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The Current Transcript for May 16, 2018

Host: Anna Maria Tremonti

STORIES FROM THIS EPISODE

Listen to the full episode

Prologue

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VOICE: I kind of tricked my way into this university. I told them I was home schooled, I really hadn't been. One of my first lectures that I attended I raised my hand and asked what the Holocaust was cause I hadn't ever heard of it before.

ANNA MARIA TREMONTI: Her parents were isolationists. So suspicious of government they didn't register her birth until she was nine-years-old. They kept their children away from doctors and teachers, raising them on biblical verse and self-reliance in rural Idaho. It would be Tara Westover's own teenage curiosity that would propel her from that world to the halls of Harvard and Cambridge. But hers isn't just a story of academic achievement, it's about what happens when family ties unravel. When you question the only world view you ever knew and when you realize that learning to think for yourself comes with a lot of joy and pain. In an hour, Tara Westover shares the story of her quest to be educated. Also today, picture this: he's a man with two precious suitcases trying to get out of Yemen just as it breaks out into civil war.

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VOICE: And I heard really loud explosions around me and so I went outside and I saw laser beams in the sky. Those were anti-aircraft machine guns being shot, Saudi fighter jets.

AMT: Mokhtar Alkhanshali was so desperate to get those suitcases to the U.S. that he risked bombs, firefights and arrest. But what was in those suitcases? Would you believe coffee beans? In half an hour we will introduce you to the man who revived Yemen's coffee industry in the middle of a war, with beans so perfect, so flavorful, the coffee sells for $16 a cup. But first we are in B.C., where thousands are helpless as they watch the water rise. Right now it's a good 18 inches higher than it's ever been before. I haven't had a lot of sleep four days. I'm Anna Maria Tremonti. This is The Current.

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Canada must do more to minimize flood risk, says climate expert

Guests: Chris Walker, Krystine McInnes, Blair Feltmate

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VOICE 1: I still have two feet of water all in my whole yard.

VOICE 2: My quad trailer is down the river, my wheel barrel.

VOICE 3: You lost some tires.

VOICE 2: And four tires with rims they were in the tractor shed. All that stuff went out. A bunch of lumber, tools.

VOICE 1: My oven had water in it. I have a freezer on the bottom and that was had water in it.

VOICE 4: Randy and I had to go rescue our horses across probably two to three feet of moving water.

VOICE 5: Right now we have the the west tail running around our house. Basically the house is an island.

VOICE 6: The whole dike system has disappeared. And to me, if we can't get help to rebuild that, those properties below us and ours will keep flooding every year, no matter what the river does.

AMT: Well voices from Rock Creek, B.C. on the reality of watching water take over their homes. It's been a long intense week for a number of communities in B.C.'s southern interior. Thousands of people have been forced out of their homes, as swollen rivers continue to rise and rise and rise again. The record-setting flooding comes on the heels of record-setting heat, combined with higher than usual snowpack and record spring rains. Late yesterday afternoon the Kootenay Boundary regional district asked Ottawa for military support, as it struggles to help people in the devastated communities of Grand Forks and Christina Lake. Others are wondering if they'll be next as a second surge of water is in the forecast. Keeping a close eye on all of this is Chris Walker. He is the host of Daybreak South, the CBC Radio morning program that broadcasts to the region most-affected by the flooding. Chris Walker joins us from our studio in Kelowna. Hi Chris.

CHRIS WALKER: Good morning Anna Maria.

AMT: What are you hearing from your listeners and the people in your region this week?

CW: Well there have been stories like you've just heard little snippets of, stories of resilience, really up and down the river systems in the southern interior. But as you mentioned, the concern right now is this second wave that may be coming. We had bad flooding in Rock Creek and Grand Forks, where the entire downtown essentially is under water. But as you mentioned, we have record-setting heat and that is melting this higher than normal snowpack very quickly in the mountains, coming down the hills now and is expected to crest in those rivers in the next 24 to 48 hours. On top of that we have a rainstorm coming right around the same time. So lots of concern still even in areas that have already seen bad flooding.

AMT: It's really something. And you know we're going to be talking about mitigation a little later, but in Kelowna, where you are, which has also seen its share of devastation from floods and fires, this year it took some steps to try to protect against rising water from Lake Okanagan. What did it do?

CW: Well, that's right. Last year we had flooding concerns throughout the downtown core of Kelowna, which is obviously a densely populated urban area and over the spring, the city of Kelowna has really taken this on. They've gone up and down Mission Creek, which is the main waterway flowing down from the mountains and have cleared brush for example, all the way up and down that waterway. Clearing willow tree, some people sad to see those willow trees go, but the city says it's necessary. They've been diking, they've been putting these big orange bladder dams, full of water ironically enough, along the sides of that creek. In addition, provincial officials have been drawing down Okanagan Lake because Okanagan Lake really is a reservoir system for the areas to the south, all the way down into the United States and the Columbia River basin and the provincial government has lowered the lake level, almost as low as it can go, just open the floodgates and let all that water flow down. And that has given us some breathing room here because even if the rivers and creeks are swollen and flood into the lake, there is some leeway there. The lake though is now filling up and it's expected to hit what they call full pool, which essentially means like a full bathtub full of water, but that is still better than we had last year and I think the city of Kelowna has taken proactive measures to prevent some of the low-lying areas from flooding again.

AMT: Where does that water go though when they draw down the lake, does it go south?

CW: Well of course, it has to go somewhere. It does go south. There are two more lakes in Canada and then one of those lakes goes into the Washington State and it all empties into the Columbia River basin. And that is one of the other areas of concern right now because those two lakes south of us, have been filling up and there's a river, the Similkameen River that comes in just below one of those lakes, so we have essentially the taps turned on from Kelowna moving south, but then we have the drain plugged on the other side, which is the Similkameen River and that could back up into the south Okanagan.

AMT: You know, Chris you report on floods and fires in B.C. every year, what's different for you this time around?

CW: Well you know what's different is it seems like the frequency of, there's always a you know, there are floods, there's a freshet every year, there are fires every year, these are both part of the natural ecosystem. But what does seem to be happening and I'm no climate scientist, but this cycle seems to be tightening. If you know what I mean and the events more acute each year. So instead of you know, flooding in 1948, 1972 and 2001. Now we have it every single year, instead of devastating wildfires five, ten, fifteen years apart. Now they're every summer and that seems to be different, but I think it's really important to keep in mind that this is not, people call these acts of God, but this is all happening on a landscape that's profoundly altered by human activity. From logging in the mountains to the mountain pine beetle caused by mild winters to development in areas that were previously rural interface areas and fires and floodplains, so this all has a human aspect to it.

AMT: OK well we'll pick up on that with our last guest, but Chris Walker, thank you.

CW: Thank you, Anna Maria.

AMT: Chris Walker, host of CBC Radio's Daybreak South. He's in our Kelowna studio. Our next guest knows all too well the devastation floodwaters can bring. Krystine McInnes is the owner of Grown Here Farms in Cawston, B.C. The organic farm is currently under water after the Similkameen River, surged to heights not seen in generations, during last week's rains and mountain runoff. Cawston may not have seen the worst of it yet. Krystine McInnes joins us from our studio in Vancouver. Hi.

KRYSTINE MCINNES: Hi.

AMT: You can't get to your farm right now, can you?

KM: No we can't. We have been looking at it from the highway with shock and awe, absolutely.

