San Diego is the southernmost city in the state of California. Below me is a border, drawn as a straight line cutting through the desert, until it meets another straight line in a slightly different angle. This is the arbitrary US border with Mexico, a consequence of a not so positive past.

It is the meeting spot of an English speaking and Spanish speaking country, two European languages that, strangely, don’t ever meet in Europe.

This border, which I’ve crossed just once, nevertheless has defined my life in so many ways. San Diego is my birthplace. English is my first language, and my passport allows me to travel freely around the world. Move my place of birth five miles south, and my language, freedom, and exposure to culture completely changes.

It was rare, during my travels, to come upon a border that was, well, worth visiting. Dirty, full of seedy shops and illicit cross border transit, they are often the despots of humanity.

San Diego, though, doesn’t feel at all like a border town. Los Angeles, to the north, feels far more Latino than San Diego, with its firmly Californian beach vibe. Looking into the mountains outside my parents suburban home, its easy to forget that just 20 minutes away is another country, where people speak a different language. Many San Diegans do just that, their mental geography filled with a black hole.

Los Angeles, San Francisco, Phoenix, they all feel closer than Tijuana, the Mexican border city, or Mexicali, a capital of a million people just an hours drive from San Diego.

The amazing thing is how arbitrary this all is. In a place where English and Spanish were never spoken as recently as four centuries ago, this border could easily have been a few hundred miles to the north, or to the south. San Diego could still be in Mexico. Tijuana could be in America. It’s a result of the history and the atrocities of European colonialism in the new world. There are indigenous people, like the Tohono O’odham, who are stuck between borders, Mexican and American and, at the same time, neither.

Perhaps I am the same. The US border, here, between San Diego and Tijuana, is a more powerful force than anything nature has ever build in this part of the world. The line on the map becomes more powerful than the actual space in reality. Our minds have lost their ability to understand context.

No wonder. The meaning that we give to a human construction such as a straight-line border really is a stark sign of how disconnected humanity has become from nature and the land.

This article The Borders Which Define Us first appeared on NithinCoca.com.

As the date neared, we saw growing numbers of  football fanatics in Manchester United, Bayern Munich, Real Madrid, or AC Milan jerseys in the malls of Jakarta. There are larger lines at already crowded Futsal centers. In fact, at bars, cafés, behind street vendors, anywhere where you saw a crowd of mostly (but not entirely) Indonesian men, it is likely they are watching one thing.

A football match from the other side of the world.

At first, it seems a paradox. How did European soccer become so popular in a country with its own rich traditions and sports, where finding flat, open land to play a game can be nearly impossible?

Not surprisingly, colonialism played a role. Javanese educated in Europe brought football back with them, and local competition began in the early 1900′s. Indonesia was, in fact, the first Asian team ever to compete in the World Cup, back in 1938 under the colonial moniker Dutch East Indies National Football Team, its only appearance. After Independence, Football’s popularity among all Indonesians only grew.

Football thus fits with the Indonesian propensity to adopt trends and fashions from abroad. There is an obvious colonial angle – look around the world. The sports most of the world plays, the most avidly followed teams are from colonizing countries. Some legacies die hard.

Still, sports are a global connector, and no sport has a larger following globally than football. In fact, fitting that early World Cup appearance, today Indonesia is the largest football loving country in the planet, by default, as my home country, the United States, is fixated on American Football, India is hardcore Cricket country, and the biggest behemoth, China, has embraced Basketball.

The fact that many Indonesians spend so much time watching football made me wonder – what if things were reversed? What if Europeans or Americans followed something in Indonesia as fanatically?

It could be a local sport – sepak takraw perhaps, the bamboo kick volleyball game which still fires up rivalries in the Southeast Asian Games every four years – or badminton? Maybe something cultural?

Imagining the cafés of Paris showing the Ramayana Ballet performances at Prambanan Temple in Jogjakarta, or American sports bars playing matches between Indonesian futsal teams seem as preposterous as well, average westerners knowing that Indonesia is the 4th biggest country in the world, or, perhaps, what the major religions or dominant ethnic groups are. That is to say, reality is not something to be proud of.

The lack of knowledge between the developed world and the developing world is a huge barrier, one that globalization has perhaps changed the character of, but not the substance. This goes both ways. It is true that American music and cinema are popular throughout the world, but anyone who has seen any Hollywood films knows that what is depicted in pop culture is not often related to reality. Likewise, despite how closely an Indonesian may follow Manchester United, it is doubtful he or she would be able to tell you one fact about the actual city of Manchester, England.

