the penalty for drug dealing is rapid death.
I came to Singapore as one of the faculty for a week-long workshop on Computer Modeling and Sustainable Development put on by Jaswant Krishnayya, our Indian member of the Balaton Group. It was a perfect example of the Balaton Group working exactly the way we’ve always hoped it would. Dennis and I used to put on these workshops, with the intention of inspiring others to do likewise, which Jaswant did. He conceived the workshop, raised the money, set up the schedule, invited the participants, did everything his own way. He made liberal use of the training games and materials the Balaton Group has developed. I just appeared as one of the speakers.
There were 15 participants from Malaysia, Indonesia, China, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, the Philippines, and Singapore, all of them professionals in forestry, economics, agriculture, ecology, some of them working in universities and some in government ministries. It was a great group to spend a week with — I loved getting to know them, and I learned a lot. It was so encouraging to find the same doubts and questions, the same concern for the environment and for the poor, the same drive for interdisciplinary solutions to problems in this part of the world as I have found in all others. Two of the people were especially outstanding, and they will be new members for the Balaton Group, one from the Philippines, one from Indonesia — countries I have long wanted to have represented.
The workshop schedule was nonstop and there was little opportunity to see Singapore, but I snuck out a few times to walk around the city, and on the last day one of the Singaporean economists at the workshop took me to meet his colleagues at the university and gave me a city tour. He was a knowledgeable guide and loaded me with statistics so I could begin to understand how this fascinating place works. I will write a column about it; here I’ll say just enough to give you a feeling for the place.
Singapore is a city-state on one main island and a few scattered smaller islands right at the tip of the Malaysian peninula, just one degree north of the equator. The British used it as a major port, but at the end of the Second World War it was a damaged, poor city, full of slums and houseboats, surrounded by swamp and jungle. What happened next was amazing. Singapore’s economy has grown twenty-fold in forty years. It has a GNP per capita about equal to England’s and half that of Switzerland, one of the lowest infant mortality rates in the world, 100% literacy, high-quality housing for all, and a fertility rate that will soon bring an end to population growth. Just down the street from my hotel is the Orchard Street complex, an array of spectacular shopping centers reminiscent of Houston, where you can buy anything in the world, from Gucci to Sony, from Mercedes to Tiffany. There’s no duty on anything, and all the world’s products are welcome (except drugs). The place swarmed with shoppers, most of them Singaporean.
The reason that Singapore developed in such a different way from Bombay, say, or Jakarta, is partially that it has no hinterland, so it was not overwhelmed with penniless migrants from the countryside. But the main reason for its success, everyone agrees, is its brilliant, benevolent dictator, Lee Kuan Yew, who has been in power since 1959. Dictatorship has its advantages, if the dictator does not tolerate corruption of any sort, and if he is a clever Confucian with an understanding of international economics.
One of Lee’s innovations is an enormous forced savings rate. Singaporeans have to save 25% of their salaries, matched by another 25% from their employers. These savings must go into government bonds. They can be redeemed any time after the age of 55. In the meantime, the government uses the money to build up the city, especially to build housing. Singapore is covered with clusters of identical 16-story apartment blocks, each with its own recreation center, swimming pool, shopping center, community center, and school. The apartments are nice, the Singaporeans told me, spacious, with 3-4 bedrooms. Now that enough of them are built, the government is letting people tap their savings funds before the age of 55 to buy them (from the government, of course). They aim at 100% ownership; the level is now at 70%. No one in the city is homeless. No one is unemployed. No one is uneducated.
The dictatorship affects every aspect of life. If you have more than 2 babies in Singapore, you have to pay higher fees for childcare, you get lower preference for good apartments, you get shorter maternity leave, you lose income tax advantages, and your children have no chance of going to the better schools. If you get caught littering there’s a $250 fine. There’s a $50 fine for jaywalking. If you don’t take care of your elderly parents, the government will take you to court. You lose your job if you get caught smoking at work and you’re fined if you smoke in a public place. I was there during No-Smoking Week — gangs of polite teenagers toured the streets with baskets of apples, descending on people with cigarette packs in their pockets, charmingly offering to trade an apple for the pack. On the main streets were electronic signs toting up Singapore Smoking Deaths each day. On television were grim documentaries showing what your lungs look like if you smoke. The smoking rate has dropped from 23% of the adult population to 13%, and Lee won’t quit until it’s zero.