AMT: What do you see? Tell us. Describe it for us.

KM: Well we have a dike system that runs along about three-quarters of our property. We're around 60 acres, so we're the largest organic farm in the region and that whole dike system has been basically blown apart. So if you imagine the dike system is, you know, high above the water level, surrounding the property and as the water kind of flooded over that dike. It was almost like a tsunami and the dike just kind of blew apart and then the water just came in almost like filling a bathtub, up about four to six feet from the ground level.

AMT: And what's happened to your crops? What's happened to your buildings?

KM: Oh, everything is under water. So the entire, because it acted like this basin, so basically the river just came flooding through and everything's under water right now. I think our house might be OK, we're a little higher up, but we can't access it at this point, but everything else is completely under water.

AMT: And so this happened, like this happened last week, but what have you been told to expect this week?

KM: We actually because our team has been strategizing and you know figuring out what do we do next. And so we were planning to come back into the property this week and just start assessing the damage and getting our fields back. But, shockingly they sent a second evacuation alert saying the worst is to come and so we're now all kind of waiting on the sideline, for what is expected to be a larger surge this week.

AMT: You know you're very calm as you tell me this, this has got to be tough for you.

KM: Well you know, I mean there's only so much you can control and this certainly isn't one of them. And so at this point for us we're really surrendered to what's happening and really now looking to these amazing government programs or insurance companies, you know the people that we trust to help in these kinds of situations to rebuild and plan forward and that's really all we can do. You know, we can't really look back, we can't really change the circumstance, we can only kind of lean on what we can lean on around us and really rebuild forward.

AMT: But you did try to protect your farm from all of this.

KM: Oh yeah. I mean we have an incredible dike system. We have a very well engineered property. The way they've described this floodwater, we've seen floodwaters over the years and we always get kind of higher levels of water this time of year. Last year was the you know "150 year" flood level and we weathered that without skipping a beat. But this year, I mean it's like ten times worse than what we saw last year. This was.

AMT: How high did it get last year?

KM: Right well, I'm terrible with measurements, but I believe our dike is about seven meters from the shoreline, so the water last year came about six inches from the top of that dike and this year it just, the only word is really apocalyptic, it just came flooding over top of that dike. It's unbelievable. Unbelievable.

AMT: Your farm is on a flood plain, that's why you did all that, to try to protect it. Is there any part of you that thought you shouldn't be there?

KM: Well, no I mean this is one of those times where I don't think anybody could have either predicted or even thought this would be an occurrence. I mean they call it kind of the, the once every 200 year event, now they're saying this is the worst flood level in history. So you know, how do you plan for an event like that?

AMT: And you did try to plan right, I mean that's the point, that all that other stuff you did was precisely to try to stop this kind of thing.

KM: Yeah, yeah. I mean we're organic farmers, we're very in tune and connected to the rhythms and the cycles of nature and you know we have to really kind of harmonize with the environment and so this is just one of those things that you have absolutely no control over.

AMT: Is your growing season gone now for sure, what happens?

KM: No. We are planning, strategizing. If we get back in the ground by the beginning of June then we still have a season and we're looking at shifting our crop rotation to grow things that are later-season harvest, so that we can kind of adapt and adjust moving forward.

AMT: But as you try to figure out how to deal with when the floodwaters recede, you're waiting for them to get higher. You've been told it's still coming.

KM: Yeah, we have one of our neighbors watching the property right now. We're using the wheel line on a vehicle that's in our driveway is now, we're calling it the high water mark. So he's saying, it's about six inches from the top of the tire now and yeah, so it's rising and it's it's higher right now than it was when our flood or when our dikes had broken through. So we are expecting higher waters.

AMT: Well Krystine, I wish you well and hope you can get back there soon.

KM: Yeah, thank you so much.

AMT: Krystine McInnes is the owner of Grown Here Farms in Cawston, B.C. It's on the bank of the Similkameen River. She was in our studio in Vancouver. We have pictures of her farm and we will post them on our website today, as the water gets higher. Her story will be familiar to my next guest. Blair Feltmate studies the costs and implications of flooding and other disasters related to climate change. He's the Head of the Intact Centre on Climate Adaptation, that's a research centre within the Faculty of Environment at the University of Waterloo. That centre is partially funded by the Intact Financial Corporation, which provides property and casualty insurance. He's also the chair of the Federal Government's Expert Panel on Climate Change Adaptation and Resilience Results. And Blair Feltmate joins me in our Toronto studio. Hi.

BLAIR FELTMATE: Good morning.

AMT: You know, we started our Project Adaptation this season with you in the fall and you're back, talking about the very same thing we were talking about, these floodwaters. As we look at B.C.'s southern interior, that's not the only part of Canada that's been hit by extreme flooding, is this the new normal?

BF: It is the new normal. And basically and fundamentally what we're seeing is that the weather of the past is not a good predictor of the weather of the future and this is the manifestation of climate change in really real form. The main expression of extreme weather events that we're realizing in Canada, is the problem associated with too much water in the wrong place, flooding. Flooding is the number one challenge for Canada in reference to extreme weather events.

AMT: And in B.C. they have the snowpack melting because of higher temperatures and then they have the rain combined, which makes it extreme, I guess.

BF: That's right.

AMT: So we heard from Krystine McInnes, who flooded out, but they had extensive efforts to protect the property. What does it tell you about the limits of mitigating against flood risk?

BF: We can work to mitigate flood risk to a certain extent and by the way to be highly sensitive to the situations people are in, whether it's New Brunswick or B.C. right now, but we need longer term planning and longer term preparation to operationalize best practices to otherwise avoid excessive flood damage. And currently in Canada, for example, in very short form, we're developing three new standards, guidance on how we can mitigate flood risk. One is a standard for how do we build new communities going forward, with fundamental features and characteristics in place that will make it such that when the big storms hit going forward, they're not all flooded out. Number two is we're developing another standard right now for existing communities, what can we do in existing communities to mitigate flood risks through the use of berms, diversion channels, holding ponds, cisterns, dikes, that kind of thing and then we have another standard that's being released very, very shortly in Canada and this is all through, the we I'm referring to is a combination of efforts by the National Research Council, Standards Council of Canada, Canadian Standards Association and then the Intact Centre works very closely with all three groups. We're releasing another standard in more or less about two months on flood protection at the level of the individual house. What can you do around your house, the outside of the property, the inside of the property to lower the probability of having a flooded basement.

AMT: You discovered that home inspectors actually aren't trained to check basements for flood risk.

BF: That is correct. There are approximately 40,000 home inspectors in Canada and right now home inspector training that's delivered through the colleges, it does not address basement flood risk assessment. Believe it or not. And so they'll take courses on heating, air conditioning, integrity of roofs, foundations and so forth, but not on home flood risk assessment. So we're developing a course right now, in real-time, that will be released here in Ontario in September of 2018, this year. That will be a new course required for home inspectors to take on home flood risk assessment and then it will be released nationally in January of 2019. So you will have people with expertise in the area of basement flood risk assessment that you could call on to give you guidance for your house.

AMT: And that just tells you how far things have shifted, that before they didn't even think about that. They thought about other things. Now they have to.

BF: That's right. There's a new stressor in the system that we're responding to.

AMT: What does water damage from flooding cost the insurance industry each year? And of course, if it costs the insurance industry, it costs the rest of us. What is it?