Nevertheless, sport is different from most media. It is a recreation, a form of individual effort, and as old as human culture itself. However, league sports, such as UEFA, or the National Basketball Association in the United States, are new phenomenon, more focused on marketing, commercialization, and profit. That is why, unfortunately, knowledge of league sports doesn’t translate into knowledge of culture and society.

This wasn’t how it was supposed to be. Pierre de Coubertin’s dream, when he founded the Olympics in the 1890′s, was that sport would take the place of war, provide a friendly venue for countries to compete in ways that wouldn’t result in deaths or ill-feelings. It was a noble goal. Unfortunately, de Coubertin didn’t foresee that sport would also become a tool of nationalism. Hitler used it to showcase Nazi Germany to the world in the 1936 Berlin Olympics, and we saw something similar during the over-the-top extravaganza in Beijing just five years ago. Adding to that is that modern sports is ruled by another global trend, one adopted with glee by Indonesian youth – consumerism. Sport is a product, and explains why the majority of those who watch football, never actually play it.

In an ideal world, sport would bring us together and provide a platform to share culture, identity, and ideas. I’ve seen first-hand, whether at a Futsal field in Kemang, or playing Takraw with children in Thailand, how sport allows us to communicate beyond the barriers of language, religion, and, ideally, gender.

One of my Indonesian friends runs a football jersey shop in Bogor. When I visited his shop for the first time, he was shocked that I only knew the names of a few male football players, and the fact that, in America, women’s football is far more popular than men’s. Nevertheless, he asked me to pick a jersey so we could take a photo together. Looking through the racks of advertiser-sponsored European league jerseys, I found one I liked, red, with no sponsors, just a logo on the right breast: Garuda, the winged Hindu national symbol of Indonesia.

It may be years before this jersey makes its return to the World Cup, but fans here will likely continue to follow their favorite teams abroad fanatically. Whether that translates into a better world, or if we will ever take similar notice of Indonesia from abroad, well, that may be asking for too much.

This article Football Fanatics and the Ideal of Sport first appeared on NithinCoca.com.

While I may have doubts about today’s Couchsurfing I also believe the potential is still there to embark on an even greater, more ambitious project.

Before we can envision that future, Couchsurfing needs to take concrete steps to rebuild trust, increase openness, and recapture the spirit that spurred the sites initial organic growth. Thus, in response to the huge response of my initial article, my plan to save Couchsurfing based on my experiences as longtime Couchsurfer, traveler and social activist.

Refocus on Members

Facebook has users. Google has users. Corporations like Wal-Mart, Apple, and HP have customers.

Couchsurfing has none of those. Couchsurfing has members.

As a social activist, I’ve worked for many nonprofits around the world. Thus, I understand how an organization builds trust with its membership. It’s also why I’ve been so vocal about Couchsurfing’s Management, who seem to be ignoring even the most basic, time-honored practices with regards to communication, involvement, and outreach, not to mention the new realities of an interconnected world.

Remember – it was members who built the community, organized events, invasions, and setup groups for ridesharing, apartment hunting, potlucks, and more, often despite what was (and still is) a clunky, buggy site.

For that sort of community, non-profit status would have been ideal. Many non-profits, such as my previous employers Sierra Club and Peace Action, have a board of directors that is elected by the members and is independent of staff, but votes on yearly budgets, program goals, and strategy. Sierra Club has a national headquarters, but also chapters and groups all across the country, and one of the main roles of HQ is to disseminate information and provide tools to local organizers for their own independent efforts. Thus, the structures empowers the regions. They aren’t dictated to by a CEO who never had a profile until he was hired.

I believe the structure would have have better fit Couchsurfing than that of a B-Corp.

Steps to build a more member-oriented organizational structure.

#1 – Treat members as members, not as users.

#2 – Build an organizational structure that empowers communities around the world, by building tools they request, not generic “place” pages that mix up cities and make finding useful information difficult.

#3 – Create an equivalent of a board that can provide meaningful member input in a more accessible forum.

#4 – Fire or demote the new CEO and all new, staff, and open up the hiring process to meaningful community input.

Sound ambitious? Of course. But this is only the beginning to the future Couchsurfing. Next, a complete shift in how Couchsurfing communicates with members, following a paradigm global shirt.

Transparency

If Couchsurfing is to be a truly global network, it also needs to integrate transparency into its organizational practices, otherwise, the vast majority of its members will continue to be disconnected from HQ and the slide in meaningful interactions will only continue.

Transparency means building trust through open sharing of information. It seems like a slam dunk for a member driven social network to embrace transparency, but, unfortunately, Couchsurfing has taken numerous steps in the opposite direction. Today, there is no place to find staff bios, the CEO’s profile is hidden, and network stats, once freely available, are now gone. We are repeatedly told (only in English) that things are happening “behind the scenes” but are given no way to provide input, and no insight into how Couchsurfing really operates.

