Which is dumb, all things considered. But I'm Peace Corps, and if we don't spend obscene amounts of time worrying about whether we are doing sufficient to Make the World a Better Place, we shrivel up and melt into gooey piles of crushing insecurity. Classes just resumed at the college. This week consisted of one day of no classes due to meetings, one day of no classes due to funeral, and one day of half classes due to college assembly. Tomorrow is a national holiday and Friday is always a half day. There may be classes happening on schedule for the two weeks to follow, and after that it doesn't matter because all the students leave to do their student teaching for two months. I finally actually have classes I can teach, and today I managed to teach them, and got chalk dust all over myself and everything, and I am just not doing sufficient to Make the World a Better Place. I have thus far instructed several members of a small village on how to make wine (sustainable income-generating project!), helped one of my fellow teachers with his homework, because he is now a university student wanting a degree in computer science so he can do cool stuff like build databases for the school, and encouraged some teachers to go to a Google conference in Dar es Salaam. Other than that, I just keep a bunch of Sun x2200 servers running through sheer force of personality. Angst.
Oh, just to keep my whining in perspective, funeral. It wasn't actually a funeral here, we were just sending off the body, because the man had been from Tanga. He was a teacher at the primary school associated with the college, and in Tanzania it is an employer's responsibility to take care of the funeral arrangements. Also in Tanzania, everything stops the day of the funeral. The community, which in the case of a teacher, is all the other teachers, go to the house of the deceased. The men sit around at the front of the house, my colleagues and friends at the college, who are mostly men, assured me that I would not be comfortable sitting with the men* and so I went around to the back of the house to sit with the women. Here I was lectured sharply for not showing up wrapped in a kanga. Fortunately, the British volunteer who teaches English had brought a spare for me, because she thought I might not have one for the situation, which I didn't. I don't entirely understand wearing kangas for funerals when wearing kangas to work is considered unkempt and not appropriate. Anyway, after a while of sitting around the car arrived, and I stood with the group of women in the background while the men surrounded the car and ushered the family, their luggage, and the coffin into the car and then we all watched silently in our segregated groups until the car departed.
I rather like this approach to funeral arrangements. Not the gender segregation, but that this is a day when the entire community stops what they to send off one of their own.
*Translation: they are not comfortable with me violating gender norms in this situation
Stories of Magic: Bananas of Mythological Realism
It sometimes happens that two bananas embryos become conjoined and inside one banana peel there will be twin bananas stuck together. According to a beautiful lady of the Chagga tribe, people used to believe that such bananas should only be eaten by men and women just about to give birth, because women who habitually ate them would twin. When twins were born one should be thrown away into the bush, or else the twins would have a curse. For example, a twin might steal someone's wife and cause a war that destroys Troy after 10 years. True story.
In Which I Finally See Mount Kilimanjaro
 |
| The glaciers on top will be gone by around 2050 due to global warming. |
Slightly before dawn, while waiting for a bus and reading Tamburlaine the Great, which is a truly epic play to read in the shadow of such a mountain with its dying glaciers. Were I Basho, I would write really good haiku about this. I am not happy with what I wrote, which is thus:
World conquering sword,
Glaciers of a thousand years,
Ice, at least, won't rot.
Even glaciers melt.
You, who chased stars, dimmed their eyes,
your kingdom is gone.
In Which I Take Photos of the Cute Things Next Door
The neighbors have a kitten! A tiny little thing that, when I saw it, was busy jumping around in a downed tree branch. It was kind of adorable.
And the neighbor's child: much less adorable, but when silly white girls are waving cameras around, children tend to pose.
I was actually outside with my camera to take pictures of the storm clouds in the sunset, with the palm trees and mountains and all, but kitties, they are cute.
In Which I am at Least as Well Qualified to Dispense Advice on Children as that Pompous Ass Rousseau
I am not overly fond of children. I find them, on the whole, nasty, brutish, and short. I don't ever want them. Naturally, I therefore have opinions on how other people should raise them, and I also think people are doing it wrong.
So: children in Tanzania. They're slave labor. In schools, any teacher can and often will order a child to drop whatever they are doing to perform manual labor or run errands. All cleaning and a good bit of maintenance work is done by the students, who will not be provided with food or water, and one just has to hope they are provided with enough money to buy it for themselves. This continues into the training that students receive at teacher training colleges. Students are not trusted to any degree ever, are regarded as cheaters looking for an opportunity, and must submit to humiliating school-wide inspections to ensure that they have all required textbooks and for the female students to be lectured on their hairstyles.* This is in stark contrast to quite a few US universities I'm familiar with, in which students receive lectures on honor, sign some honor pledge, and have done with the baby-sitting. I think this is a much better way of doing things because it teaches people that they are adults and should be responsible. If people make mistakes being adults and responsible, well, institutions of higher education do a reasonable job of providing a reasonably safe environment to make mistakes in.