BF: That's right. Well it used to be, if you went from 1983 up to about 2008 or 9 in Canada, the average payout in terms of catastrophic loss insurable claims in Canada, were in the order of between about 200 to 500 million dollars per year. Now for eight of the last nine years, those costs have gone up over a billion dollars per year, every year for eight out of the last nine years. And the primary factor that's driving these costs up, these catastrophic loss claims, is flooding. Flooding explains about 58 percent,. 55 percent in that order, of the elevation in the costs of the claims.

AMT: So clearly, individual homeowners and property owners can't do it all themselves. What do you see governments moving to change on some of these bigger issues?

BF: Yes. And it is a combination of the deployment of the standards that are being developed at the level of new community design, existing communities and at the level of the individual house. And we really need governments, particularly provincial governments, to give very strong guidance if not you know, non-negotiable direction to municipalities, to say that you should be operationalizing these standards. This is the requirement that you should be living up to in your municipality and if you don't, you will continue to experience management by disaster.

AMT: And so you're the Head of the federal government's Expert Panel on Climate Change Adaptation and Resilience Results, you've got a report coming out when, in August?

BF: No. It'll be sooner than that, it will be almost with assuredness in June of this year.

AMT: And can you give us any preview of what we should be looking for in that?

BF: Well, effectively what the report focuses on are the indicators that Canada will use to determine the degree to which it's living up to its commitment to adaptation, as outlined in something called the Pan-Canadian Framework on Clean Growth and Climate Change. There's two components to the government's direction in the Pan-Canadian Framework on the climate file. How do we mitigate greenhouse gas emissions and how do we adapt to climate change? So there's strong direction on adaptation and what we've identified are the indicators that will be used to determine the degree to which the government is actually living up to its commitment on adaptation. So there are about 55 indicators that you'll see in the report when it comes out in a couple of weeks or maybe a month or so.

AMT: OK. And in the meantime, we're watching this flooding. Again we're looking at huge costs and then fire season, we know has now been extended. So this again comes down to extreme weather in your estimation.

BF: That is absolutely correct. We are seeing, this is the manifestation of climate change, the expression of extreme weather events, whether it be flood, fire, drought, hail, wind, different parts of the country get hit with different factors at different times.

AMT: OK. Blair Feltmate, thanks for coming in.

BF: Thank you.

AMT: Blair Feltmate, Head of the Intact Centre on Climate Adaptation, a research centre within the Faculty of Environment and the University of Waterloo. The centre is partially funded by the Intact Financial Corporation. He is also the Chair of the federal government's Expert Panel on Climate Change Adaptation and Resilience Results and he joined me in our Toronto studio. Let us know what you're thinking about your own home and property as you listen to this and the need for adaptation for where we have a new normal, where the old way of doing things is not going to be the new way. Tweet us @TheCurrentCBC. Find us on Facebook. Go to our website cbc.ca/thecurrent. Stay with us. The news is next and then Mokhtar Alkhanshali went on a quest for the best cup of coffee in Yemen. He'll join me to talk about the remarkable lengths he went through to find it. I'm Anna Maria Tremonti. This is The Current.

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How a search for the world's best coffee led to Yemen in the midst of civil war

Guest: Mokhtar Alkhanshali

AMT: Hello. I'm Anna Maria Tremonti and you're listening to The Current.

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AMT: Still to come, for the first nine years of her life, as far as the government was concerned, Tara Westover did not exist. Her parents were survivalists and raised her in isolation in rural Idaho. She had no birth certificate, no schooling and yet today, Tara Westover holds a PhD from Cambridge. She'll be with me in half an hour, to talk about her remarkable quest for learning. But first, what lengths would you go to for the perfect cup of mocha.

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VOICE: If you look over here, these are the terraces that have coffee. As you can see, they're high, high up the mountain. And unfortunately, cars can't come over here, so the only way to go up is the hike with all our luggage bags and use a few donkeys. Otherwise you can't go up. In search for the best coffee, sometimes you have to sacrifice some things. Here we are. Hopelessly see you guys on the top, if you make it.

AMT: That is Mokhtar Alkhanshali, hiking through Yemen's highland on the hunt for coffee beans. But the daunting mountains and valleys weren't the biggest challenge he faced in that quest. During his search, civil war broke out in Yemen and suddenly his coffee dream seemed shattered. But Mokhtar was not going to let armed militias and bombing by Saudi airforce jets keep him from finding the holy grail of coffee. Mokhtar Alkhanshali's incredible story of war and coffee is told in Dave Eggers' new book, "The Monk of Mokha." And Mokhtar Alkhanshali joins me from San Francisco. Hello.

MOKHTAR ALKHANSHALI: Hi. Pleasure to be here with you today.

AMT: What was at the top of the mountain?

MA: That was, it seemed only like yesterday, that was actually an area called Bura, in the far western region of Yemen, close to the Red Sea and that was one of the hardest hikes of my life. It's on the top, on top of the mountain, you see a village perched way up near the clouds. And these people live, it's almost like the Hobbit, the Shire. It's just an incredible way of life that's been really untouched by time and space and these people who live in a beauty, really wonderful balanced way of life and it's something that I was really fortunate to see.

AMT: Your family had left Yemen before you were born and you grew up in the U.S., what was it like being back in your ancestral home country of Yemen?

MA: The idea of actually going back and starting a career in my family's homeland was something that you know my family didn't really understand, for me, even myself to a certain degree. Actually, when I was a kid, my parents used to threaten me and tell me if I didn't do good in school, they would send me back home to work on the farm.

AMT: And you actually went back when you were a kid because you were a bit troubled and they wanted you to be there for a while and see another world, right?

MA: Yeah you know, we're all a product of our environments and growing up in the inner cities, it was really rough. I grew up in a neighborhood in San Francisco called the Tenderloin and as comedian Dave Chappelle once said, "Ain't nothing tender about that place." It was really a difficult reality, a lot of drug and violence and it's hard for a kid to see themselves outside of that circumstance. And so, at some point my parents really couldn't handle me and I went back to Yemen when I was almost 13 as sort of a boot camp. And that's where my grandfather and that's where you know, I saw people who were so less fortunate and didn't have much and it made me feel guilty of the privilege I had and so it had a huge impact on me when I was a kid. But I also I got to learn Arabic and learned how to you know walk the walk and talk the talk and that was tremendous in helping me do the work I do now.

AMT: So tell us about the moment, when it came to you, that your future lay in coffee.

MA: That was on October 1st, 2013 at 12:02 p.m. You know, people have their like what moments in life, you know define you and sometimes it could be as simple as a text message. And so that, at that moment, a friend of mine she texted me about a weird Yemeni statue in front of the work, my job. At that time I was doing a lot of civil rights work with groups like the ACLU and my goal was to become a lawyer. That's what I wanted to do and my parents loved that idea. And around that time I was also working as a doorman in this like tall high-rise in downtown S.F. to make extra money, to support my family. Well they didn't cause doormen, they called us lobby ambassadors to make us feel better. And so my friend told me about this statue of a weird Yemeni man next to my job, drinking coffee. And so I went across and you know, for those listening out there, especially the older generation, there's an old coffee company called, "The Hills Brothers," and their logo was an Arab man, who held a cup of coffee to the sky. And so I went to this courtyard across where I worked, there's this epic statue of this man, arab man, with this long robe and this turban and holding a cup of coffee to the sky. And so that led me on this long journey of understanding the history of coffee and you know learning about, you know for those who don't know, there's actually a port city called Mocha, in Yemen and that's where the name comes from. And just a disclaimer, I am not the "Monk of Mocha," that actually belongs to a man who lived in the 14th century, a title that was his and he was the first person to write about coffee as a drink. And I just learned about the incredible history of coffee and how when coffee entered Europe and these major cities like Vienna and London and Paris, in coffeehouses people had amazing ideas and social movements. And I just fell in love with the history of coffee and I felt that for the first time, I found something that could connect you know my Yemeni heritage with my American side and I felt coffee could be this bridge.

