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Showing posts from November, 2009

Turkey!

  This is a picture from my thanksgiving. A delicious taste of home, made by a South African no less! Good times.

I'm back!

Sorry for the lack of updates this weekend. I had a lovely traditional thanksgiving, then went to visit another volunteer. I'll be posting some more updates later today. I hope everyone had a good turkey day!

Moar kittehs!

  This picture isn't too good either, but it gives you an idea of the size of 'em.

Kittens!

  Yesterday the family cat gave birth to four babies. They're tiny, a bit hard to see in this picture. Their eyes are still closed, and they can't walk or stand up. Some people might hate me for saying this, but I really do like cats better than dogs (maybe because the runty, flea-ridden bastards bark every night for hours). The cats seem to have fewer fleas than the dogs as well--I think it's a different species that lives on cats. I find myself considering adopting one of the kittens for my time here. It would be nice to have a companion, and a cat would be so much less hassle than a dog. No doubt as they get older they'll be less attractive, but for now they're awfully cute. The whole birthing process was interesting to watch. This was the mother's first litter, yet she knew exactly how things should go. When the baby came out, she licked it clean, then bit off the umbilical cord. When the afterbirth came, she ate it immediately. A model of efficen

Thoughts on the Peace Corps

There's a post that's been kicking around in my head for awhile and reading the blog of one of my fellow South African finally brought it into focus (her blog is great, by they way, you should definitely check it out): As much as I came into this thinking I was expectation-free, the reality of it is I did expect to see circumstances more along the lines of what I saw in Ghana and Uganda. I’ve been struggling a little bit with this and somewhat questioning the role of Peace Corps here. The biggest problems, as far as I have seen thus far, lie in the lack of morale and motivations of society and continued disparity among races. These are problems that can only be healed with time. Clearly, there is work to be done in the schools and there is definite value to having Peace Corps volunteers working in them. I think my problems are more selfish, in the fact that I have never held much interest in working in education, among other things. Anyway, I know there’s no use in second-gue

The new Palin book

Apparently Sarah Palin wrote a book called Going Rogue (really--well, someone ghostwrote it for her). I'm not going to read it, but Matt Taibbi hits this post out of the park : Palin — and there’s just no way to deny this — is a supremely gifted politician. She has staked out, as her own personal political turf, the entire landscape of incoherent white American resentment. In this area she leaves even Rush Limbaugh in the dust. The reason for that is that poor Rush is an anachronism, in the sense that his whole schtick revolves around talking about real political issues. And real political issues are boring. Listen to Rush any day of the week and you’ll hear him playing the old-fashioned pundit game: he goes about the dreary business of picking through the policies and positions and public statements of Democrats and poking holes in them, arguing with them, attacking them with numbers and facts and pseudo-facts and non-facts and whatever else he can get his hands on, honest or n

Things I never learned in school

  You've gotta embiggen this picture and check it out. I never knew pot caused diarrhea!

Burning trash

  I had a good blaze going last night from my monthly pile of trash. This picture is from after it burned down quite a bit. Burning trash (as well as littering) is strangely thrilling. There's not much else to do with it--there are no dumps, and I don't want to bury things where people drink the water right out of the ground. Yet so many unspoken codes are being broken I feel almost criminal, in a good way. At first, I started a small fire in case the plastic didn't want to burn. Then I upended my fridge's cardboard box with most of the trash in it over the top. This sealed well at the ground, making a square pillar of trash with the fire at the bottom. I thought it would smoulder slowly for a while, but after a couple seconds it burned like a gas flare. For a few moments the sides of the box contained it, and the fire poured out the top like the tresses of some demonic Rapunzel. I wished that I had my camera, but I didn't want to miss it, and sure enough, it

Keep your wits about you online

Felix Salmon details a sleazebag practice : In general, the customers of these companies have no idea that they’re customers until they discover mysterious charges on their credit-card bills. When they investigate further, they find that during the checkout process at reputable websites like priceline.com or 1800flowers.com, they inadvertently clicked on a link which automatically gave their credit card details to these rip-off merchants. By the way: CPM means cost per thousand, or how much these companies pay the website per thousand clicks on the ad (I learned this in the comments). Previously those same companies harassed another blogger in court about this same thing. Definitely a good reason to keep your an eye on your credit card bill. Via Kevin Drum .