There will, of course, always be the outliers who never learn and probably are evil, lying cheating scoundrels, but this is not a reason to infantilize a majority of people.
The major reason I bring this up as a problem is because I worry about the teachers in training at the teacher training colleges. They are very soon going to be full-fledged teachers with pretty much complete power over their students, and while this never seems very healthy emotionally for anyone, there is a peculiarly worrisome and demonstrable (though granted, only through anecdata) tendency for teachers' unlimited power to result in excessive corporal discipline verging on or becoming torture, and sexual harassment for the students. This is probably due, at least in part, to abuse being the only model of teacherhood some students ever see, and while I have great faith in people being able to rise above bad circumstances through sheer force of will, I also sympathize with those who don't because it's really hard. And I wish that students were treated like embryonic adults rather than like slaves.
*All through primary and secondary school, girls must have their hair either cropped very short or in simple plaits, but at teacher colleges, the women can, and do, have any hair they want. African hairbraiding can do some seriously amazing things, and I love looking at the hairstyles of some of the female students here, but apparently the fancier hair violates cultural expectations of gender roles. What is with cultural obsessions over hair? How the monks were going to shave their heads was a major thing between England and Ireland back in the day, and in the Bible, you have the long-haired Nazarenes on one hand, and Paul declaring on the other that long hair-men are unnatural or something. Some Muslims and some Christians both decree that strange men should not have a complete view of women's hair, and I just don't get it. It's hair. We've all got it.
So: children in Tanzania. They're slave labor. In schools, any teacher can and often will order a child to drop whatever they are doing to perform manual labor or run errands. All cleaning and a good bit of maintenance work is done by the students, who will not be provided with food or water, and one just has to hope they are provided with enough money to buy it for themselves. This continues into the training that students receive at teacher training colleges. Students are not trusted to any degree ever, are regarded as cheaters looking for an opportunity, and must submit to humiliating school-wide inspections to ensure that they have all required textbooks and for the female students to be lectured on their hairstyles.* This is in stark contrast to quite a few US universities I'm familiar with, in which students receive lectures on honor, sign some honor pledge, and have done with the baby-sitting. I think this is a much better way of doing things because it teaches people that they are adults and should be responsible. If people make mistakes being adults and responsible, well, institutions of higher education do a reasonable job of providing a reasonably safe environment to make mistakes in.
There will, of course, always be the outliers who never learn and probably are evil, lying cheating scoundrels, but this is not a reason to infantilize a majority of people.
The major reason I bring this up as a problem is because I worry about the teachers in training at the teacher training colleges. They are very soon going to be full-fledged teachers with pretty much complete power over their students, and while this never seems very healthy emotionally for anyone, there is a peculiarly worrisome and demonstrable (though granted, only through anecdata) tendency for teachers' unlimited power to result in excessive corporal discipline verging on or becoming torture, and sexual harassment for the students. This is probably due, at least in part, to abuse being the only model of teacherhood some students ever see, and while I have great faith in people being able to rise above bad circumstances through sheer force of will, I also sympathize with those who don't because it's really hard. And I wish that students were treated like embryonic adults rather than like slaves.
*All through primary and secondary school, girls must have their hair either cropped very short or in simple plaits, but at teacher colleges, the women can, and do, have any hair they want. African hairbraiding can do some seriously amazing things, and I love looking at the hairstyles of some of the female students here, but apparently the fancier hair violates cultural expectations of gender roles. What is with cultural obsessions over hair? How the monks were going to shave their heads was a major thing between England and Ireland back in the day, and in the Bible, you have the long-haired Nazarenes on one hand, and Paul declaring on the other that long hair-men are unnatural or something. Some Muslims and some Christians both decree that strange men should not have a complete view of women's hair, and I just don't get it. It's hair. We've all got it.
Emotional Chocolate and Peanut Butter Cake
Not bad for fake butter and that weird long life milk stuff (that's at least better than powdered milk) and so-so hot chocolate drink mix. The peanut butter, however, was awesome, as it came in a box from that magical land in which peanut butter is sweet and has all sorts of strange compounds added to keep the oil from separating out. Only fancy, there are places in the world with different types of peanut butter!
The magical marvelous sufuria oven.
Stories of Magic: Alabama Edition
A volunteer told me that in her home state of Alabama, people say that the devil is beating his wife when the sun shines during rainstorms.
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