Americans shudder at all this infringement on freedom, but Singaporeans don’t seem to mind. The rules are not stupid or arbitrary, they make sense, and the reasons for them are explained to all. They lead to clear results that benefit everyone, clean streets, greater public health, and bustling prosperity. Singapore runs like a well-tuned machine. There is freedom of speech — I heard Singaporeans discuss various government measures critically, but not in an us-versus-the-government confrontational way, more in a let’s-help-our-government-do-better way. I asked one man why he didn’t take his complaint about a new school policy to the newspapers or start a political movement, and he was shocked. He would never disturb the social harmony, he said. He was assembling evidence for his point of view and then he would present it to the government. Singaporeans do not feel alienated from their government; they feel a part of it. They can affect it by logical argument, so they don’t have to do political organizing. It’s quite an amazing system.
Singapore has some obvious environmental problems, and an inevitable vulnerability to events in the rest of the world. Most of its water comes in a pipeline from Malaysia. All its food and all its energy are imported. Its sewage is dumped (treated) into the ocean. Disruptions of international finance and trade shake it deeply. But its worst problem, I think, is its mindless materialism, its commercial soul-lessness. I couldn’t get any aspiration out of any Singaporean that was not about more money and more possessions. I couldn’t discover any national goal beyond being as rich as Switzerland. (That will happen in one more doubling, about 10 years at the current rate. When I asked them then what do they want to accomplish, they were blank.) The first few days there I was dazzled by the beauty and richness of the city. Then I got bored with it, and finally disgusted with its smug, glittering emptiness. I suspect the next generation of Singaporeans may go through the same progression.
Well, I better get onto the rest of this trip in less wordy fashion, or we’ll never get home!
It was an easy flight to Bangkok, and Chirapol Sintunawa was there to meet me with his new Toyota 4-wheel drive truck. The temperature was 100, the rainy season was just beginning, and after Singapore Bangkok looked jammed and tawdry and poor. Instead of Singapore’s traffic of Mercedes andÊBMWs, Bangkok’s was full of ancient trucks and jitneys. Every vehicle was spewing diesel fuel and overloaded with cargo, with usually about ten people on top of the cargo. Traffic was jammed constantly, at all times of day. There are 2.6 million people in Singapore and the population is stable; there are 6 million in Bangkok and they’re still pouring in by the thousands every day.
I had a hotel with a balcony on the Chao Phrya River, the main artery of Bangkok, and I spent hours watching river life. Chains of big barges pulled by tugboats go down the middle, double-decker tourist boats with awnings stop at the hotels and restaurants, overloaded bus boats tootle along stopping at docks to load and unload passengers. Little restaurant boats do a good business at the shanties and houseboats where the poor people live; there’s a cooker in the middle of the boat keeping soup hot and refrigerated compartments for cool things. Tiny handpaddled scows were everywhere, carrying everything. I saw one big commercial boat dump a load of garbage right into the river, and immediately a bunch of scows shot out from shore — one picked up the floating aluminum cans, one the plastic bottles, one the coconut husks, one the other organic stuff. At the end only the paper was left, slowly sinking in the brown mucky water. It must be one of the most polluted waterways in the world, but children were swimming in it, women were washing clothes in it, it must have been the main water source for all the hovels built along it.
I wasn’t in the hotel much; I was mostly with Chirapol, who was a wonderful host and who put me to work very skillfully to give speeches and talk to his students and meet with officials and help promote his work. He took me to see the Temple of the Emerald Buddha and on a spectacular nighttime boat ride down the Chao Phrya and to a new Buddha Park outside the city where he goes to meditate every morning. On the Thai New Year we bought some caged birds and let them free at the temple. He introduced me to Thai food, which is HOT!!! and good. The only not-hot dish was mangoes and sticky rice with coconut milk, a favorite of Chirapol’s that we ate every day until my stomach finally rebelled (the only rebellion I experienced on the trip; it might have had something to do with the fact that I was having three mangoes for breakfast every morning too).
