Skip to main content

China advice bleg

I've basically made the decision to continue serving or working abroad after my Peace Corps service in South Africa is over, probably in China or Taiwan as I would like to learn a bit of standard Mandarin and gain some perspective on an up-and-coming power. I've talked a few people who lived there or are currently working there right now who have been enormously helpful, but I'm trying to get as broad a perspective as possible. If you have any advice, contacts, or other thoughts you wouldn't mind sharing, I would be much indebted if you would leave a comment or shoot me an email.

UPDATE: It seems that extending my Peace Corps service is out. Apparently your close of service date needs to line up closely with the beginning of service date for the desired country, and Peace Corps is fairly inflexible about COS dates here. So take that into consideration, I guess.

Comments

  1. are you sure? lydia told kristen that she could probably transfer to a program where pst starts as early as may, and I know that education vols from sa have gone to china in the past, you should ask if you haven't already...

    ReplyDelete
  2. Well, that's just what McGrath told me in an email and also what was contained in a Peace Corps policy document she attached. I emailed Morgan weeks ago with no response (shocking, right?). I also cced Lydia on the email to McGrath, so hopefully she'll get back to me if that is the case.

    In any case, one of my good friends from college can apparently help me find a job at a university over there, so I'm not super concerned.

    ReplyDelete
  3. yeah you can do basically the same job and actually get paid for it, i guess the only advantage to pc is that you get language training but I'm sure you can pay someone to tutor you or take a class somewhere

    ReplyDelete
  4. Well, I've recently got in touch with Lydia asked for clarification. I'll keep you posted on what she says.

    ReplyDelete
  5. You could go somewhere were you could actually learn the language to a comfortable conversational level in a year, aka Latin America. Also, I hear that there are cool people there.

    ReplyDelete
  6. oops, I meant "where you could actually learn the language in a year"

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

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 actually b

The Basic Instinct of Socialism

This year I finally decided to stop beating around the bush and start calling myself a democratic socialist. I think the reason for the long hesitation is the very long record of horrifying atrocities carried out by self-described socialist countries. Of course, there is no social system that doesn't have a long, bloody rap sheet, capitalism very much included . But I've never described myself as a capitalist either, and the whole point of socialism is that it's supposed to be better than that. So of course I cannot be a tankie — Stalin and Mao were evil, terrible butchers, some of the worst people who ever lived. There are two basic lessons to be learned from the failures of Soviet and Chinese Communism, I think. One is that Marxism-Leninism is not a just or workable system. One cannot simply skip over capitalist development, and any socialist project must be democratic and preserve basic liberal freedoms. The second, perhaps more profound lesson, is that there is no s

Varanus albigularis albigularis

That is the Latin name for the white-throated monitor lizard , a large reptile native to southern Africa that can grow up to two meters long (see pictures of one at the Oakland Zoo here ). In Setswana, it's called a "gopane." I saw one of these in my village yesterday on the way back from my run. Some kids from school found it in the riverbed and tortured it to death, stabbing out its eyes, cutting off its tail, and gutting it which finally killed it. It seemed to be a female as there were a bunch of round white things I can only imagine were eggs amongst the guts. I only arrived after it was already dead, but they described what had happened with much hilarity and re-enactment. When I asked why they killed it, they said it was because it would eat their chickens and eggs, which is probably true, and because it sucks blood from people, which is completely ridiculous. It might bite a person, but not unless threatened. It seems roughly the same as killing wolves that