Companies deal with issues like this all the time, and the internet – the same platform that made Couchsurfing possible – is fostering shifts in openness and corporate accountability. Remember Wikileaks? A global movement has blossomed over the past two years, showing how we live in an era of information.

There are calls to open up access to Government, to widely implement tracking of Corporate Social Responsibility standards, and, now, companies in some industries are required to manage their supply chains. Just this week, there was a campaign launched to force clothing manufacturers sign a pledge to ensure safety standards in overseas factories, in response to the horrific factory collapse in Bangladesh that killed over 600 people. If this was a few decades ago, we’d never have even heard about the factory, and, of course, Couchsurfing wouldn’t exist.

The fact that Couchsurfing is on the wrong side of this movement is a tragedy. Yes, it is a corporation, accountable first to its investors, but we, the members, are the consumers, and Couchsurfing needs us. It is outdated, bad corporate practice, to hide behind walls of secrecy. Transparency will go a long way in re-establishing the trust that the past years actions have cost the organization.

Steps towards an Open Couchsurfing.

#1 – Tell the truth about why Couchsurfing was unable to receive non-profit status.

#2 – Explain where those millions in donations went in the years before the move to corporate status.

#3 – What is the role of venture capitalists in the organization?

#4 – Come clean about plans to monetize the site so that funders receive a return on investment.

#5 – Listen to members and create a more inclusive, open transparency strategy that integrates global, not Silicon Valley, standards.

Once Couchsurfing implements transparent communication practices, we can move to the final step – regaining the famous spirit, through a reassertion of values.

A Values-Added Couchsurfing

We can never return to the past, but we can chart a path towards a greater future. Couchsurfing worked because surfers like me, were empowered by their positive experiences as travelers, were excited to open up their homes to guests once they had their own place.

Trust is fragile. One negative experience can cause a host to shut down his or her couch. There is now a major imbalance between surfers looking for hosts in certain cities (Paris, New York, Berlin) and hosts never getting requests in non-destination cities. How to rebuild this trust, and reintegrate safety into a network that, still, has its base in finding a free place to stay?

An answer may lie in the original hospitality network, Servas, decades old, which relied on books of potential hosts in each country in lieu of online profiles. Safety was maintained through a system in which hosts were vetted by existing members. But Servas was more than just a free place to crash. At its base was a powerful ethical mission – that each friendship the organization built was a step on the path towards world peace. Hospitality exchange meant building connections between boundaries that would tie humanity together into a web of love.

I’m not saying Couchsurfing should become focused on world peace, but if it had an ethical purpose, it could move beyond just being a “free place to stay” website, and events could move beyond “let’s get drunk at a bar.”

It could be a movement.

#1 – Using the new structures,  convene a digital conference of all active members to determine a universal, ethical foundation for Couchsurfing.

#2 – Implement the agreed upon ethical goals in all communications and re-brand the site so that it’s not longer just about finding a place to stay.

The Human Spirit

In Thailand this past year, I met a young man of mixed Burmese and Indian origin. From the second I met him, I knew he was someone with a good heart, a genuine person, who treated those around him with respect and love.

We only spoke for a few minutes, but he invited me to visit him at his University, and a few days later, I came. He showed me around the beautiful countryside and took me to one of the oldest Thai floating markets, and talked about life, family activism, and his travels. I was astonished to hear about when he was just 17, he biked around Southeast Asia, from Vietnam all the way through Indonesia, alone, with little money. I asked him, how did you find a place to stay, expecting the answer to be, well, Couchsurfing.

“When I was tired, I would just find some homes, and knock on their door until someone let me stay.”

“Was it tough finding someone?”

“No, I never had to knock on more than two or three homes.”

Oftentimes, they had no language in common, speaking in gestures or short phrases. In exchange for their hospitality, he would cook dinner. More often than not, they would become close.

“When I left, they would often say, don’t go, stay longer,” he said, smiling.

That is why I vehemently disagree that human nature leads to hook-up oriented events, or that money is necessary for hospitality exchange. There was, and is, a greater, natural human spirit of sharing that breaks down social and cultural barriers, and it is that spirit that Couchsurfing needs to recapture to grow into a positive force for change.

This is only the start of the conversation. Please share your ideas for Couchsurfing in the comments. With enough fervor, HQ won’t be able to ignore us.

This article Couchsurfing: Stopping the Downward Spiral first appeared on NithinCoca.com.