AMT: And so you decide to get into the coffee industry. What did your family think when you told them you were going to try to resurrect the coffee industry in Yemen?

MA: I think, the term I liked to use for myself at this early stage of my idea, was naive arrogance. I didn't know anything about coffee or I barely drank coffee, you know six years ago, five years ago even. And so when I told my family, I remember like I had this little red popcorn maker and I used to roast coffee beans on it. And I remember roasting coffee beans with my family, showing them and I had my Chemex and my hand grinder and you know, at the end, they were like, well, so how's school going? At that point, I had dropped out of college, they didn't know that. So I think in the beginning they were just skeptical, then they became worried because at first they thought it was maybe a phase and then when I actually went to Yemen this summer, then they were really concerned.

AMT: What was the coffee industry like in Yemen, when you got there?

MA: So to give you an idea, in the 1800's, Yemen was shipping out close to 60,000 tons of coffee out of the port of Mocha and now it's less than 15,000 tons, a huge, huge decline. And so it was really just a shell of its former self. They were all along the value chain. I like to use the word value chain and not supply chain because I believe everyone brings value to his product as it comes to us. One of the things that this book talks a lot about is the idea of the journey something takes to come to us and how as consumers, through the power of direct trade, we have so much more power to impact people's lives. But when I went to Yemen, every way along the chain, along every point of coffee, from the moment it was picked, there were things happening along that chain to really ruin the quality and the main reason why was there was no price incentives for high quality. You know, coffees are, for those who don't know, they're cherries. It's actually a fruit and the seed, the pit, this is a seed, that is the coffee bean that we roast and we grind and we brew this incredible drink that will change your life. And so, it starts off kind of green, the colour of this cherry and as it ripens, it becomes yellow and then orange and then when it's fully ripe, it's this really beautiful, ruby red and it's so much more sweet. And so to selectively pick just the ripe red cherries, it takes much more labour and so farmers weren't being paid more for that. And they were being taken advantage of by loan sharks, head of harvest and they were mixing different coffee varietals in different areas and regions and years. All these things were along the chain so I noticed there were a lot of issues, a lot of problems and I felt like maybe I could be that bridge and I can fix these issues.

AMT: Are you drinking coffee right now?

MA: I actually am.

AMT: I thought so.

MA: And that's how I am, that's how I'm so excited right now.

AMT: There are Ethiopians who are going to say, you are full of beans. Ethiopia is the birthplace of coffee. What is so special about coffee in Yemen?

MA: There is a difference of opinion, where coffee begins, right. Does it begin in Ethiopia or does it begin in Yemen? And depending on which side of the Red Sea you're in, you'll have a different answer, but I think I'm probably the only Yemeni who believes coffee begins in Ethiopia. As an indigenous plant that grows wildly there and the first consumption of coffee was people would chew on the coffee cherries, sometimes with animal fat, but the first people to actually, you know, harvest it intentionally and cultivate it into roast and make this beautiful drink, were Yemeni Sufi monks in Yemen. The first cup of coffee was poured in Yemen. And for a Sufi, at that time they believed that God had brought down this plant to help us reach higher states of consciousness. And so it was like a spiritual stimulant and it was a very powerful way to build community and have social gatherings, which I think coffee was intentionally used for and especially when it went to Europe. You had certain coffee houses that were known for philosophers and some for musicians and so on. And so it then began being produced in Yemen exclusively. It was illegal to sell seedlings to foreigners and if you did, you'd be executed by Yemeni authorities. So for almost 200 years Yemen had a monopoly in the world of coffee. And so that's kind of my way of making peace between Ethiopia and Yemen and it's been working so far.

AMT: OK well we'll see how our listeners feel. So at the beginning of you deciding that you're going to do this, you go on this trek around Yemen looking for coffee farms, what was that like?

MA: That was one of the most interesting parts of my life. I just had these old Arabic books and coffee in Yemen and I had these USAID and UN reports on coffee production. And so I went to the port of Mocha and I zigzagged across the country. I went to over 32 different regions that grew coffee and it was incredible like some places we would hike for days to get to and you know others we would get to and we would realize there's no coffee and we'd ask the farmers, you know, do you guys have coffee here. They're like, yeah, you know we used to have coffee, 50 or 80 or 100 years ago. You're a little late.

AMT: And you did find a place where the best beans were growing, tell us about that and the farmer who grew them.

MA: After the first summer, almost four months, I had lost almost 40 pounds. You know, I had contracted malaria and tapeworms and had a gull bladder swollen, but that's a different story. But I brought back six luggage bags full of coffee samples from these areas. They had about 21 samples. And when we analyzed these coffee samples of 21, 19 failed basic standards. You know, I mean they had horrible scores because of the way it was picked and processed and sorted, but two of the coffees had a 90 plus rating, which is the highest you can give and it's extremely rare and so from those coffee samples, one of them was this incredible village area in the province of Sana'a, there are Al-Jabal coffees and there was a farmer named Malik and his wife, Wardah. And their coffees were just, some of the highest scores in the world, according to these experts that tasted it with me. And so it just had this incredible tropical flavor of like papaya, with mangosteen and it had this sweet lingering aftertaste, silky smooth, it was just something you wouldn't taste in coffee. You know, I mean we're describing it this way because we're used to drinking you know, coffee that tastes like burnt popcorn, where you have to put loads of cream and sugar just to make it drinkable. And so it was just a very unique coffee.

AMT: And that was the coffee that you would go back to Yemen for and really start a business. But you go back to Yemen and right around the time when you're there, with all these big plans, the Houthi uprising begins.

MA: Yeah. So this was, Yemen was going through a very difficult political situation and it just got worse and worse, as days went by and the months went by. I was scheduled to leave to attend a coffee conference, a huge event in Seattle and over 100 countries in attendance, the biggest coffee conference in the world. And so a few days before I was supposed to leave, I woke up at around 2:00 a.m. and I heard really loud explosions around me and so I went outside and I saw it just, it looked like laser beams in the skies and those were anti-aircraft machine guns being shot at Saudi fighter jets. And I found that overnight the country had went into an all-out war, a regional conflict and Saudi Arabia had started the coalition with around ten countries with the U.S. backing, to take out this militia and just began bombing around us. They actually bombed both the civilian airports and it was just a very scary, scary night. I had to, you know, send messages to my mom and dad, not knowing if I would live to see the morning, to really feel a certainty around death. All I knew of war is what I saw in movies right, I never thought I'd be in that situation. So that first night was very difficult.

AMT: And as difficult as it was, you were pretty single-minded. As you point out, there's a coffee conference, you need to be there to sell this stuff and you need to get out of the country.

