Skip to main content

My life in numbers

Image
By
Cooper Knowlton had a funny idea I'm going to shamelessly steal.

Months in South Africa: 15
Months left in South Africa: 10
Books read: ~100
Books I’m currently reading: 5
Blog posts written: 561
People helped/successfully taught: 0
Friends in my village: 0
Bowls of Morvite eaten: 1000's 
Times I’ve been asked if I want a South African wife: ~10
Times I've been asked for money: Avogadro's number
Amount of money Peace Corps pays me each day: ~$11
Amount of money I spend each day: ~$5
Days of rain since last May: 0
Number of students in my Grade 8 class: 12
Number of mosquito bites that I have ever gotten in the village: 0
Number of miles I’ve run in the last two weeks: 40
Number of legs I have seen broken: 1
Number of miles from my village to Kuruman: 62
Hours it took to travel that distance (by taxi) yesterday: 3 1/2
Labels:

Comments

  1. AnonymousNovember 1, 2010 at 11:38 PM

    you make TEN dollars a day! They spoil you guys rotten over there in Africa it sounds like! By the by...ive taught just about as many students myself!

    Josh
    PCV M20 Mongolia

    ReplyDelete
  2. RyanNovember 2, 2010 at 1:34 AM

    Yeah, pretty much the lap of luxury. Prices are a bit higher, possibly because SA's total lack of a manufacturing sector. I'm not sure how the rest of Africa compares.

    Teaching's great, ain't it?

    ReplyDelete
  3. OlderMusicGeekNovember 6, 2010 at 11:00 AM

    sounds about right! had a similiar experience when i was in lesotho!

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Why Did Reality Winner Leak to the Intercept?

By
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...
Post a Comment
Read more

The Setswana Grammar Manual

By
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 .
6 comments
Read more

On Refusing to Vote for Bloomberg

By
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...
4 comments
Read more