Within weeks, the royal family was in exile, the majestic Palace has been looted, and the face of Burma, the crown jewel of Asia, has changed forever.

This is the vivid intro to my favorite book, Amitav Ghosh’s Glass Palace, a fascinating tale of war, exploitation, love and family told over several generations in India, Malaysia, but focused on the heart of colonial darkness, the crossroads of Asia, Burma. It is, by far, the best writing encapsulating why colonialism was an unequivocal tragedy for the entire human race. It is part of the reason I am so fascinated by this country – and want to go there.

When I was 23, I arrived, alone, to Thailand, Burma’s eastern neighbor, and spent six months traveling around Southeast Asia. I was idealistic then as I am now, but far less certain of how to channel that idealism. I wanted to change the world, but first, I needed to understand the world.

It was an emotional trip, begun just a month after my grandma died unexpectedly. As I entered Asia after a touching month volunteering in rural Nepal, I wanted to experience, to feel, in a region which, in many ways, represented the world.

Where else do you have one of the world richest countries (Singapore) right alongside one of the poorest (Cambodia)? Where else does French (Laos, Cambodia, Vietnam), British (Malaya, Burma), Dutch (Indonesia), Spanish (Philippines) and Portuguese (East Timor) colonialism brush shoulders with one of the few countries to never fall under foreign control (Thailand)?

And then there is Burma. This was the country that preserved Buddhism when it withered in India, which once defeated the vastly superior forces of the Qing Chinese, who sacked the Thai capital of Ayuttaya and built one of the greatest empires of human history in Bagan. It was once, just over a century ago, the wealthiest country in Asia. Today, it is one of the poorest in the world. Where else has the cruelty of modernity been so acutely felt, where else has repression taken on such a diverse form?

During that trip, I discovered my passion for history and culture, and after returning home, I was attracted to books about Burma; Emma Larkin’s Finding George Orwell in Burma, Thant Myint-U’s The River of Lost Footsteps, and, especially, Amitav Ghosh’s aforementioned classic.

If I wanted to change the world, Burma would be at the center of that struggle. It was akin to Tibet, another country I cannot go to until I feel I can do something positive, and refuse to go to until the Dalai Lama is allowed to return.

Until the Dalai Lama can return to a Free Tibet, I won’t go there.

— Nithin Coca (@excinit) August 4, 2011

Today, Burma is open and there is, finally, the possibility of making positive change there for the first time since the British boats rolled up the Irrawaddy in 1885. It’s struggle is my own, its future is that of all of us.

Why Burma? It is, at once, a backwater paradise and the prototypical Orwellian state, the idealism and depravity of humanity. To me, the atrocity of exploitation is so clear here, in a country with such a long history, with a religious, tolerant past, manipulated by outsiders with no regard for its people or culture.

I don’t see Burma as a fantasyland, and its appeal isn’t that it is “untouched,” in many ways, it is more impacted by foreign forces than any place in the world. It’s it run by a military dictatorship, a decidedly western system, and ruled through totalitarian ideas developed in Germany, Russia, and the colonizing powers of Spain, the UK, and France. It’s not surprise that many believe Orwell’s classic 1984 was, infact, a prophecy about the Burma he served in for five years in his youth.

No, what appeals to me is the complexity. Did culture there get preserved because there wasn’t access to the outside world? Or was it formed in response to the situation there? So many things connect me to Burma – the religion, closely tied to my own beliefs, including the Vipassana retreat I did three years ago of which the founder was Burmese. Then there are Burma’s cultural connections between India, my cultural homeland, and Southeast Asia, where I’ve focused my professional career and written extensively about during the past few years.

I’ve decided that my destiny is there. I want to learn the language, explore the diverse cultures, and make a difference not for my own goals, but for the people there, and for people everywhere.

We seem to have a unique opportunity to, for once, right the wrongs of the past. It won’t be easy. But it is possible. Who could have said that back in 2008, when shots and repression ended one of the bravest, most noble protests movements in human history?

That is why I want to go to Burma. Now, years after its story first captured my mind and tore my heart, I want to do something to help us all heal together.

If this was an ideal world, I’d go to Mandalay by boat, sailing through the jungles of the Irrawaddy Valley, and see Burma enfold slowly, naturally. Our modern world, for all its freedom, no longer allows for those types of experience. What I hope to capture is something more powerful – the power of love and hope to build a new future.

This article Why Burma is Our Future first appeared on NithinCoca.com.