MA: You know for me, I think I had promised these farmers something. These are real people that I knew and we were friends and you know I looked in their eyes and I told them I could do something for them. And that was a huge burden and maybe at a deeper level with all that happened and this was the only thing that I could hold onto, to help me continue that I had this mission. However crazy it seemed like that within five or six days, I was supposed to somehow make it to a conference across the world, to just showcase coffees and wouldn't even know if I would find people who would pay these price points for this coffee and how it would taste with them, but that was the game plan.

AMT: So you have a couple of suitcases with your samples of beans and was it two suitcases or more?

MA: Two suitcases.

AMT: Ok. But you have to get them and yourself out of the country. Yet as you just pointed out, they've bombed the airports, so you think, you can get in a truck, drive down the road. How'd that work for you?

MA: A friend of mine in the southern part of the country, in the city of Aden, told me that there was a Greek ship taking foreigners out. But it would leave in the morning and I was, if I had left at that exact moment, I might just make it because it was a nine and a half hour, it was a ten hour drive. And so I just decided to go and you know I went through a lot of difficulties when I got there. The people in the south were fighting the Houthi invasion, this militia invasion. So every time I got to a Houthi checkpoint, they would just look at the front of the car, kind of smile and just kind of like wave at us and let us come through. You know, checkpoint after checkpoint, I had just OK whatever. It wasn't until I got to the city of Aden, where you know the Houthi resistors, like the people of Aden who were fighting the Houthis, at this point they looked in the front of this truck I was in and their face changed colours. And I was like what's going on. It was just this giant sticker that was like the chant of the Houthis. It was like their chant there and it was on the front of it. So it was like, it's like Houthi like, it looked like I was doing like a Houthi propaganda vehicle. And someone at some point that night, while we were leaving the capital, had just like put it on the front of the car. We didn't notice it, we were in such a rush. So that was one of the things that unfortunately made the situation much worse.

AMT: And yeah, at some point you get into the other side, eventually you and your driver wind up in jail. What was that experience like?

MA: Well we got jailed twice in that city. The first time, you know, as soon as they saw that sticker they like pulled us out and the two people with me, one of them had a very thick northern accent. And so, I looked around and I see him being blindfolded and being pushed around, someone hitting him with a rifle and so I tried to explain to them what was going on. Like listen, you know if you're American, you have a passport, you can leave, but these guys can't. These people, they were friends of friends of mine, I had never met them before. I couldn't just leave them. I just, I knew that whatever happened it wouldn't be good. So I stayed with them, eventually we were able to leave the first. They put us in a makeshift prison, it was actually kids elementary school and for whatever reason I was able to talk myself out of that situation by saying my friend, someone who is from New York, she was there in the city and I told them that she was my fiancé and it was a long story, but I was able to leave that, you know, after a couple of hours. The second time, that was the more difficult one and that was where, you know, I was blindfolded and tied up and thrown behind a truck and you know I went through a lot of difficulties in that moment. Which I really, it's hard for me to go through, but you can read about that part.

AMT: And all the while you still got these suitcases with your beans and you still have to get out of the country. You finally get released and you get help and you get to the port. But how do you actually, what do you leave Yemen in. How do you do it?

MA: So while I was in prison, the second time, I overheard one of the guards and I think he have Djiboutian and half Yemeni, talk about there was some activity between Yemen and East Africa, pirates and some like cattle shipments and stuff like that. So I had this idea, well it's faraway fantasy that if I ever left this situation, I would go to the port of Mocha and try to escape through there. So after the next day, I was able through a longer series of events, I left, I was able to be freed and I made it back to the capital and then I drove seven hours to the other side of the country, to the port of Mocha. And I got there and we were supposed to take a mid-sized ship with about 160 passengers from Somalia and I think 11 or 12 tonnes of onions and I'm like OK, whatever. We get there and the ship wasn't working, there was no diesel and I was afraid that they would begin doing airstrikes cause there were threats of that and they would closed that port and that was the only way I could leave. So someone said to me, well instead of a three day journey on this mid-sized ship, we can take you on a on a one-day journey across the Red Sea on a smaller boat called a Viper. When I heard that, I thought he meant viper like like Dodge Viper, some kind of speedboat. He meant fibre, as in fiberglass. And it was this little, 18, 20 foot dinghy with a small single motor, Yamaha 40 horsepower, on the back of it. You know and so I jumped on that and you know, we hear stories of people from East Africa or from Syria who take these ocean voyages, refugees and the horrific scenes of bodies washed up ashore in places like Greece or Italy. And so I took my samples, I went on that ship, I made a prayer to God, I asked God, you know, just as you allowed Moses and his people to cross the sea, help me cross it. You know in the opposite direction, but still, I got on there and I took that boat ride and you know that was the biggest leap of faith in my life, to just go and just have no, I mean looking back it was really stupid. The idea on this small dinghy, if you get, if for whatever reason the engine stops, you're stuck in the middle of the ocean. If you get robbed, it's one of the most pirated waters in the world and so forth. But eventually, after a day, we crossed it. We made it to Djibouti, got there, then they thought I was a smuggler, I had to show my passport. I spent a night, you know, detained there and then finally like this governor of this small port called Obock, freed me and then we contacted the embassy and we got to go to the capital. It was a long drive and made it there, then from there flew to Kenya, from Kenya to Amsterdam. In Amsterdam I called my mother and I told her the story of the boat, everything. I didn't tell anyone this whole, what I was doing. And my mom was so emotional. She was just like, whoa, whoa, did you make it. I'm like, no ma, I died. I'm talking to you on the phone like I made it, of course I made it. And so she's just really emotional.

AMT: It's like a mother question. Did you actually get to the conference on time?

MA: I made it there. I made it across, made it to Amsterdam. I flew to the airport and then in the airport there was this giant press conference for me at the airport in San Francisco and so I got interviewed by a bunch of different news outlets. And so the next day, I flew to Seattle and I made it to the conference and on the Uber ride, you know, from the airport to the conference, I hear myself on BBC radio. This interview that I had done the day before and it was one of the most surreal experiences of my life. I remember the Uber driver at the end of the interview, saying this guy what he's doing with farmers is really incredible helping them, but he's crazy. And I was like yeah, he's nuts.

AMT: How has your coffee venture and adventure changed your life?

MA: And that's a, that's a really wonderful question and I wish I had three days to answer that, but to try to summarize it, I feel thankful, I thank God every day that I found something that I can do that gives me meaning. I feel like I'm helping people, connecting people and trying to like bring positivity to this world, that I found something useful in. And so for me that's been really wonderful. There are things I wish I didn't have to experience, but there's always a lesson in something, right. These are things I have to internalize and try to process, but it's been wonderful, to be honest, to be able to travel the world, to be able to talk to people like you, you know and reach people, millions of people who I never thought ever. I'm a kid who grew up in the Tenderloin and I grew up in a one bedroom apartment, with six siblings, there's nine of us. My dad as a bus driver. I didn't have, you know, many options in my life. Most of my friends you know, didn't make it to college. And so I'm very thankful for, I am and I hope that anyone, young person, you know reading this book can find themselves in these pages and try to find what they want to be happy for. No matter how difficult things are in life, as long as your passion is there, as long as your passion outweighs your fear, you'll always make it and do something that you will be proud of.

AMT: Well yours is an incredible story. Thank you for sharing it. Bye-bye.

MA: Bye-bye.

