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Showing posts from March, 2010

Brains are odd

It's strange how when you're learning another language and you are only fluent in language, everything language-related seems to be categorized into two categories. For me, it's "English" and "not English." When I was first learning Setswana, I would always reach for Spanish words, which made some pretty comical situations at times. Now when I'm trying to brush back up on my Spanish, I find myself reaching for Setswana words. The difference this time is that my Spanish is good enough that I can read simple books (I had my folks send me Harry Potter in Spanish), but now I can't find the words if I want to speak it. I had to look up the word for "yesterday," well, yesterday. I bet Stephen Pinker could tell me why that is.

Marathon update

I finished this half marathon! First I'd like to thank all the people that gave money to help the kids of KLM and allowed me to participate. Good on you folks. I definitely didn't win any fundraising awards but we exceeded the recommended amount. The marathon itself was a lot of fun. The course was up in these beautiful misty mountains and mostly downhill. My time was 1:46:30 (approximately), which made me the fastest Peace Corps in the half race. I was shooting for two hours, so I was pretty proud of myself, though there were some real runners in the 56 km race that would have smoked me. Today I'm incredibly sore, so I'm going to take it easy for a day.

Discrimination

Makwerekwere is a Setswana word that means (as far as I can tell) foreigners from Africa. On a side note, Asian foreigners are called "Chinas," while white-looking ones are "makgowa." One of the teachers at my school mentioned it in the context of Zimbabweans that are coming "to steal our jobs." With the continuing economic cataclysm in Zimbabwe, something like 25% of the population there has fled to South Africa, where they are widely resented for starting businesses and prospering. This came to a head more recently when I was teaching English in Grade 7. I had just started, and was still trying to learn their names. One face that I hadn't seen last year turned out to be a new girl from Pretoria. Here's how the conversation went: ME: What's your name, again? NEW STUDENT: Palesa. I am come from Pretoria. ME: Oh really? Were you born there? ZANE (a boy): This girl is from Zimbabwe. She talk Xhosa. ME: Xhosa is from Eastern Cape, not Zim

I'm off!

Tomorrow I'm catching a taxi to Pretoria, where I'll stay for a night and then cruise on over to this marathon business in Mpumalanga. (The marathon is on Saturday, by the way.) Depending on cell coverage, things might be pretty dark here for a week or so, but I'll try and put a few posts in the pipeline so it won't go completely dead. Maybe I can also convince my family to keep the flame of truth smoldering.

Dogs

There are a couple dogs that live at my host family's house. The other day I was teaching Grade 9 the word "fierce," and as an example sentence they came up with "The Setlholoeng (my host family) dogs are very fierce." Often when someone comes by the shop these dogs (a couple little yapping longhair types with the worst fleas of any animal that has ever lived) bark like mad things. I've seen them chase everyone from little kids to grown men around. Yet they took to me like a duck to water. Every time I get home they're jumping all over me, trying to lick my feet, and generally being a friendly nuisance. I didn't really try to befriend them, it just happened. I'm not super surprised at this, as I've done it a few times in the past with notorious mailman-biting dogs of my friends. I just don't know how it works. The thing is, I don't really like dogs!

Some light reading

This blog often seems a little too serious. My friend Noah often inspires me to try and be more light-hearted. Observe this otherwise-horrifying post about bedbug attack: What's your game bed bug!? Now I have a new enemy that I can't even begin to understand. Apparently they are making a resurgeance in America because of international travel and new drug resistant super breeds. I suggest you start practicing taking micronaps standing in stainless steel cubes. What spirit, eh? Unfortunately, my sunshine and rainbows meter is all the way in the red. So here's Andrew Sullivan on the child abuse scandal currently blasting through the Vatican: But what staggers me is once again the immediate, visceral circling of the wagons - when what is being revealed - again! - is a pattern of criminal abuse, aided and abetted by a powerful elite, led by the Pope himself. If this were a secular institution, the police would move in and shut it down. And he's a Catholic! I'm cur