Street food is to Indonesia as boulangeries are to France. Unlike French bakeries, though, street food is relatively new to Indonesia’s culinary scene, and has been transformed into a national obsession. Its emergence coincides with rising diabetes, blood pressure and other health issues quickly turning into a crisis. Most tellingly, according to the World Health Organization, the adult obesity is now at 21%, one of the highest rates in Asia. The chief culprit? Unhealthy diets of greasy street food and sugary drinks.

To understand the effects of street food in Indonesia, we need to go back to the 1960′s in my own country, the United States, when a transformation altered the way people ate food and, created a health crisis that has, today, reached epic proportions.

This article Asian Street Food is Fast Food first appeared on NithinCoca.com.

I walked over, slowly. This was strange, I thought. She was usually out and about, or, would have woken upon hearing me enter. I looked at her chest. Was it moving? Was she breathing.

My fear slowly grew as I watched and couldn’t tell.

Instantaneously, her face burst into a smile, and out came a deep laugh. Immediately anger overtook me. Death wasn’t something to joke about. Silently, I walked upstairs.

I can’t recall every being more angry with Amama than that day. After an hour or two, I went downstairs, and we both acted like nothing had happened, and we never spoke of it again. But there was a message she was trying to tell me, one that I was too young, or too stubborn, to listen to.

That incident was one of the first ones I remembered when, years later, my Grandma passed away unexpectedly while on a trip to India. Amama’s joke, followed by other memories. How often she commented, when talking about the future, “oh, I’ll be dead soon anyway.” After funeral, I was surprise to learn that she never said that to my mom, only to my brother and I.

Amama never had any fear of death. That joke, her comments, were her unique way of telling us not to fear what was inevitable anyway.

–

Death was the origin of my distaste for materialism. When I was 12, my Grandpa died. Until then, I had been an avid collector of things like stamps, newspapers, souvenirs, borne out of a fear of forgetting memories, ones which, as a child often not happy where he was, I cherished.

But after this death, I immediately saw how meaningless these things were. Nostalgia is our body’s way of clinging to the emotions of the past, encoded in items that no longer have the emotional value they once did.

I prefer to remember people in another way, through the heart. Sometime, when I was young,  I read about an African culture that believes there are three phases of being, as opposed to the dominant western belief of two. In our paradigm, there is life, and there is death. But in this culture’s belief, there are three. Physical life, our manifestation in the human body, is the first. The last is death as we see, eternal, final. But in-between is another phase – when are you alive partially, through the people who loved you during your life. It connected with me in a deeper level, spiritually.

To keep someone alive is to remember them, not for what you’ve lost, but for what is still there inside of you. I was my Grandma’s eldest grandson, therefore a special part of her would always be with me. It’s easy to feel pity for yourself, for having lost someone you love, but I wanted to remember and grow. I knew that Amama will still be there, perhaps not in person, but in my heart.

Why am I writing this now? It now just over a year since one of my high school friends died, a death that touched me more than I would have thought. Several of my friends have lost loved ones recently – often to tragedies and often young. This post was party in response to hearing about the tragic loss of the father of a dear friend, for whom my thought and prayers are with.

One person I met this trip, who is blessed with a loving, caring family, told me how on his birthday every year, instead of having a party for himself, in his family they visit an orphanage, and prepare dinner and give gifts to the children there. There are millions of orphans around the world, who’ve lost their parents to disease, war, or famine. They crave nothing more than what too often the rest of us, with loving, caring families, take for granted.

I understand Amama’s joke, today, seven years after her death. She wasn’t laughing at me, or my love, but at my unfounded fear. Death is a part of life, she was telling, accept it, laugh at it don’t fear it. And never take for granted what you have at any moment. Like all of life’s most valuable lessons, this is one I only understand now, after so much experience.

This article Life, Death and Remembering first appeared on NithinCoca.com.

Before the event, I joined some surfers for dinner. Immediately, I noticed this was unlike any other Couchsurfing meetup I’d ever been to. One girl had never used the site as a guest or host, only to meet people to go drinking with. The guys had barely traveled, weren’t interested in talking with me, and didn’t actively host in New York. None of them seemed like real Couchsurfers.

At the meetup, it got even more strange. Upstairs, in the dark, loud, and unfriendly room, was a group of nearly two dozen guys, all American, and a single girl, surrounded by guys. No one came up to welcome us, and the atmosphere felt stifling.

“Man, where are all the girls?” said one of my dinner mates.

I left only 20 minutes later. That didn’t feel like the Couchsurfing spirit, not at all. Little did I realize that site which had changed my life, had itself changed for the worse.

Couchsurfing trip to Sequoia National Park, 2008

Couchsurfing has gone from a modest start as an attempt by a traveler to find a free place to stay in Iceland, to become the largest travel social network online. It now boasts five million members, and the growth shows no signs of stopping. For six years, I’ve been a member of Couchsurfing. I’ve met several of my best friends through the site, and found it to be an epitomization of the true spirit of traveling.