AMT: Mokhtar Alkhanshali, Chief Executive Officer and Founder of Port of Mokha coffee. The story of his search for the best coffee in Yemen, is the subject of Dave Eggers' book, "The Monk of Mokha." And Mokhtar Alkhanshali spoke to me from San Francisco. Stay with us. The remarkable education of Tara Westover is coming up, from backwoods isolation, to an Oxbridge doctorate. She's my guest in the next half hour, we're going to talk about the importance of learning and the importance of family and what happens when family ties unravel. I'm Anna Maria Tremonti. This is The Current.

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From isolated homeschooling to a PhD from Cambridge: How Tara Westover was saved by her education

Guest: Tara Westover

AMT: Hello. I'm Anna Maria Tremonti and you're listening to The Current.

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VOICE: Randy Weaver brought his family to the top of this mountain nine years ago because he wanted to be left alone. Now a force of 200 police federal agents and the National Guard have surrounded the house. Weaver is wanted on charges of selling two illegal sawed off shotguns to a federal informer. When authorities went to Weaver's house last week to arrest him, a U.S. marshal and Weaver's 13-year-old son, were killed in a brief shootout. The FBI says they will not leave, until Weaver and his friend Kevin Harris who lives with him, are in custody.

Well that's an ABC News report from August of 1992 on what would become known as Ruby Ridge. It was a 10-day siege in the mountains of northern Idaho and by the time it ended, one federal agent would be dead and Randy Weaver's son and later his wife would be killed. It was a shootout that became a cautionary tale for Americans who are already suspicious of government and public institutions. And it would loom large over Tara Westover's life. Tara was only five-years-old at the time, but what happened at Ruby Ridge influenced how her parents chose to raise their seven children, keeping them out of school, away from all authority. And though she may have grown up in some of the most isolated conditions imaginable, Tara Westover's ambition and curiosity, couldn't be contained. She'd go on to break away from the isolation and learn about the world even earning a PhD from Cambridge University. Tara Westover has written a memoir, it's called "Educated," and she joins me from Cambridge, England. Hello.

TARA WESTOVER: Hi. Thanks for having me on the show.

AMT: I want to ask you about what we just heard. How did that stand off at Ruby Ridge motivate your father.

TW: Well I think he had been someone who had been developing unorthodox ideas for a long time, kind of paranoid ideas about the government. And I think what was tragic about Ruby Ridge for my dad, I think for a number of other people, who were concerned about government overreach and had a certain paranoid view, especially if the federal government, it just seemed to confirm all of their worst suspicions. So for my father, who I think until that point had had more moderate views even though he wasn't happy when my siblings chose to go to school or to the doctor or to participate in some of these institutions that he was very skeptical of, I think after Ruby Ridge it became a little bit more of a real conflict in his mind. And he saw it as kind of a of a battle for us where if we wanted to go to school, he was a lot more concerned about us getting brainwashed and he seemed a lot more worried about the government turning up and kind of forcing us to go to school or maybe our family getting caught up in some kind of conflict like the Weavers because of the way that we lived.

AMT: So he was already an isolationist, he was also very strict Mormon. In terms of growing up, what did that mean for you?

TW: I feel like, most our entire town was Mormon, but everybody else they went to school, they went to the doctor, they had birth certificates, which you know I didn't have a birth certificate until I was nine years old. So it was very much something that my father, you know, he took this kind of extreme interpretation of Mormonism, which wasn't even extreme, it was just kind of his specific interpretation.

AMT: And you make the point, you didn't have a birth certificate until you were nine. Why?

TW: I'm not entirely sure. I mean sometimes I think it's that my dad was trying to avoid any entanglements with the government. We didn't have a phone for a while, I think he liked the idea of not having a lot of paper trail, but when I was nine, that was an age my older brother was old enough to get a driver's license and he wanted to become a truck driver eventually, so it just wasn't practical for him not to be able to get a birth certificate, which is when my mother started getting birth certificates for all of us who didn't have them, the younger four.

AMT: How much education did you get at home?

TW: I was taught to read by one of my older brothers, I think to win a bet with another one of my brothers. And there was certainly books around, there just wasn't a lot of formal education. So I never wrote an essay for my mother, I never, you know we were never gathered together and given a lecture. I was never given an exam. I do think, you know she would teach us a bit of math, kind of fractions and a bit of long division, but it just was really informal and the older I got, I would say the more erratic it became.

AMT: And your mom was a.

TW: Because she was a, yeah she was a midwife and she was an herbalist and she was you know very busy, she was delivering babies. She had seven children. There was a farm to run. I think it wasn't really practical for her to be educating us at home.

AMT: On one hand, you heard what sounded like an idyllic childhood. Tell us what you would do during the day, as a child.

TW: I mean we lived in this beautiful mountain. My dad ran a junkyard, which when I was little was kind of this exotic playground that we could go and whenever we wanted, we would essentially loot these cars. So you know, we had a lot of animals, in a lot of ways it really was an idyllic childhood. And of course it was the only life I had ever known. So to me, it seemed completely normal.

AMT: The fact that you couldn't go to school though, at some point your paternal grandmother was subversively trying to show you another way of doing things. What did she do?

TW: She offered to kidnap me and take me to Arizona and put me in school. I think she had this hope that if I tried it, that I would like it because I had been kind of, you know I'd been very much convinced by my father. His world view was the only world view I had access to. So when he said the public schools were dangerous, evil, that they were run by the Illuminati, that they would brainwash me and take me away from God, I believed all that. I think my grandmother thought, if she could take me for a short time and get me to go to school, that when my dad came for me that I would kind of plead with him to let me keep going. But I think what she didn't realize is that, I think your loyalty in that situation is always to your immediate family. And it, you know, it would never have occurred to me to take her up on the offer.

AMT: As you say, you didn't really have other information coming at you and you were little.

TW: No, I didn't. So much so that you know, later when I was 16 and I did decide to educate myself and I kind of tricked my way into this university. I told them I was homeschooled, I really hadn't been. You know, I just didn't have the foundational education that a lot of kids do. So one of my first lectures that I attended, I raised my hand and asked what the Holocaust was cause I hadn't ever heard of it before. So this was the kind of education that I was getting. I had access to books and I could read and I read a lot of kind of 19th century Mormon lectures, but that kind of more foundational, basic historical awareness, I didn't have any of that.

AMT: You also had a lot of violence and injury in your life. Tell us what happened the day you were in the scrapyard and you had to go into the collection bin.