Various updates

Well, I eat my words. I was wrong to despair, even when Democrats managed to choke away Ted Kennedy's seat. Health care reform passed the House 219-210. Ezra Klein is making sense here : The legislation builds a near-universal health-care system, but it only uses the materials that our system has laying around. It leaves private insurers as the first line of coverage provision, but imposes a new set of rules so that we can live with -- and maybe even benefit from -- their competition. It spends $940 billion in the first 10 years and more than $2 trillion in the second decade, but its mixture of revenues, spending reductions, and cost-controlling reforms are projected to save even more than that. It is the most sweeping piece of legislation Congress has passed in recent memory, but it is much less ambitious than the solutions that past presidents have proposed. It is routinely lambasted for being too big and comprehensive, but compared to the problems it faces, it is too small an

Correction

In the comment thread of this post I rather glibly stated that Teach for America had a dropout rate of ~50% (n.b. that I was defending TFA at the time). Turns out it's more like 15% for two years, though it gets a bit murky after that . Regardless, I still believe that TFA is a worthwhile program with a limited scope. The dropout rate for Peace Corps in South Africa, on the other hand, is actually about 50%. This is higher than average--according to this Peace Corps wiki , the overall rate is about 33%. I find this discrepancy unsurprising.

Health care reform update

I may have been wrong. I didn't think the Dems would get it together after the Scott Brown fiasco, but it seems like Nancy Pelosi has got more spine than I imagined. (And riding herd on House Democrats takes a lot to start with.) Not for sure yet, but it's looking favorable. Stay tuned.

I gotta stop thinking

 I've been brooding a bit much lately. Too much analysis of things I am obviously unqualified to be judging. To lift all spirits, I proffer this picture of my host nephew in hot boots . The Marine Corps grimace he's wearing tops it off.

Saturday wall of text: what is the point of Peace Corps?

This is a question I suspect is on the minds of many volunteers in South Africa—what the hell am I doing here? It’s a difficult question in the abstract, not least because there are dozens of countries involved, each with its own training program, staff, and host country support. I’ll start with the training program—is Peace Corps sending adequately-trained volunteers to their permanent site? From some conversations with volunteers that have served in other countries, I suspect the training program in South Africa is much worse than average. This is especially true of the language training, which I would compare to a semester or two of a decent high school language class—not remotely enough to carry on a normal conversation, barely enough to make your needs known. Volunteers in Spanish and French-speaking countries described their language training as much more difficult, immersive, and effective. The education section, while also horrible, I can’t really imagine being much better

Book review: Kafka on the Shore

I had high hopes for this work by Haruki Murakami, as I was a big fan of The Wind-up Bird Chronicle . I was mildly disappointed, though. A quick aside: I listened to this book rather than read it. I reckon that has nontrivial effects on the enjoyment of a work. First there's the reader--a bad read can make a good book a slog, while a great reader can turn some pulpy schlock (like Clive Cussler) into an enjoyable experience. Second, the writing itself can sometimes not lend itself so well to being read aloud. (Try listening to The Catcher in the Rye , for example.) A third issue is translation. The writing often sounded repetitive, like the editor was lazy with the white-out. This was especially apparent during exciting or suspenseful scenes--the main characters had a tendency to narrate the action to death. But with a translated work, one always wonders if that would have played better in the original language. On to the actual story. It's a a 15-year-old boy who cal

Article of the week

This article in The Independent is about the kidnapped wives of Ethiopia: Nurame was in her bed when she was woken by an angry m̻l̩e. In her family's hut there were grown men Рan incredible number, 10 or more, all in their 30s, all standing over her father, shouting. They reached for her. At night here, where there is no electricity, perfect darkness falls, and everything becomes a shadow-play of barely visible flickers. But even though she was eight years old, she suspected at once what was happening. She had heard whispers that, when a girl is considered ready for marriage, a man will seize her, and rape her, and then she must serve him for the rest of her life. "That was the culture," she says. But it wasn't her culture: like all the other little girls, she didn't want it. "I started screaming and tried to run out of the hut," she says. "I hid in the trees Рhah! Рbut one of the men found me." She was