That things change is a central facet of Buddhist teaching. Couchsurfing is no different. With growth comes challenges. Natural spread through word of mouth has become media-driven growth.

With that, I no longer feel I can recommend a traveler to use Couchsurfing, and no longer plan to use it much myself. Here is why.

More Members, Less Community

The first meetup I organized was in back in April of 2008, a few months after moving to San Francisco. A potluck at a park.

Nearly 50 people came from all around the San Francisco Bay Area; experienced surfers, newbies, recent high school grads and retired professors. Locals and travelers from all around the world intermixed, and there were even children, playing on the rare, beautiful San Francisco spring day. It was what I always imagined – an open community of all ages. We’d done a potluck to make it as open to as many people as possible, even set up carpooling so that more people could come. Everyone brought what they could, and there was more than enough food to go around.

I still remember how amazing it felt that day, to be around other like-minded Couchsurfers, people mixing freely, nearly everyone having come on their own. Several of the people I met that day remain my friends, and two ended up getting married. We truly felt we were part of something.

Today, and I’ve tried, but events like those of 2008 and 2009 in San Francisco seem like the fading glory of the past.

There are still good people on Couchsurfing. Just as there are good people anywhere. But the sad part is, the community that was once so powerful has lost its focus. My new home, San Diego, tells that story as well as anyplace else.

Four years ago, there was a vibrant community, active, friendly, and with an incredible array of events taking place. Art gatherings, bonfires, a weekly meetup at a bar, cafe gatherings, potlucks, mimicking and exceeding that of San Francisco.

Now, San Diego is quiet, a weekly bar meetup the only regular activity, the message board sparse, my attempts to organize events getting little response. Any men who post on the boards get no responses, while any girl, not surprisingly, get plenty. In San Francisco, the weekly meetup I started has disappeared, the potlucks, which went on for nearly three years unabated, long forgotten. Despite millions more members, the community seems to have disappeared.

Gender and Couchsurfing

Since its early days, Couchsurfing has had a gender imbalance, with more male members then females one. But it was not really an issue then, and more a reflection on the fact that men, unfortunately, have more freedom to travel then women.

Despite that, my first host back in 2006, when I was living with two other men in Granada, Spain, was a solo traveling female from Australia. Initially, I was shocked. Why would a girl want to stay with three single men, with a brand new profile, and no references? So I asked her.

“Couchsurfing, to me, is safer than hostels. Even if you have no references, at least I know who you are through your profile, versus in a hostel, I could be sharing a room with mentally-insane strangers.”

It made perfect sense. The thought of taking advantage of a guest, male or female, was unthinkable. Just as I knew a guest would never take advantage of our trust and steal anything – which, to this day, has never happened. It is that trust that Couchsurfing is based on, and it was enlightening. The potential of humanity to share and grow. It fulfilled a need within me, to connect with people and share.

That was the point of travel.

Today, would anyone stay with three men who had an empty profile? The sad truth is, I would tell a girl never to do that, because it would be too risky.

Those first three years, I never heard of a single bad experience – everything was positive, evidence of humanity’s good. Then, it began to change. Slowly, more negative stories began to pop up – aggressive hosts, dirty places, uncomfortable situations. Now, its a 360 degree shift. Girls tell me about how when they arrive in a city, they often get random messages from local males, often with suggestive, flirty content. It is not uncommon to see hosts in major cities whose entire wall of references is only girls. According to an ambassador in New York City, girls posting on the message board in that city can get 50 message from males, most of whom have empty or near empty profiles.

It was those people I saw the so-called Couchsurfing meetup in New York. The girls they’d sent those messages too probably had been too scared to come.

The new open couch request feature demonstrates the problem clearly. It is a place where references matter little. I’ve been shocked to see men with 40+ references still seeking a host, while girls with no friends, no references, and bare-bones profiles getting 3+ invites.

Is that the Couchsurfing spirit?

For Profit Couchsurfing

Why has Couchsurfing become so gendered? Why is the community weak? I think the blame lies in an organization that has decided to focus on growth over building a community.

The site went for-profit last year, and now, following time-honored corporate practices, is focused solely on growth. Membership growth. Quantity over quality. The more members they have, the more valuable the site becomes to potential advertisers, or, as some rumors have it, to potential buyers.