Chirapol teaches in the Faculty of Environment and Resource Studies at Mahidol University, one of the major universities of Thailand. There are 35 students per year entering his two-year master’s program (chosen from an applicant list of 700 — it’s the most popular education program in Thailand). I was so impressed by the faculty, the facility, and the students that I wrote a long description of it for my UNEP book on environmental education. It’s a truly interdisciplinary group, truly working on the problems of Thailand. The students are in the field a lot — no way they’re going to have a distant, theoretical view of a Thai village. They also learn systems analysis and computers — it’s what Chirapol teaches — and they have the best system dynamics library I’ve seen in the Third World. How many other libraries have eight well-worn copies of the collected works of Jay Forrester?
I loved talking to the students. Their English is passable, and their enthusiasm is wonderful. We got into a heated debate about whether organic farming is possible in the tropics. Fortunately the students who joined my side had actual done some organic farming, so we were pretty convincing. The discussion started the idea of making a demonstration farm at the university (which is on the edge of the city, where there’s room), and Chirapol and I got the rector to agree to the idea. Now I’ll start sending to Chirapol every scrap of information I can find about organic farming in the tropics, so he can start a library for his students. And I passed on to him a system for composting water hyacinth that I had just learned from an Indonesian at the Singapore workshop. And then later on the trip I passed on Chirapol’s curriculum and teaching methods to the Tanzanians, who were very interested and will go visit him to learn more. And still later in Germany I got the founder of the International Federation of Organic Agriculture Movements to make Chirapol a member and invite him to the next conference. That’s how the Balaton group works. Cross-connections like that were the purpose of my trip.
The best part of the Thai visit was going out for two days with Chirapol and one other faculty member and one student to interview Thai farmers. They are starting a big study of energy use in Thai agriculture and they had made a questionnaire that they wanted to test, so we went to rice-growing and sugar-growing areas to talk to farmers. We went up the Kwai River valley (saw the Bridge over the River Kwai) and into the hill country and stayed overnight in a bungalow in a national forest. There was a waterfall there where we went swimming — after a day of 100 degree jouncing on Thai country roads it took me about 3 seconds to dive into that beautiful water. While the others did their interviews I walked around the villages and tried to absorb all the strange and wonderful things I was seeing.
The Thai seem to be natural geniuses at appropriate technology. Old car engines are recycled into boat engines that are then mounted on hand-built ferries to transport motorcycles across streams. Bare car tires are fastened to clever wooden carts pulled by bicycles. Hand-forged circular knives are mounted to cut bamboo into precision dimensions. There are inappropriate technologies too. In one village every house had a TV, and as I walked down the road I could see inside every door the kids sitting slack-jawed watching Thai-dubbed American cartoons. How can they possibly square in their minds the space wars in the cartoons and the skinny cows wandering around their muddy roads? How can they find their proper place in the world when their fathers are flinging fertilizer by hand out of buckets onto their rice paddies while the TV is telling them to buy Coke and Toyotas?
From the charming chaos of gentle, fasting-changing Thailand I flew to the much less charming chaos of the deteriorating Bombay airport in the middle of the night, where I was supposed to transfer to a Kenya Airways flight to Nairobi. I could write here a devastating description of life in the Bombay airport between midnight and 4 am, but let’s just summarize by saying mosquitoes, raw sewage, customs officials on the make, mindless bureaucracy, and no dedication on the part of anyone to letting passengers know what flights are departing from where. Somehow we Nairobi passengers found each other and pursued a series of rumors until we found our gate. We nearly all got on a Yemeni Airlines plane to Accra (along with veiled women carrying green parrots in a cage and Arab men with elaborate wooden models of sailing ships) but corrected ourselves and straggled onto the delapidated Kenya Airways plane at last.