Meta blogging

Here's an interesting piece by Peter Hessler about Peace Corps in the New Yorker ( h/t: Liz ) by an ex-Peace Corps volunteer responding to these articles about Peace Corps by Nicholas Kristof in the NYT and by John Brown in the Huffington Post . The New Yorker piece is great, a pretty thorough look at an often-elusive program and the Kristof piece isn't too bad--it's mostly tangentially related, it's his proposal for a new volunteer program since Teach for America and PC can't meet the demand. Brown, on the other hand, is an unmitigated wanker: Mr. Kristof, who wants young Americans to teach English the world over, seems unaware that all too many of us here in the homeland (which is how we now identify our cry-the-beloved country in these sad post-9/11 times) are incapable of writing a coherent English sentence free of grammatical and spelling errors. And how many of us called-to-duty language missionaries currently living in said homeland, if volunteering to coa

302nd post: storm of the century

Last night was perhaps the most intense storm I've seen thus far in South Africa. I was woken up at about 1:30 by a text message wondering if my roof had blown off (quote: "it sounds like the earth is splitting apart here") but as my friend is about 75 km away, the worst hadn't hit me yet. This was extremely lucky, as practically every piece of clothing I own was outside on the line. I grabbed my flashlight/cell phone and rounded those up quickly. Outside, the lightning was nearly constantly flashing to the south. It looked like a club light show, or an intense IMAX movie, or perhaps the siege of Leningrad. A few minutes later, the storm started in earnest. Howling wind, rain, and then hail, which sounded like ball bearings dropped from a great height. Sleep was out of the question, so I just sat up and listened. With all the bricks I've put up there , the roof seemed to hold steady, so it was just a few minor leaks that weren't as bad as I've p

More thoughts on aid

Rereading my last post on aid I think there's few points I need to clarify. First, I'd like to distinguish between developmental aid and humanitarian aid. In the case of a famine, or especially a huge natural disaster, humanitarian aid is very important and not subject to my earlier critique. When people are dying all the business about dependency and whatnot goes out the window. One still has to be careful humanitarian supplies aren't captured by warlords, but the moral imperative is clear. Second, longtime readers of this blog (there might be a couple, who knows) might notice that I've got a pretty wide libertarian streak. How do I reconcile my support of obviously paternalistic aid programs like the Millennium Villages with my dislike of paternalistic policies like New York's trans fat ban? I think the difference here is coercion. I have no problem with people entering into a voluntary arrangement with an aid program, even if it's paternalistic as he

How to save human civilization in 10 easy steps.

This classic Joe Romm post lays out the nitty-gritty: It would require some 12-14 of Princeton’s “stabilization wedges” — strategies and/or technologies that over a period of a few decades each ultimately reduce projected global carbon emissions by one billion metric tons per year (see technical paper here , less technical one here ). These 12-14 wedges are my focus here. [...] I do believe only “one” solution exists in this sense — We must deploy every conceivable energy-efficient and low carbon technology that we have today as fast as we can. Princeton’s Pacala and Socolow proposed that this could be done over 50 years, but that is almost certainly too slow. [...] This is what the entire planet must achieve:

Determinism vs. free will

From Lukesurl .

Rehabilitating Ulysses S. Grant

Check out this article on Grant in the NYT, because apparently conservatives are trying to replace him with Reagan on the $50 bill: For Grant, Reconstruction always remained of paramount importance, and he remained steadfast, even when members of his own party turned their backs on the former slaves. After white supremacists slaughtered blacks and Republicans in Louisiana in 1873 and attempted a coup the following year, Grant took swift and forceful action to restore order and legitimate government. With the political tide running heavily against him, Grant still managed to see through to enactment the Civil Rights Act of 1875, which prohibited discrimination according to race in all public accommodations. Grant did not confine his reformism to expanding and protecting the rights of the freed slaves. Disgusted at the inhumanity of the nation’s Indian policies, he called for “the proper treatment of the original occupants of this land,” and directed efforts to provide federal aid for