Lost beneath this frenzy of numbers are the disappearing quality interactions, those which can’t be quantified. In my first four years of hosting surfers, I only once had a surfer flake on me. In the past two years, its happened several times. Just a few weeks ago, in Singapore, I had a host flake on me for the first time, the day I arrived, forcing me to stay in a hostel. Years ago, this would have shocked me. But now, it was almost expected. The trust on the site has diminished. A contradiction; more members, less community, less positive experiences.

I used to say that Couchsurfing was Globalization done right, where ideas and exchange mattered more than money or status. When you met someone who said they were a Couchsurfer, it meant they had a different viewpoint on life, that they knew how to share, and were culturally open-minded.

Back in the day, we used to test travelers to see if they were worthy of Couchsurfing. I remember meeting a friendly Malaysian in Bulgaria, and shared a train ride with him. Couchsurfing was so new back then, that there were actually only a handful of hosts in Bulgaria, so Noel had never heard of it. But I felt an innate openness, and warmth, within him, so I told him about Couchsurfing. He joined, and quickly became an active user, and later, an Ambassador, in the site’s true early spirit. That seemed like natural, organic growth, spread through word of mouth, introduced by people who shared the same ideals. If you were meant to be a Couchsurfer, you would find it. If not, it would remain apart, a subculture in a world of diversity. With time, society would be ready.

Unfortunately, we live in a society obsessed with growth, and the Couchsurfing management team fell into this same trap. The millionth member joined in 2009. Now, there are five million users, mass media coverage, and even mentions in Lonely Planet. Was it inevitable? Probably. Could it have been done in a way that respected the values that spurred Couchsurfing’s initial organic growth. Definitely.

Several of the members I met four, five, or six years ago, as a surfer in Europe or at my potlucks, barely use the site anymore. Some have stopped hosting due to bad experiences, others find the site no longer has the values its once did. It strikes me as incredibly sad. Couchsurfing has lost its base, and is now dependent on only one thing, growth, new membership, at any cost.

There is no turning back once you make a deal with the financial devil.

I loved Couchsurfing because I felt it was a true social network that created positive interactions and make the world a better place. I still believe in that dream, that we can turn the internet into the amazing, transnational, cultural tool for social change. Unfortunately, Couchsurfing is no longer that platform, and may no longer even a good site for travelers anymore, especially women. Will another site, such as the open-source, community run BeWelcome? I hope so. The people who made Couchsurfing great are still there, waiting for the opportunity to transform travel and the world once again.

Other Critiques

Mechanical Brain – A Sad end to a Good Idea

Quirky Travel Guy – Couchsurfing Backlash

This article The Rise and Fall of Couchsurfing first appeared on NithinCoca.com.

I visited it last summer when working for Kehati, the Indonesian Biodiversity Foundation. Rows of carefully plotted and maintained mangroves fill a swampy wetland, small but efficient. Each Mangrove is planted as the result of a donation, cared for by a non-profit that runs the centre. They also work to educate local children about the benefits of nature and the environment.

This article More Mangroves, Less Flooding first appeared on NithinCoca.com.

In the middle of the wedding, my friend’s grandma, a short, stocky, but strong aboriginal Taiwanese woman in her 80s, went up on stage. She grabbed the microphone and, after a short introduction in Mandarin, the dominant language in Taiwan, began a Christian prayer in the Atayal language.

The fluid, slightly raspy words sounded quite different than the varying toned, short-syllables of Mandarin. I was in Taichung, Taiwan, a groomsman at the wedding of my good friend. Here, the attendees were mostly Atayal, one of the 16 surviving aboriginal tribes of Taiwan, as the ceremony was for the indigenous side of my friend’s family. 

A short prayer in Atayal.

Taiwan is unique linguistically. Dominating are three Chinese dialects; Mandarin, the national language, Taiwanese, the most widely spoken, similar to the Hokkien dialect in mainland China, and Hakka, another dialect from Fujian province. These three languages, all part of the Sino-Tibetan language group, the second most widely spoken language group in the world after Indo-European, represent nearly more than 95% of the island’s 23 million people.

Throughout my time in Taiwan I saw this diversity, learning to distinguish between the three languages. I learned how many of the older generation do not speak Mandarin well but that, in Taipei, many youth do not speak Hakka or Taiwanese. These three language alone provided me with a window into Taiwan’s unique cultural landscape.

Now, though, at this wedding, I saw that was only a small part of the picture. It is incredibly easy to live, work, and travel in Taiwan and not realize that an even greater linguistic diversity lies in the islands beautiful, green hills, where the aboriginal peoples of Taiwan reside, the source of one of humanities most astounding migrations and the birthplace of another language group that’s tentacles are spread over a far vaster geographical area than the Sino-Tibetan group. In fact, Taiwan is the intersection of two of the world’s greatest linguistic groups.