Nairobi is rather a blur in my memory, since I was up all night on the trip, waited an hour and a half while Kenya Airways struggled to open the luggage hold, finally discovered that my suitcase was lost, dashed in my rumpled clothes to UNEP and had a hectic all-day meeting with Michael Atchia, head of environmental education there. I was bringing him the final manuscript of my book (fortunately it wasn’t in my suitcase!) and we went over all the last minute details of publication. I don’t know how I stayed awake, but I did. I even stayed awake several hours longer and struggled successfully with the multitudinous impossibilities of Africa long enough to change money, buy some basic toiletries and some clothes, and try endlessly to reach Kenya Airways and Swissair on semi-functioning telephones. I was sure I’d never see my suitcase again. I was picturing the crooked customs officials in Bombay having a fine time sorting through it.
After a good night’s sleep I felt much better and could laugh at the whole business. I actually felt lighter and better without that big suitcase and with only two outfits to wear (wash one every night, who needs more?). The Nairobi highland air was bracing after Thailand, the rains were going on and everything was green, the people were as beautiful and dignified as I had remembered (and as slow-moving). I continued the suitcase search, figured out what I’d need to complete the trip sans suitcase, went out and bought it, and then relaxed by spending the afternoon with good friends Ed and Joyce Wright and their lovely little daughter Carolyn.
Ed and Joyce made me feel guilty about any complaints I had about the unworkability of Africa. Joyce manages the Kenya Peace Corps (180 volunteers out in the field) and Ed trouble-shoots for Peace Corps offices all over Africa. He had just come back from 10 weeks in Conakry, the capital of Guinea, where the phones are basically nonfunctional and the U.S. Embassy is a 45 minute drive through horrendous traffic from the Peace Corps Office. Somehow Ed and Joyce make things work under such conditions, and they even seem relaxed and cheerful about it. I think they and their volunteers are heroes. I’ve always admired the Peace Corps, and hearing the Wrights’ descriptions of its accomplishments and of what it takes to keep it going, I admire it all the more.
The Wrights’ telephone worked better than the one in the hotel, and from their place I reached Kenya Airways for the first time in two days. My suitcase was there! I wonder when they would have gotten around to telling me about it! Ed kindly drove me out to fetch it and I was on my way again. The next morning I reluctantly boarded Kenya Airways again for a short flight to Dar Es Salaam, with a spectacular view of the crater of Kilimanjaro from not very high above it. It has two craters, one inside the other, with a small lake inside the inner one. From that point of view it looked easy to climb. I’d like to try it someday.
Eli Shishira and Athanas Kauzeni were waving merrily at me when I cleared customs at the Dar airport, and they spent the next two days giving me a tour of Dar and of their Institute at the University. The Institute for Resource Assessment is another member of the Balaton Group, though I was the first BG member to visit it, and they were thrilled that I was there. The university is one of the few well-maintained and semi-operational institutions in Tanzania, a high priority for government spending, but even there you can see all the contradictions of Africa. Air conditioners hum in uninsulated buildings with windows and doors wide open. Three out of six Apple II computers donated by aid agencies don’t work, none of the printers work, and they have run out of printer ribbons and diskettes and can’t get more. Sweden has offered them satellite mapping data on Tanzania, but they don’t have a computer or software to handle it. Of a staff of 14 six are out of the country for advanced training, and typically when those people come back they are hired away by the government, because advanced training is so rare.
Still, the Institute struggles on with excellent research primarily in the rural areas. Most of the staff were out in the field when I was there. They have great piles of interesting publications (they print them themselves with a little printing press donated by Denmark) on water, land use, forestry, fertility, schooling in rural Tanzania. Most of that good information doesn’t get very far; they have no way of disseminating it. There is so much the Balaton Group could do to help make these folks more effective, from training and publications help to simple things like printer ribbons.
Tanzania is so poor, so poor, and going so obviously downhill. The government built a bunch of enormous and gaudy beach hotels (Dar Es Salaam is surrounded by beautiful tropical beaches) to attract tourists, and then didn’t maintain them. They are in despicable shape now. One has been shut down, another has been bought by the university to house its staff. A third still functions, but only Tanzanians go there, and it throbs with wildly overamplified disco music so you can’t stand to be near the place. The beach is eroding so badly that the waves now nearly reach the hotels; in a few more years the buildings will be swept into the sea. I had long conversations with people to determine the cause of that erosion. There seem to be two causes — the systematic dynamiting of the coral reefs offshore (a cheap way of fishing and simultaneously destroying the source of further fish) and the mining of sand from the rivers flowing into the bay — the sand is an input to the cement blocks that I saw being made in all the villages — the cement blocks are used to build the better grade of shacks for the influx of migrants to Dar Es Salaam).