High drama in the sky yesterday

Clouds like well-lit cauliflower.

Sunset

  This from yesterday.

Cool bug

  This thing lived on my screen door for several days. I wonder what it eats?

News: the road goes ever on and on

This is a picture of the road to Heuningvlei. Not much has changed here in my village. The students are taking their end-of-year tests, as the year is over the second week in December. I’m helping write the exams, as I’ve been teaching nearly all the English and maths classes for the senior phase (grade 7-9). I’m getting ready for the Thanksgiving celebration in town, which should be a nice get-together for us Northern Capesters. I’m also preparing for my Christmas vacation in Eastern Cape with a load of other Peace Corps. It will be nice to get out of the desert for a time. I’ve been practicing my Setswana, which seems to be improving, albeit very slowly. Oddly, I’ve been practicing Afrikaans a lot, and improving very fast. I think this is mostly due to my possession of a good Afrikaans-English dictionary, and a couple Afrikaans books. I’m not quite sure why I want to learn—the language has a strange attraction for me. All the double letters, the harsh yet romantic sound

Test fail

  Today the grade 9s took a bit of the second part of their massive test they've been working on for the last few months. This was the first question, referring to a map of a bit of the Free State. The only problem? There was no such map included with the test. They couldn't have answered the questions anyway, but it was still galling. Bonus points if you notice the grammatical mistake.

Terrorism: war or crime?

Matthew Yglesias puts down what I have often thought, but more clearly: ...I think it’s pretty clear that international terrorism has some dimensions that go well-beyond ordinary law enforcement, but if you have to put the whole thing in either the “crime” box or the “war” box, there’s a pretty strong case for erring on the side of crime. In political terms, the right likes the war idea because it involves taking terrorism more “seriously.” But in doing so, you partake of way too much of the terrorists’ narrative about themselves. It’s their conceit, after all, that blowing up a bomb in a train station and killing a few hundred random commuters is an act of war. And war is a socially sanctioned form of activity, generally held to be a legally and morally acceptable framework in which to kill people. What we want to say, however, is that this sporadic commuter-killing isn’t a kind of war, it’s an act of murder. To be sure, not an ordinary murder—a mass murder—but nonetheless murder. It

Pension day

  Today was the day when the grannies get their pension. They set up shop right outside my house, and it was the site of a little capitalist scrum where people were selling popsicles, peanuts and booze. At least that government handout is going somewhere. My host mother was roasting those peanuts this morning; I trust she had a good take. The head of department tried to convince me that my mother was putting something called "come again" on the little bags of peanuts. They were pretty delicious.

The view from my window

  That's the chicken coop there, in the back, and the goat pen behind that.

Sometimes the world is depressing

Bad news from Costa Rica: But haphazard development, in tandem with warmer temperatures and rising seas that many scientists link to global warming, have vastly diminished the Pacific turtle population. [...] Worldwide, there are seven sea turtle species, and all are considered threatened. (Turtle populations in the Atlantic have increased over the last 20 years because of measures like bans on trapping turtles and selling their parts.) The leatherback is considered critically endangered on a global level. Populations are especially depleted in the Pacific, where only 2,000 to 3,000 are estimated to survive today, down from around 90,000 two decades ago. Cooler sands alone will not save them, given the scope of the threats they face. At Playa Junquillal, markers placed a decade ago to mark a point 55 yards above the high tide line are now frequently underwater. Turtles are truly magical creatures (just ask my mother). Swimming with one is as close to a spiritual experience as I could

Quote of the day

"I'm so old I can remember when ritualized symbolic execution of public officials wasn't cool." -- Josh Marshall Apparently some teabaggers are planning to burn Rep. Tom Perriello (D-VA) and Nancy Pelosi in effigy.

Want to buy a cow?

  This is a picture of a newly-built cattle auction house, complete with scale and all the trimmings. It's roughly equivalent to a place called the "Sale Barn" back home. It was supposed to work as a co-operative selling stray cows from around the area, but people were apparently unwilling to raise anyone's cattle other than their own, so it sits empty. Maybe they'll find a use for it someday.

Things kids do at my school besides learn, part IV

  It's just a simple soccer game. This might be a bit hard to see, but I somehow managed to catch the ball in midair.

