Skip to main content

On complaining

The APCD (associate Peace Corps director) visited me today, and we had a very nice chat. A subject that came up was the amount of complaining relative to other countries that we had visited. He brought up Uganda, where teacher salaries are genuinely meager, where most teachers have to take a second job to make ends meet.

Yet here, where my principal makes $2400 per month (with zero housing cost), and even a normal teacher can afford a house and a car, complaining is like the national sport. From my parents I have a deep dislike of whining, a kind of British stoicism that I value highly. (Of course, I like to sit around and bitch the same as anyone--I'm talking about serious complaining, like when one's house has burned down.) My principal teaches one class, goes back to the staffroom, and spends the rest of the day talking about how tired he is. I just have to bite my tongue and smile.

A lot of people here seem...spoiled, I guess the word would be. Of course, they're not spoiled in a literal sense, as in having lots of material things and taking them for granted. They're spoiled in the sense that they don't know how good they have it, especially compared to countries like Zimbabwe or Sudan, and they don't value staying strong and not whining all the time. It's a weak, sickly kind of attitude, always demanding help from the government, and complaining bitterly when it doesn't come.

I suppose this like many other problems can be traced to Apartheid, which while stomping down the African tribes also kept them at a bare minimum of existence. I imagine this would quickly lead to a loss of motivation and an embrace of victimhood, as there was mostly no other option.

One of the tenets of adapting to another culture is accepting or even enjoying facets of that culture. The example they gave is bargaining, which I don't like much, but could imagine getting used to. Yet I don't think I will ever appreciate this aggrieved atmosphere (or the constant begging for money). Knowing where it comes from may help me tolerate it, but I'll never like it.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Why Did Reality Winner Leak to the Intercept?

So Reality Winner, former NSA contractor, is in federal prison for leaking classified information — for five years and three months, the longest sentence of any whistleblower in history. She gave documents on how Russia had attempted to hack vendors of election machinery and software to The Intercept , which completely bungled basic security procedures (according to a recent New York Times piece from Ben Smith, the main fault lay with Matthew Cole and Richard Esposito ), leading to her capture within hours. Winner recently contracted COVID-19 in prison, and is reportedly suffering some lingering aftereffects. Glenn Greenwald has been furiously denying that he had anything at all to do with the Winner clusterfuck, and I recently got in an argument with him about it on Twitter. I read a New York story about Winner, which clearly implies that she was listening to the Intercepted podcast of March 22, 2017 , where Greenwald and Jeremy Scahill expressed skepticism about Russia actual...

The Setswana Grammar Manual

One of my few successes during my service here was formatting the Peace Corps South Africa grammar manual for Setswana, written mostly by Art Chambers, an SA16 volunteer.  For anyone wanting to learn Setswana, I reckon it's a pretty good primer, so I present it for free here .  If you think it sucks and you want to make changes, or you'd like to take a look at the raw TeX file, you can find it here .

On Refusing to Vote for Bloomberg

Billionaire Mike Bloomberg is attempting to buy the Democratic nomination. With something like $400 million in personal spending so far, that much is clear — and it appears to be working at least somewhat well, as he is nearing second place in national polls. I would guess that he will quickly into diminishing returns, but on the other hand spending on this level is totally unprecedented. At this burn rate he could easily spend more than the entire 2016 presidential election cost both parties before the primary is over. I published a piece today outlining why I would not vote for Bloomberg against Trump (I would vote for Sanders, Warren, Buttigieg, Klobuchar, or Biden), even though I live in a swing state. This got a lot of "vote blue no matter who" people riled up . They scolded me and demanded that I pre-commit to voting for Bloomberg should he win the nomination. The argument as I understand it is to try to make it as likely as possible that whatever Democrat wins t...