TW: The scrapyard was an incredibly dangerous place. You know, my dad, this instant that you're referring to, I had filled a bin of scrap, it was about a tonne, about 2000 pounds and what had to happen is that bin needed to be dumped into the big semi-trailer. And how you do that is you'd get a JCB, essentially a forklift, with an extendable boom and you would lift up the bin and then you would raise it up and dump it and then someone would ideally climb and after and settle, settle the scrap. My dad decided that he didn't want to take two trips, you know dumping the bin, dumping the scrap and then going down and taking me up separately to settle it afterward. He just said, what would be faster is if I just rode up with the scrap and then he would kind of pause for a minute and I could crawl along the trailer and go sit on the cab, while he dumped it and I could climb down and settle the scrap. And I mean, I remember when he asked me to do it I thought it was a perfectly insane thing to do, but I was 10-years-old and I trusted my father, I assumed he knew what he was doing. So I climbed in the bin. And what happened is when he picked it up and swung it around to head toward the trailer, a bit of scrap kind of spike, just shifted and it just pierced right through my leg. And so when he was holding the scrap level, the bin level with the trailer, so that I could crawl out and crawl to safety, I couldn't move. And it was a really loud diesel engine, so even though I was shouting at him, he couldn't hear me. And what happened was he raised the bin and dumped it with me inside and I was kind of lucky because if I'd gone down the front, I would have, you know it would have been like going through a meat grinder, but I was able to throw myself over the side and then I just fell to the ground, just about I don't know, probably 15, 20 feet and I was OK at the end. I was injured, but there were a lot of instances like that that happened in my dad's scrapyard, not just to me, but to my siblings. People lighting themselves on fire or falling or just a lot of injuries and they always happened because we were taking shortcuts because we weren't being safe. And as a child I just didn't really know, how to interpret those things. I think when I got older and I went to university and I heard of mental illness and I heard lectures about bipolar disorder and schizophrenia, that became a way that I began to understand and reinterpret my childhood because until that point, I just didn't understand that people could have limits to their mental ability in that way. And I thought, I thought that people were either sane or insane and I didn't realize that you know, someone could just not be able to process risks. Someone could just not be able to learn from their mistakes, in the way that my dad he just was not able to understand, kind of the consequences of the things that he was doing. He had this belief that if something bad happens that it was kind of God's will and that really nothing terrible would be allowed to happen that God didn't want to have happen. And this would apply even to himself. So the worst injury that happened in my dad's scrapyard, you know, happened to him, which I always use as kind of evidence that I don't think it's a he didn't care about us, I think it was much more complicated than that.

AMT: You talk about the potential that he's bipolar, he was never, has never been diagnosed. This is your reading.

TW: No and I'm not a medical professional, so I can't really say, but I feel like you know there's a couple of things I know. I know that my dad loved me and I know that he valued my safety, but I also know that he was completely unable to keep me safe and in many cases, was the reason I wasn't safe.

AMT: And as you become a teenager, your brother Shawn becomes violent toward you. What would he do?

TW: My brother is an extremely complicated character and person. You know, he could be incredibly kind person, he could be really self-sacrificing. He saved my life once when we were breaking horses. So he was capable of this incredible self-sacrifice, but he also had, I think more self-loathing than anyone I've ever met. And he had a tendency I think at certain points to need to externalize that and make other people feel that way about themselves. So as I got older, he would sometimes, he'd be kind of pretending that you were having a game that you were just wrestling and he would be laughing, but you know, what he would actually be doing were things that were quite painful or sometimes he would choke me or he would grab me by my hair and haul me down the hallway and shove my head in the toilet. And he had a name for me, he called me "whore" quite a lot. I was a 15-year-old girl and that would just really enter into my self conception, so much so that when I was 16, I wrote a journal entry about my brother that included the line, "It's strange how you give the people you love so much power over you." And I think my brother had more power over me than I really could have even imagined. He defined me to myself. And I don't think there's a greater power really than that.

AMT: And you did what so many people in those situations do, at times you tried to make a joke of it and hide it from outsiders.

TW: Yeah I would really often and you know there was a time that he attacked me once in a parking lot of a grocery store and I was screaming, trying to get him off me and people started to look and immediately I just started to laugh because I wanted them to think it was a game and it was also a really common way that my brother would distort what was happening for me. I have this theory about abuse. I think all abuse, no matter what kind of abuse it is, is foremost an assault on the mind. And I think if you're going to abuse someone, you have to invade their reality and you have to distort it. You have to convince them of two things: you have to convince them that what you're doing isn't that bad, which means you have to rationalize it or euphemize it or downplay it. And the second thing you have to convince them of is that they somehow deserve what's happening to them. And I think the second thing kind of happens naturally cause I think people take on blame, when they're hurting, but the first thing takes a lot more active rewriting of what's happened. And my brother, he was just very good at it. He would laugh, even when he was you know, cutting off your air supply. You know after that incident in the parking lot, he came into my room I remember, and I had written this journal entry about it. I'd written what had happened, which was kind of the first time I'd done that and I had written that I've been afraid of him. And I'd written that I begged him to stop and while I was writing that entry, he came into my room and he said, you know I'm sorry that I hurt you, but it was really just a game and we were having a really good time and if you'd said something, if you'd asked me to stop, of course I would have and next time we're having fun, you just really need to tell me. This was a cycle that we had repeated hundreds of times and that was probably the only time where or the first time where after he left, what I continued writing in my journal wasn't necessarily just his his opinion of what had happened. I kind of wrote both. I wrote that he'd said it was fun and games, but I also wrote that I didn't know what had really happened, but that I knew that for me what I had experienced, you know, I hadn't been having fun. I had not been having a good time and I'd been terrified. And I think that was probably the first time, I was 17, I'd done one semester at the university. I think it was the first time that my brother attempted to dominate me in that way and at the end of the process, there were still two distinct minds present. You know, two totally distinct minds and not just one mind having gained control over the other.

AMT: And that made all the difference in the end, over time.

TW: It did. I do think that it had to do with this really broad idea of education. I was quite used to having the world interpreted for me by other people and I think when I went to the university and I learned about the Holocaust and I learned about different versions of history, what I was developing was the ability to have my own view of things that was distinct from my family's view, especially my father's views. So that, you know there was a time my senior year at the university, my dad visited me and he launched into this kind of anti-Semitic lecture about you know, he said that the Jews were trying to start World War 3 so that they could consolidate their power. And I knew that he was quoting from the Protocols of the Elders of Zion cause I'd taken an entire course in Jewish history and I knew the history of that text. I knew that it had been discredited as a forgery and I knew that that hadn't stopped Adolf Hitler from quoting it in "Mein Kampf." And I also knew that my father would have hated to be quoting Adolf Hitler, that he despised Hitler. So it was kind of the first time in our relationship, where there was a real reversal of the parent-child relationship because I knew what he was saying and he didn't, but I think he would become something I would learn to do about the present as well. When my brother would say this is what's happening, I would start to have that ability to say to myself, you know interestingly you think that, but that's not what I experienced.

AMT: So how did you go from that isolation growing up to university?

TW: Yeah, I wish I understood that. So I was 16, I was working in my dad's scrapyard, which wasn't the safest place. I had this really tumultuous relationship with my older brother and my older brother Tyler had gone to university. He had been allowed to go to school because my dad got more radical as he got older and so my older siblings had had that opportunity. And he came back when I was 16 and just told me I needed to get out. And then he just said to me, look to get into this university, all you have to do is pass the ACT. It's one test and you can do the reading, you can do the English bit, just learn a bit of math. I just bought some textbooks, I bought an Algebra textbook and I just started teaching myself and you know I didn't do great, so I'm not entirely sure what happened there, but it just was the situation that I arrived at university when I was 17 and just had, you know, no formal education, having convinced this university that I did.

AMT: And you made the point that there were certain areas that you knew nothing about like the Holocaust, that you were learning.

TW: Almost all areas.

AMT: By going to university, it didn't just help you learn, as you point out it helped you think. It helped you learn how to think.