Morning assembly

  One of the (few) things I like about the school system here is that every morning they get together and sing a few songs. At a middle school, it's kinda cute, but at a decent high school, it's deeply impressive. When we visited a high school in Marapyane, they sung us a song and it was Mormon Tabernacle Choir-quality, with seven-part (or more) harmony and resounding bass.

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

Structural reform in the Senate

Matthew Yglesias has a couple of good posts on the nihilistic cesspool that is the Senate : A persistent liberal failure in terms of legislative tactics seems to me to be the repeated belief that if you try to make a compromise proposal, that the compromise will be adopted and then you’ll get half a loaf. The reality of the way the legislative bargaining process works, it seems to me, is that you make a proposal and then a bloc of moderate legislators demands concessions. Whatever you propose, you then have to make concessions since the moderates wouldn’t be moderate if they didn’t make the liberals make concessions. So you might as well have had the bill start with a sweeping expansion of abortion rights—require that all Exchange plans offer a full suite of reproductive health services. Then you start bargaining. And this one on the devious practice of the "hold:" So now it’s Senator George LeMieux of Florida’s turn to screw things up with a hold . Neither DeMint nor LeMie

Department of WTF, anger bureau

This pretty much speaks for itself: WASHINGTON — Top executives at Blackwater Worldwide authorized secret payments of about $1 million to Iraqi officials that were intended to silence their criticism and buy their support after a September 2007 episode in which Blackwater security guards fatally shot 17 Iraqi civilians in Baghdad, according to former company officials. Some of the perils of using mercenaries. One wonders if this will problems will disappear if we have totally robotic armies.

Sunset

  This one was a little more subtle, but I still liked it.

A further thought on administrators

A few posts back I was talking smack about the Peace Corps and put down administrators rather glibly. My grandmother reminds me that my grandfather was an city manager in Tempe years ago, and by all accounts a good one. Americans especially are mistrustful of government employees, and it's easy to find examples of mindless bureaucrats callously stamping on someone. Yet for the most part our government works fairly well. When Republicans ask if I'd like a health care system that works like the post office, I reply "hell yes!" Relatively cheap, reliable, a bit rickety, always running out of money, but they get the job done. At least they aren't actively trying not give me what I paid to have . Decent bureaucrats are one of the most glaring necessities in South Africa. Especially in a heavily socialized country like this one, if one doesn't have a semblance of professionalism throughout the government, your state-run electricity tends to go out all the tim

Another dead snake

  Found this one squashed on the road in my village--the last one was outside of it. It's almost certainly a puff adder , the most common snake in South Africa. It's pretty venomous, which is a little disconcerting. Not as bad as a black mamba but bad enough. Nevertheless, I reckon snakebites should be avoidable for the wary. I don't go tromping around in the bush, mostly just in the riverbed or where the walking is nice and open. Things like this make me keep my eyes open, and indoors at night.

Department of WTF, angry bureau

This can't be for real : As the unemployment rate crossed the 10 percent threshold at week’s end, we learned that bankers were helping themselves not just to bonuses as large as those at the bubble’s peak but to early allotments of H1N1 vaccine . No wonder 62 percent of those polled by Hart Associates in late September felt that “large banks” had been helped “a lot” or “a fair amount” by “government economic policies,” but only 13 percent felt the “average working person” had been. Torches! Pitchforks!

On logistics

One of the big concepts they talked about a lot at PST was "a slower pace of life." The idea was that here in South Africa people are less concerned with progress, getting things done, etc., so things tend to take a lot longer. I envisioned this as somewhat similar to what I saw in Belize where the unofficial national motto is "go slow," and work starts late and ends early. Yet when the work is actually in progress, it goes reasonably fast. On a side note, I'm not wholly familiar with Belize and I could be misconstruing the place. I use it only for purposes of contrast, so forgive me if I'm making a grievous error. I find the South Africa version of this is not at all the laid back, "screw it, let's do it tomorrow, them beers ain't gonna drink themselves" philosophy I was expecting. Rather it has more to do with the lack of organizational prowess that is endemic here. Here's a story from one of my fellow PCVs: I reached my absol

Eish!