Besides the Atayal, there are the Truku, Paiwan, Bunun, and many others. They number 500,000 in Taiwan, only 2% of the population, severely displaced by immigration from mainland China that began in the 1700′s, and especially the great influx of Mandarin speakers who fled with the Kuomintang (Nationalists) from mainland China in 1949 and took control of the island.

Aboriginal Taiwan’s history long predates that of Chinese Taiwan. It is unknown how and when the island of Taiwan was first populated, but records of settlements date back thousands of years. What is known is that, beginning in 300 AD, Polynesians became the first great seafarers in human history. Ships set sail from Taiwan down to the neighboring Philippines, then, in the greatest period of exploration until Columbus’ voyage across the Atlantic, Polynesian sailors spread to a huge part of the world, colonizing vast territories.

Map of the Polynesian expansion from Taiwan

Perhaps you’ve heard of Tagalog, Indonesian, Malay, Maori, or Hawaiian. All of these languages can be traced back to Taiwan, the birthplace of Polynesian people and languages, the world’s third most spoken language group. Taiwan’s indigenous people are the ancestors of one of the greatest, most influential stories in human history.

Even more amazing, despite the spread of Polynesian peoples, there is more linguistic diversity on Taiwan than the rest of the Polynesian world. That is to say, Taroko and Atayal are more different than Malagasy (Madagascar) and Maori (New Zealand) are from each other. In fact, three of the four branches of Polynesian language tree can only be found in Taiwan.

Taiwan’s true beauty this, its astonishing diversity, preserved over thousands of years. One that, today, is facing its greatest challenge in the face of Globalization and Mandarin Chinese dominance.

This I could clearly see at the wedding. My friend’s grandma was still praying, and I listened attentively, trying to grasp the unique sounds of Atayal, to see if I could hear the distant connection between it and the Polynesian language I am learning, Indonesian. I couldn’t. It ended too fast, and the cacophony of Mandarin once again took over.

I looked at my friend, who can understand, but not speak, Atayal. In fact, in his generation, none of his cousins can speak it. They are passive listeners, the first step towards language death.

Cousins, unable to speak Atayal

He is going to have kids soon, who will not get the chance to learn Atayal. With that, a link that connects them with their past, with those hundred previous generations, with the Polynesian sailors who spread the language and culture of this small island to the far corners of the world, will be broken. A history in Taiwan, one that is extraordinary, but little known and of little use in our modern world, is being lost.

It’s already started. Just 100 years ago, Taiwan had 26 aboriginal languages, but in the past century, 10 have gone extinct, two are moribund, and several others endangered. The day may come when the island only speaks Chinese dialects, and Taiwan’s uniqueness is a mere relic of the past.

This is language death in action, the causes clear, the consequences quietly, softly, grave.

–

At the wedding hall, the dominance of Chinese was apparent – the “lucky” characters hanging on the walls, the round tables, and, most of all, the languages spoken around us. The entire ceremony, minus the short prayer, was in Mandarin Chinese, as were all the conversations and songs.

But at the end of the night, after the ceremony was finished, the bride had gone home, and the younger generation – my friend’s cousins – had all left, it was only us, the groomsmen, and the elders awake, a strange mix. They looked entirely different than most Taiwanese, with darker skin, larger eyes, and straight, sometimes curly hair, like their ethnic cousins in the Philippines. Out came a bottle of Johnny Walker, a long line of shots thrust into our hands. There was no way we could say no. Smoke filled the air, along with a sense of relief and joy.

Spontaneously, one of the elders began singing. Soon, a chorus began – traditional Atayal songs. I whipped out my camera, wanting to record this amazing moment, but for some reason, the record function refused to start. Smiling, I put the camera down. Modern technology and traditions didn’t mix at this moment. The irony. We try to preserve culture through recording, digitizing, but can this moment truly be captured?

I felt as if I was seeing and hearing something truly special, a glimpse into the heart of humanity, feeling our long existence on earth. But I couldn’t enjoy it fully, because I couldn’t help wondering if I was seeing the last gasps of a dying culture.

When Atayal is gone, when the future generation can no longer speak the language of its ancestors, will we even realize its passing, or what we have lost? It doesn’t sound like a future I want to be a part of.

This article Language Death in Action first appeared on NithinCoca.com.

There are no official statistics about interfaith marriage because Indonesian law only allows for religious, not civil, marriage, and thus one of the marrying couple must convert for the marriage to be recognized. This, not surprisingly, creates difficulties. Who should convert? What will the families think?

This article Cinema Driving Debate on Interfaith Marriage in Indonesia first appeared on NithinCoca.com.