TW: Well and it's one of the reasons I wanted to call the book, "Educated," because I think that word has become really overburdened or are almost kind of hijacked by issues that we're having with inequality and privilege. I think when we say someone is an educated person, it seems like increasingly we mean institutionalized or we mean that they've had access to this really elite set of institutions. And I was really lucky, you know, I did get access to them, some of those institutions. I was able to go to Harvard, I was able to go to Cambridge. But I felt like in writing this story, the bits of my education that were, that I thought made me educated, had a lot more to do with changes in the self. And some of that took place in classrooms and a lot of it took place on my own when I was reading books or when I was writing things or when I was meeting different people or just getting access to different points of view. You know, that's what I've been lacking when I was a child, that made me uneducated was the absence of different perspectives, that I could sort through them and decide what I really thought because I'd only had access to my father's point of view.

AMT: And you eventually get your PhD from Cambridge, which is an accomplishment for anyone, but the further you go into that academic world, the further you're pulled from your family. What kind of a struggle was that for you?

TW: You know, they were becoming more and more radical. We were having a hard time negotiating that, we were managing it, but as I moved more into the mainstream, I didn't know how we were going to continue to be a family. And that's not what broke us apart. What would break us apart eventually, would be when I would confront my parents about my brother's violence. My father and I'm not sure why, but for some reason when I told him about my brother and told him that it needed to be stopped, I just got shifted into that category of all the things, you know, the Illuminati, doctors, schools, things that he was afraid of. He said that I was lying, he said I just wanted to destroy our family and eventually he began telling people that I was possessed, as a way to explain why I had said the things I'd said about my brother Shawn.

AMT: And do you have a relationship with your parents today then?

TW: I don't with my parents and so a lot of the, you know, one of the reasons I wanted to write the book was because I wanted to tell a story about estrangement. And I think estrangement is a story that people tell, but they tend to tell it when they're towards the end of their lives. What I really craved, what I really wanted was to hear stories of people, while they were going through it, while they were young. Cause I think what's hard about estrangement is not knowing the future and not knowing if you're going to regret it. Is there going to be a car accident, is someone getting a cancer, are you going to regret your decision and trying to come to terms with it, without knowing how the rest of your life is going to unfold. And then just trying to work out how you feel about that decision. You know, I was in a situation where I was I was trying to figure out how do I believe that I'm a good person, when I know that my mother doesn't believe that I'm a good person cause she had accepted my dad's explanation and she was also telling people that I was possessed. And that was just not. I didn't know where to find the answer to that question and I felt like that should be something that I could find the answer to in stories cause I think that's what stories are for. And so once I had kind of come out the other end of the kind of, well I had a real mental breakdown actually when I was becoming estranged from my family, when I came out the other end of that, I thought, I really felt the absence of this story when I was going through it and maybe it's just a story I can write.

AMT: I was really struck by the fact that at one point you actually thought you should, you considered maybe, you needed to just give that up and go back into that cocoon of isolation.

TW: Yeah. And he offered me such a clean way back. He visited me. My mother and my father visited me when I was at Harvard and it was about a year after they'd told my brother what I'd said about him and he had disowned me. So this first phase of disownment wasn't my choice, at all, I would've done anything I thought to get them. And then my dad came to Harvard and he offered me a blessing, which would have been in his mind I think tantamount to an exorcism, where I could have subjected myself to that and then blamed everything I said about Shawn on this possession and then been welcomed back into the family. And there was this bizarre period of about three days, when I was walking around Boston, you know, sight-seeing with my parents that I really thought that was a deal I could make and that there was some dignity in doing it to win the love of my parents. In the end, I think I had to come to this realization, you know when my dad actually offered the blessing, I said no. And I think the reason I said no is because I realized, the person that my, the daughter that my father had come to reclaim, just didn't exist anymore and I had changed too much. And all the reading and thinking I'd done, I'd just become a different person. I'd become a different, I'd had a different mind than I'd had when I was younger. And the person I'd become just had no tolerance for violence and I just couldn't give way to it in the way that when I was 16, would have been so easy or was so easy.

AMT: How has your family responded to the candor in your book?

TW: So I'm estranged from my family and I don't know cause I haven't talked to them about the book. The half the I'm close to, you know, they were reading it the whole time I was writing it and they were giving feedback and they've been pretty supportive. It's hard on everyone, I think telling stories like this in a public way, I think it's hard.

AMT: And I guess, you know, we have read your parents have made it clear that your view of how you grow up is not the way they see it.

TW: No they don't. I mean a lot of the ways that they've responded at least publicly to the book, they seem to focus on the home school quite a lot, that they think the home school was a lot better. And it's kind of funny because I don't actually have any problem with the home school, particularly. I mean there are things about my upbringing that I really value. I value that they taught me that I can teach myself things and I value the fact that they instilled in me a kind of feeling that my education is my own, it's my own responsibility. I think for my parents it's a lot easier to talk about the home school than it is to talk about my brother.

AMT: You know there are many people who are deeply suspicious of government and public institutions, not unlike your dad and mother and maybe in different degrees, but how do we as a society reach people who are that suspicious?

TW: I don't know. I mean I don't know if I have a solution for every family that chooses to isolate itself. I mean my worry now is I'm not sure I would have the experience that I had, if I had it now because I feel like universities especially have become a lot more ideologically puritanical. There were a lot of things I said, when I first got to university that would have been considered, sexist, racist, homophobic, all kinds of just ideas that I had, that I had been given. And I've never had them challenged and I never thought about them. And I feel like I was given the benefit of the doubt so much and people would engage with me, rather than just turn their back on me, they would try to figure out why I thought that and they would present me with better arguments, which over time would really begin to change the way that I thought. But my worry is that we have become so tribal, that we don't do that anymore and that we tend to go straight from, you have a prejudice opinion to you are a bad person and we don't try to talk to people.

AMT: We are a much more polarized society, in general now, aren't we that way.

TW: Yeah and I think just that tendency to reduce people to their opinions and not, just not see that people can be very good people and have strange ideas and that's something I really hope people would take from the book. I think my dad is a good person. I don't know why he's so fearful of the things he's fearful of and I don't know why he responded the way he did with me and my brother, I don't know. But I still think he's a good person and I think he's worth reasoning with.

AMT: You know after all you've been through and all that you've learned, how you raise your own children?

TW: I don't know. I feel like my parents, you know, with education, I think John Dewey and education is two things. He said it had two components: the individual or what an individual brings to their education and the social, what society brings in. I feel like my parents took the individual way too far, but I like some of the ideas that they had about individual ownership, but equally I sometimes worry that mainstream education has taken the social a bit too far and that just isn't enough scope for people to have real ownership or real buy-in over what they learn and that they don't feel like they get to make any decisions about the shaping of their own mind. So I don't know, if I have to make that choice, I think I would maybe try to do some kind of hybrid.

AMT: Tara Westover, it's really good to talk to you. Thank you for sharing your story and for your insights.

TW: Thanks for having me.

AMT: Tara Westover, author of, "Educated." She joined us from Cambridge, England. That's our program for today. Stay with Radio One for Q. Remember, you can take The Current with you to-go on the CBC Radio app, free from the App Store or Google Play. Readers everywhere today are mourning the loss of Tom Wolfe, the American journalist and author of books including, "The Right Stuff" and "Bonfire of the Vanities," died on Monday. He was a guest on The Current in October of 2012, when Jonathan Goldstein was sitting in as the show's Friday Host. Toward the end of their conversation, Jonathan asked Tom Wolfe about his signature sartorial flourish, his ever-present white suit. We're going to leave you with what he had to say. I'm Anna Maria Tremonti. Thanks for listening to The Current.

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Clip from interview with Tom Wolfe.

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May 16, 2018 episode transcript

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