Punishment

My thoughts on corporal punishment have coalesced a little more over the last week or so. Like my last post on international aid , I think the main problem with corporal punishment as practiced here is implementation. I might sound like a brute for saying this (let's face it, I am a brute), but I don't believe there is something intrinsically wrong with inflicting mild pain on a child, so long as it's done correctly. Punishment like that must not be brutal (i.e., spanking vs. flogging), it must be carefully and conservatively dispensed according to a rigidly followed code, it must not be indiscriminate, and it must never be done in anger. Of course, corporal punishment at my school is none of those things. It's used as an omnipresent and first-resort punishment to quiet the classroom, and the immediate effect there is to create a culture of hitting, where the appropriate response to a grievance with someone is to hit him. This makes my theoretical position detaile

Grumpy blogging, ctd.

When I'm in a really bleak mood, I like to listen to some melancholy crooning. If it's bad, you might as well wallow in it, right? In that vein, here's Beck with "I Pay No Mind:" Lyrics: (this is song two on the album this is the album right here burn the album) tonight the city is full of morgues and all the toilets are overflowing there's shopping malls coming out of the walls as we walk out among the manure that's why I pay no mind I pay no mind I pay no mind give the finger to the rock 'n' roll singer as he's dancing upon your paycheck the sales climb high through the garbage-pail sky like a giant dildo crushing the sun that's why I pay no mind sleep in slime I just got signed so get out your lead-pipe pipe dreams get out your ten-foot flags the insects are huge and the poison's all been used and the drugs won't kill your day job...honey that's why I pay no mind I pay no mind I pay no mind that's why i pay no mind [x7]

Grumpy blogging

For reasons not worth discussing I'm in a lousy mood. But misery loves company, right? So I give you Daniel Larison on the Iraq War : Whenever possible, I refer to the Iraq war as a war of aggression, because that is what it is and has always been. One thing that has often puzzled me about the reflex to declare victory in Iraq, as a Newsweek cover story did recently, is that I don’t know what it could possibly mean to achieve a victory that anyone would want to celebrate as the result of a war of aggression. Tens and hundreds of thousands of Iraqis and thousands of Americans are dead. Tens of thousands of Americans are injured, some of them severely, and Iraq now boasts one of the highest percentages of disabled people in the world . Millions of Iraqis were turned into refugees or displaced within their own country. All of this has come about because of a war that did not have to happen. All of this has come about because of a war we started . [...] I don’t think it is particul

Book review: Suttree

This apparently semi-autobiographical novel was classic Cormac McCarthy. The writing was ballsy and wordy, but to my ear mostly beautiful. Especially in this day when the faintest breath of wordiness is scorned, McCarthy's expansive style is lovely to read (and even better to hear). It's hard to imagine anyone else pulling that off, though. The story concerns Cornelius Suttree, a man of apparently wealthy background who, for reasons that remain mysterious, abandons his family and friends to live in a dilapidated houseboat on the Tennessee river and hang out with a bunch of colorful miscreants. The story, rather like a river itself, meanders all over the place with not much purpose aside from staying close to Suttree. It's the funniest McCarthy book I've read: Come in here, Worm, called J-Bone. Get ye a drink of this good whiskey. Hazelwood entered smiling and took the bottle. He tilted it and sniffed and gave it back. The last time I drank some of that shit I

Development

There was an interesting article in the NYT a couple days ago about a village in Kenya called Sauri (pop: 65,000) that has been carpet bombed with aid for the last couple years: Agricultural yields have doubled; child mortality has dropped by 30 percent; school attendance has shot up and so have test scores, putting one local school second in the area, when it used to be ranked 17th; and cellphone ownership (a telltale sign of prosperity in rural Africa) has increased fourfold. My friend Kristin riffs on this over at her place: But of course the question is is this really a realistic and sustainable project? I do like the idea that each village that is successful in these practices is used as an example to surrounding villages, but with all of the funding being used in each of the villages, it seems unlikely that other communities would just be able to “pick up” these great practices. I guess I just have a problem with the international aid community being so focused on highly-funded