I do miss home, but in some ways I'm glad I'm not back there : With the release of the jobs report on Friday, the broadest measure of unemployment and underemployment tracked by the Labor Department has reached its highest level in decades. If statistics went back so far, the measure would almost certainly be at its highest level since the Great Depression. In all, more than one out of every six workers — 17.5 percent — were unemployed or underemployed in October. The previous recorded high was 17.1 percent, in December 1982. Hell of a time to graduate from college. South Africa is feeling the bite too, but as most people in my village didn't have jobs to start with, it's not making a huge difference.

Things kids do at my school besides learn, part III

  Today it's washing the head teacher's car.

Things kids do at my school besides learn, part II

  Today, it's washing the principal's car.

Things kids do at my school besides learn, part I

  Yesterday the principal had them build a little brick shack for building a fire and cooking when the power goes out, which happens all the time these days. I'm beginning to get the idea that most of the problems at my school are due to the principal. He's not a bad person, but he's a terrible gossip, doesn't teach his classes, and generally fosters an unprofessional atmosphere. For the few classes I've seen him teach (I've counted him in the class three times since I got here) he mostly just sits and chats with the students in Setswana. The reason I mention gossip is that today I was talking with the Grade 8s during a break and they said I should go and visit America. I told them I don't have enough money, and they replied that the principal had told them that I am a "rich man." I told them that the principal is a liar--kinda pissed me off, actually. No one in my village believes that I am actually as poor as them in terms of my income. The

A goat story

  Goats are my favorite animals at my house, I think. Cows are too large and alien, chickens are too damn loud and shit everywhere, and the dogs bark and jump on me. The baby kids do make a noise (what do you call that?) during they day, an eerily human kind of wailing, but it's not nearly as loud as a rooster and they sleep at night. Still, more than once I've walked out my door to see who had left their baby in the road only to find a lonely kid broadcasting its location to goatdom. The other day I was sitting outside and reading, and half-watching the animals swirl around me in the hopes that I would drop something savory. One of the smaller goats (a couple months old, I'd guess) was trying for a one of the low walls that lie around our compound, about waist-high. Goats are fairly nimble, but this one was just a bit too small to make the leap. Finally he backed away, got up a head of steam, and made a running leap. He made the wall, but carried a bit too much mome

Another tortoise

  Shamefully, I picked this one up to give a sense of scale, but I reckon it was fine after a few minutes. He was much smaller than the last one. Cute, eh?

My school's new additions

  This is a picture of the staffroom of my school. On the left and the right you can see the new additions that started about a month ago. It's a kitchen on the left and an office for the principle/storeroom on the right. (One of the good things about the school--perhaps the best one, actually--is that the kids get a solid meal every day.) The cost, according to my principal, was 200,000 rand (about $27,000). I've laid out many problems with South African schools, but money is not the chief one. Sure, they're nowhere near the monetary level of an American school (or the glitzy "Model C" schools here in South Africa that actually get near 100% pass rates on the matric test), but they've got more than enough to make do. They've already got two industrial-quality laser printer-copiers, and today the government dropped off another one (don't know why.) Massive piles of books go unused or even sorted. South Africa is a rich country, especially by th

Heh

" WASHINGTON —Claiming that the president was preying on the public's fear of contracting a fatal disease last week when he declared the H1N1 virus a national emergency, Republican leaders announced Wednesday that they were officially endorsing the swine flu."

Beauty alert

  This was from a couple days back, before one of the big storms.

News

I hope everyone is doing well as the northern hemisphere settles into winter. Here it's getting hot, and also raining a lot. It's kind of a monsoon feel, but it doesn't rain in the afternoon, rather in the night. Clouds start building in late afternoon and roll in heavy about sundown. This tends to kill the cell phone signal, as well as the electricity. The storms are powerful--two nights ago was literally the most intense lightning storm I've ever seen. The lightning came so fast it was almost like a strobe light, or a fireworks show finale, and a couple bolts struck less than 200 yards away by my reckoning. Like the unzipping of the fly of God Almighty (as the old man said). The rain was so heavy (or perhaps my roof so lousy) that water ran down the walls and drenched a couple of my books. Not to worry, they've mostly dried out now and I've got many spares. One of these days I hope to get the roof fixed up. I do have a screen door now, which is all

Thorns

  This isn't too good of a picture, but the one in the middle there went right through the sole of my shoe into my foot. Not far, but it still took me by surprise. I should really get some new shoes...oh wait.