Ryan Cooper

Sorry for the downtime here, I've been working on a special project (about which more later). But as I promised last year , here's the latest news from the case of Jesse Osmun, the South Africa PCV who was arrested for sexually abusing children: A judge sentenced a former Peace Corps volunteer to 15 years in prison for abusing girls under the age of 6 in South Africa while he was a volunteer there, federal officials said. The sentencing was announced Thursday in a statement from U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Jesse Osmun, 33, of Milford, Connecticut, joined the Peace Corps in 2010 and worked in a nongovernmental organization's AIDS center for children whose families had suffered or died from the disease, his attorney, Richard Meehan, Jr., told CNN Thursday. Osmun volunteered as a Web designer for the center and worked with older children in a "scout" program. While there, Osmun engaged in sexual acts with four girls, all under the age of 6, off...

This is looking south from my family home where I grew up from about nine years old.  I took this picture with my mom's sweet new Android phone.  I don't have a phone myself yet, but I'll probably have one by early next week.  Over my left shoulder you can see Sleeping Ute Mountain, and over my right you can see Mesa Verde. The flight was a 40-hour marathon and I still feel pretty frazzled, but a shower and some sleep did me a world of good.  I'm still processing the whole America experience, so I don't have much more to say yet, but more updates will follow as I manage to put words to things.

Trying to close my FNB (First National Bank) account here in South Africa I got a visceral reminder of what kind of service banks are providing the average customer.  First, just to close the account requires a fee of about R50.  I had left about R20 in there, but as it turns out FNB had charged me a bunch of fees that put me in the hole, and then a R88 "service fee" which I assumed was from being forcibly overdrafted.  I suspect there's some kind of automatic procedure that trips a bunch of fines if you ever let your account balance get to low so they can then charge you for overdrafting.  Anyway, I had to pay to get my balance up to the correct amount, and pay an additional deposit fee to allow me to put money into my own account. The best part, though, was after waiting about twenty minutes for the deposit to go through, they had one more fine of R9.50 waiting for me on another screen, so I had to pay the deposit fee again to finish the process....

I'm currently doing my end-of-service paperwork and various checkups, so posting might be a bit light for the next few days. In some strange weather, it's raining hard, something that doesn't usually start until November or so.

It's my last day in the village, but I don't have much to offer but an atrocious case of hiccups and this Michael Lewis article . This graf in particular jumped out: Jörg Asmussen offers the first hint of an answer—in his personal behavior. He is a type familiar in Germany but absolutely freakish in Greece—or for that matter the United States: a keenly intelligent, highly ambitious civil servant who has no other desire but to serve his country. His sparkling curriculum vitae is missing a line that would be found on the résumés of men in his position most anywhere else in the world—the line where he leaves government service for Goldman Sachs to cash out. When I asked another prominent German civil servant why he hadn’t taken time out of public service to make his fortune working for some bank, the way every American civil servant who is anywhere near finance seems to want to do, his expression changed to alarm. “But I could never do this,” he said. “It would be illo...

A week from today I'm taking the bus to Pretoria for the last time.  Hooray!

Two years ago today I landed in Oliver Tambo International Airport in Johannesburg.  It was the first time I had set foot outside North America.  Three weeks from today I'll leave my village forever, and if House Republicans don't manage to destroy the US, I'll fly home that following Friday.  The times, they are a'changin.

So I'll be headed home on the 19th of August. Anyone that wants to meet up, or if you've got a plum job in the DC area (wink, wink) drop me a line.

Apologies for the light posting, I've been rather busy with getting ready to come home.  Hopefully I can dream up something plausible-sounding in the next couple days.

Thinking again about the camp I recently helped with I was struck by a couple things.  First was that overall it went off very well.  The kids got there on time, the food was sufficient and cooked on time, the activities went off more or less how they were planned—and most of all, the kids had a great time.  I'd say it was one of the best organized and best executed events I have attended here in South Africa. The second thing is that the stress of the event nearly gave the volunteer organizing it ulcers.  The key thing I noticed here is that the actual logistics weren't the stressful bits.  It was the thankless, selfish, and petulant attitude evinced by a large fraction of the people involved with the camp.  Beforehand, people who agreed to help or contribute often went back on their word or didn't keep their promises.  A local politician who had agreed to organize transport reacted to inquires about said organization with disbelieving fury—only lat...

I now know for sure when I'll be coming home: August 18th!  (Plus or minus a day or two.)  I'm stoked to be coming home!  More thoughts later when I've got a bit more time.

I'm currently coming back from Pretoria where I got a new pair of glasses.  Not much to report, except that like the dentist here, the optometrist had equipment of greater sophistication than anything I'd ever seen back in the states.  We may have sub-par stuff, but at least the system is really expensive.

I has been raining on and off for the last two days and it is absolutely freezing. I rarely leave my sleeping bag in my room. I don't remember it getting this cold last year, and I'm fairly sure it didn't rain between about May and October. Some sun, please?

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 .

Wikimedia/CC Right now, the Big Dipper is just barely visible on the northern horizon.

Our financial officer has informed us that the late payday is due to a mixup back at DC headquarters.  Apparently some jackass "forgot" to submit the bank transfer this month, or something.  They were not remotely specific, whoever it was, but they said that the money should arrive by the 1st of June.  Maybe.  However, I do have faith that our local financial officer is not at fault here.  Even if he had forgotten, by now the situation would have been rectified if he had the power to do so.  We volunteers can complain up a storm.

Our monthly paycheck is now six days late and counting.  Comeo

Our monthly paycheck here is now five days late and counting.

As expected, the ANC won a large victory with 63.6% of the vote (with 80% counted thus far).  However, this is a bit less than the 67% they won back in 2006.  The opposition Democratic Alliance drastically increased their support from 14 to 22.1%.  Given that Coloureds (mixed race) and whites make up about 9% each of the population, clearly the DA's play for the black vote had at least some success.

South Africa voted yesterday in the rough equivalence of midterm elections. To my amazement they actually set up a polling station, complete with official signs, officers and police in my tiny village. It's been an extremely visible campaign with the two main parties putting up signs all over creation in a mess of languages. The two main parties are the African National Congress and the Democratic Alliance.  This was apparently the first election where the DA, traditionally the party of whites and Coloureds (mixed race) made a serious effort to get the black vote.  To my eye they had a much better-organized campaign, with their signs up long before the ANC's and a much larger media buy.  The DA strategy focused on service delivery, going with the slogan "We deliver for all" (or in Setswana, " Re direla botlhe ," or in Afrikaans, " Ons leiwer dienste aan almal ," or in Zulu...you get the picture) featuring commercials with a bunch of gogos (grand...