Tournament day

Today there was a big primary school soccer tournament for a bunch of the schools around the Moshaweng valley (the valley created by the wash running through my village). I spent most of the morning taking then printing out pictures of the eligible learners: boys under 13, grades 4-6, save one near-genius grade 7 boy. The paperwork requirements for this thing were stiff--you had to have a copy of your birth certificate, notarized by the local police station, a picture, and proof of enrollment in the school. Following the local safety guidelines, we loaded the boys up in a truck and drove the 6km to the next village. There we saw a few white guys, who were visiting from the UK and an international school in Hong Kong. They were helping one of the local teams with balls and uniforms. There's an organization called the Kalahari Experience that built most of these nearby schools, and these guys were loosely affiliated with that group. The guy from the UK was pretty friendly, but

Minding the store

Today it got even lonelier as the girl who minds the store left to take care of her sick child (I had no idea she even had a kid). My host sister went to buy some stock for the store, so I agreed to watch over things until she got back. Though I was the only person actually from my family around, it wasn't too boring as I was selling a great deal of electricity, airtime, sweets, and single cigarettes. My kids from school hung around a lot, as there's not a lot to do, but as they tend to fight constantly I usually kicked them out (wonder if that's got anything to do with the corporal punishment? Nah, couldn't be). My Setswana is getting better and better, but honestly I still struggle with a simple conversation. I think that I'm close to a tipping point, where I will be able to understand most conversations, and thus will get better faster and faster. I think the main problem with the (utterly half-assed) language training during training is that it didn't

Blog news

So I added a picture to the header. It's from my favorite event in the village thus far, the big flood . I've also added the follower gadget to the sidebar, whatever the heck that is. Everyone else seems to have it, so I might as well join in. If you've got opinions as to those additions, let fly. Especially about the picture--sometimes I think I like brown too much.

From the picture archive

When I was on vacation in December, a man accidentally drove his car off a cliff. Apparently he got a little too far down on the slope of the grass and then couldn't get enough friction to start up again, but didn't have the sense to call for help at that point and kept trying to make it. We walked out with the rest of the rubberneckers to get a look at the car, which was pretty banged up. He was badly hurt and had to be taken out by helicopter, which landed right outside our backpacker's. In a sense, he was lucky as he wasn't wearing his seatbelt and was thrown from the car, and the car came to a rest only inches from his head. They airlifted him to Mthata. I have no idea if he survived or not, but the paramedics seemed to think he would be okay.

Link dump

Matt Taibbi's latest piece in Rolling Stone: Along with the collateral it pocketed, that's $19 billion in pure cash that Goldman would not have "earned" without massive state intervention. How's that $13.4 billion in 2009 profits looking now? And that doesn't even include the direct bailouts of Goldman Sachs and other big banks, which began in earnest after the collapse of AIG. Great article in the New York Times Magazine about the state of teaching research. An interview with Desmond Tutu.

The science news cycle

In helpful graphical form:

Book review of the week

Marc Thiessen, a former speechwriter for Bush II, wrote a book about how torture is the greatest thing since sliced bread. Matthew Alexander, a former military interrogator, gives it to Thiessen with both barrels : ...Thiessen relies solely on the opinions of the CIA interrogators who used torture and abuse and are thus most vulnerable to prosecution for war crimes. That makes his book less a serious discussion of interrogation policy than a literary defense of war criminals. Nowhere in this book will you find the opinions of experienced military interrogators who successfully interrogated Islamic extremists. Not once does he cite Army Doctrine—which warns of the negative consequences of torture and abuse. Courting Disaster is nothing more than the defense's opening statement in a war crimes trial. [...] Thiessen and the torture apologists mock every American soldier who has followed the rules of law and ethical warfare. He insults every interrogator who has learned to elicit inf

Lonesome weekends

 My host family goes through chickens at an unbelievable rate. Every week there's a hatching of 5-10 chicks, and usually within five days they are all dead. I'd estimate the mortality rate at ~90%. About half die from dogs and cats, and about half die of exposure or are crushed by their mates. You see, groups of similarly-sized chickens like to pack together at night like penguins in the Antartic winter. Of course they all want to be in the middle where it's warmest, so the smaller ones squirm under the bigger ones, where they are crushed during the night. They also don't have enough sense to find a dry place, so often if it rains hard you'll find several dead the next morning. I've also seen the mother hen unwittingly crush one of her own, or peck a different hen's chick to death. If my family were better at managing their stock they could have fresh chicken every day. In other death-related news, my host brother is dying of AIDS (not the one I me