Everywhere in Dar you could see capital crumbling away from neglect. I have never seen such potholes. They told me that even tough 4-wheel drive jeeps only last a few years on those roads. The old somewhat gracious colonial buildings areÊdeteriorating. The only new construction I saw was the ugly row of decrepit (even when new) factories lining the road to the airport. They are all parastatal industries built and run by the government, woefully managed and grossly inefficient. Then, of course, there were the miles of slums, mud, goats, children, beehives of wondrous activity. Here the private sector is alive and well — every shanty had a proud hand-lettered crooked sign proclaiming the improbable business that takes place inside — everything from grocery stores to butcheries to auto body shops, none with more that $50 or so worth of inventory or tools.
There was a surprising amount of open space in Dar, some intensely gardened but most grazed by goats. The city hasn’t yet swollen the way so many Third-World cities have, mainly, I guess, because it’s so economically stagnant that there’s no reason to migrate there. Also, Nyerere has put nearly all development investment into the countryside — so perhaps I just didn’t see the major success stories of Tanzania.
With all the grim poverty, I got a wonderful sense of happiness and friendliness from the Tanzanians. In Dar most of them speak elegant English, and I had wonderful conversations, in which I felt none of the holding-back and being-appraised-suspiciously that I often feel when talking to Kenyans. These are outgoing people. I liked being with them, and I’d like to go back, spend longer, see more.
In one long day I flew from Dar Es Salaam to Frankfurt with stops in Jeddah and Zurich. It was an amazing day. I spent it with my nose pressed to the window, marveling at this enormous and various planet. The green, rich African coast, the highlands and snow-capped mountains of Kilimanjaro and Mt. Kenya, the endless, barren deserts and mountains of Ethiopia. The Red Sea and the flat, brown, lifeless-looking Arabian desert. Jeddah (passengers please put away all liquor bottles while we are on Saudi soil) with dozens of shining Saudi Airlines 747s and DC10s lined up unused on the tarmac. Over the Red Sea again (lots of little coral islands) and a long time over wrinkled, lifeless-looking Egyptian desert. What an enormous part of the planet’s land is inimical to life! I was watching eagerly for what I expected to be a broad green swatch of the Nile Valley, but it wasn’t broad, it was such a thin, pathetic, jam-packed little strip amidst all that desert. I blanked out over the Mediterranean and the next time I looked down we were coming in for a landing over the Austrian and Swiss Alps, which were all lit by the setting sun and a sight to make lumps in the throat and tears in the eye. They were so, so beautiful, but you had to wonder how anyone could make a living in that forbidding terrain, much less how anyone could be rich when the warm, green African coast was so poor.
I will abbreviate here my time working in Kassel with Hartmut Bossel and Hardy Vogtman and my whirlwind tour of Hardy’s organic demonstration farm (everything you do with Hardy is a whirlwind). And also the Balaton Group steering committee meeting at Joan Davis’s house. I was on familiar territory again, in the lovely European spring with the neat, plowed fields and the apple trees in bloom, and with long-treasured colleagues whose ideas and commitments always make my own soar, and whose friendship is a constant support to me. It was a high note to end the trip on, and I came home cheered, energized, amazed at how much the Balaton Group is doing around the world, sometimes under very difficult circumstances. I’m committed more than ever to helping the Group do even more, even better.
There’s more to say, but I can’t believe anyone will read even this much, so I’ll quit at last. I lost 7 pounds on the trip, I feel my old self again. There’s an old story about a king who offered a prize to anyone who could offer him a formula that could cheer him up when he was depressed. A courtier gave him the formula, with the warning that it would also dampen his joy when he was elated. It was simply the words, “this, too, shall pass!”
Love, Dana
