Skip to main content

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 get us anywhere close to that tipping point. (I would compare it to a semester or two of high-school language.) Dragging yourself to that tipping point, especially in a place where nearly everyone speaks some English, is tough.

Apparently the Peace Corps has been getting complaints from the State Department that their language program isn't working well here, and I reckon that's why. I think I'm one of the better speakers in my group, and I doubt I will be fluent by the end. Of course, some people will make it, but to increase that fluency rate they need to make the language part of training much more intensive.

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...