Crime update

So I successfully bought a new pair of kicks for the marathon and made it all the way to the bus without losing them. This time I wore them right out of the store, which probably helped. I also talked to the police chief of Kuruman and I've got an appointment to see him next weekend. Police presence seemed heavier, especially in the shoprite area, though we were still super cautious. No muggings to report this trip. It's a nice pair of shoes that I picked up too. I usually favor Aisics but as they didn't have any in town, I went with Adidas instead. Apparently I'm a supinator , so I went with a very soft shoe.

Chump of the week

All this stuff about teaching and children has made me thirsty for some good old-fashioned US politics...what's this? Some douchebag from Kentucky single-handedly put half the government in a chokehold ? Besides cutting off aid to the long-term unemployed, Bunning – who is not running for reelection – singlehandedly blocked healthcare benefits for the jobless, forced the layoff of 2,000 federal employees, stopped a continuation of federal flood insurance, and left doctors facing a 21 percent cut in Medicare payments. The point Bunning said he was trying to make – that the benefits extension was unfunded, added to the federal deficit, and violated recent pay-as-you-go budget rules adopted by the Senate – was overshadowed by his own lack of politesse, and Senate Republicans’ silence in the face of it. Last week, Politico reported that when Oregon Democrat Jeff Merkley implored him to stop the filibuster, Bunning replied “Tough shit” to his Senate colleague. On Monday, ABC News repor

The cutest little girl in the world

 It might be a bit hard to see in this picture, as she's shy and I couldn't get her to smile for me, but Tsholofelo here is simply adorable. She's quite low in maths, but we've been working after school and I've finally got her fairly good at multiplication and division. Thank heavens for small victories, and quiet little girls that don't hit anyone.

Grade 4

 Here are a few of my Grade 4 learners. I've been doing better and better with them (probably because of the small class size--18 learners), while I've been doing worse and worse with the 5/6 class (31 learners). The profound-looking one is Reaobaka, while the eager short guy on the left (who's the best at maths) is Obenne. On the right we have Thataone, and in the back Kobamelo on the left and Kaone on the right. A teacher friend tells me that the key to classroom management is finding what your kids love and taking it away if they won't behave. They certainly love me taking their picture, and if I could print it out somehow I think they'd be ecstatic. Certainly worth considering.

Tuesday funny

Noah again brings Teh Funny : His strategy is wildly inappropriate, salting the chicken is many steps down the line. All I can think to say to this misguided, salt wasting youth is "you're doing it wrong" but perhaps "you're creepy and stop tormenting that chicken" would do better. Additionally I would hope that this salt company respects its customers more than to think we can easily be tricked into salting the animals while they are still alive in an effort to increase salt usage and therefore profits. Check it out. One of the great things about blogging is if you're bored or feeling uncreative you can just link to something that's interesting (or, less lazily, use someone else's post as a springboard for your own). And that's a great thing to do! After all, the stuff is online for free, and websites generally love traffic. Everybody wins.

Reading is great

Watching my grade 7s struggle mightily with reading even Setswana (we do bible translations, as it's the only book I have in Setswana, and they love reading it), I'm reminded again what a deep pleasure it is to be able to read fluently. Such a wide range of meaning can be imparted with so few words, and there are so many words that I know--the possibilities are dizzying. Going through the cheap Setswana dictionary with my kids there were only a couple words I didn't know (duh, it's about 3/4'' thick--but it was still interesting to probe my vocabulary). I suppose this is just a long way of saying that being very fluent in a language is something I hadn't appreciated much before. Not just to be able to speak, write a sentence, and struggle through a newspaper, but to be able to read fast and handle sophisticated or technical topics easily. I reckon this is blindingly obvious to anyone who's ever taught literacy, and I suppose I knew this on an intell