At my new home, I get an average internet latency of ~200 ms. At my old house, I was getting, on a good day, between 400ms and 600ms. To put this in perspective, websites load up to around 2000ms latency, but after around 800 ms you have to turn off images and be really patient. Above 600ms video streaming isn't really worth the trouble and above 400ms it requires significant buffering time. The point of all those numbers is to explain that at 200ms a lot more is possible on the internet.
Turing bless some amazingly generous friends of mine for providing me with 1) access to a stateside machine with permission to use it as a proxy server provided I set up RSA authentication rather than passwording into it (it's a reasonable stipulation), and 2) the password to a Netflix account with unlimited streaming. The reason I care is that a lot of fun stuff from the states is only available to US IPs, for example, Netflix, a lot of Youtube videos (including Funimation's entire catalog which they tantalizingly uploaded to Youtube and then geoblocked outside the US. Jerks.), the Daily Show, anything on NBC, and Pandora my favorite music streaming station. Needless to say, having access to this stateside machine made me really excited. Until I decided to check the internet speed on it and almost cried when I realized what I lost by leaving the US. 6ms latencies?!
Getting access to everything was pretty straightforward except that I've never set up a proxy server. I am the dumb kid of the CS department. Nonetheless, with Google I can do anything. The main issue was getting Netflix, because I can't run that natively under Linux. Netflix uses some magical special proprietary player that doesn't play on Linux. Fortunately, this is one of the things I can use a virtual windows machine for. That becomes much more complicated with proxy servers involved, because even with the proxy as the system wide network setting on the host, it is not immediately obvious how to get a guest machine to use the proxy. At least, not on VirtualBox it's not. This shouldn't be a huge issue for me, really, because weirdly enough I am one of the world's experts on networking in virtual machines. Also, I now have Pandora to provide me with music while I work on this. But because I have a tendency to hack my way through problems rather than really acquiring expertise it became easier to install Cygwin on the VM so I could have a Linux-emulator to set up a second proxy server specifically for the VM (okay, so it's probably possible to do a proxy setup and Windows, but I understand how to do it on Linux) Which is when I figured out that Cygwin's ssh key authentication is a little strange but ssh has helpful debugging output. Another reason to do this out of a Linux emulator rather than using Windows system tools, I don't know how to troubleshoot stuff on Windows. Anyway, I am now running a proxy out of a Linux emulator on a Windows virtual machine hosted on a Linux machine. Which is running the same proxy at the same time. Go me. The amazing thing is the virtual machine and emulation isn't enough of a bottleneck to make streaming video off Netflix impractical.
I realize most people that I know who read this blog don't care about any of this, but I had a good time.
A Few Thoughts on my New Home
I have a balcony in my house. I like it. I like to sit and look at the mountains and not have anyone bother me. Birds are building a nest in the corner.
There is a homeless man without pants who wanders about screaming and eating out of the garbage pits. What connection he has with the school that brought him here, or has prevented anyone of authority from removing him from the premises, I do not know. On the other hand, there are no facilities for caring for those who are homeless and/or mentally disturbed. There are no incidents of his hurting anyone (I really hope. The two volunteers previous to me report no incidents), and the place is crawling with security guards, so I guess why not? It's not like he has anyplace more healthy and reasonable to go. Either his family abandoned him or he's an orphan probably.
I am now in a house that gets an average internet latency of 200ms. This is awesome. The fabulous bearded volunteer I am replacing and whose house I am sharing for a week watches American sport tv on a regular basis. I joined him for an evening of baseball, which unfortunately included a lot of American commercials as well. At least two products promised, in so many words, that using them would "get girls" or cause one to "get laid." The advertisers must assume that men are highly gullible or that women (not girls) are contractually obligated to provide sexual favors as a reward for obedient consumerism. Either way, this is sleazy.
Russian plugs are weird. But at least the Russians who built the place abandoned plenty of industrial equipment which is just sitting around. Children and I play on them.
I am suddenly not so much missing one of my hardworking girls in Morogoro, because apparently by failing to forward her text message to 10 people within 60 seconds, I do not love Jesus. I'm fairly certain Jesus wouldn't care about such things, and I'm having trouble coming up with a deity who would. This would be beneath the God of the Machine, but perhaps there is some minor network god who really likes counting things who might care. Possibly this could be seen as a sacrifice to Mark Zuckerburg, greater saint of Empty Gestures Leading to Greater Corporate Profits.
Refrigeration is awesome! I can keep non-onion vegetables around for more than two days! Even avocados! My shopping is going to get so much more efficient. However, it does seem a bit of a cruel joke that I have a refrigerator in a cool place like Mbeya but didn't have one in the weltering heat of Morogoro. Regardless, I think I'm in love with this refrigerator. I have never felt so intensely emotionally attached to a machine since I met the office copier that could also scan entire books and had a built-in stapler.
There is a homeless man without pants who wanders about screaming and eating out of the garbage pits. What connection he has with the school that brought him here, or has prevented anyone of authority from removing him from the premises, I do not know. On the other hand, there are no facilities for caring for those who are homeless and/or mentally disturbed. There are no incidents of his hurting anyone (I really hope. The two volunteers previous to me report no incidents), and the place is crawling with security guards, so I guess why not? It's not like he has anyplace more healthy and reasonable to go. Either his family abandoned him or he's an orphan probably.
I am now in a house that gets an average internet latency of 200ms. This is awesome. The fabulous bearded volunteer I am replacing and whose house I am sharing for a week watches American sport tv on a regular basis. I joined him for an evening of baseball, which unfortunately included a lot of American commercials as well. At least two products promised, in so many words, that using them would "get girls" or cause one to "get laid." The advertisers must assume that men are highly gullible or that women (not girls) are contractually obligated to provide sexual favors as a reward for obedient consumerism. Either way, this is sleazy.
Russian plugs are weird. But at least the Russians who built the place abandoned plenty of industrial equipment which is just sitting around. Children and I play on them.
I am suddenly not so much missing one of my hardworking girls in Morogoro, because apparently by failing to forward her text message to 10 people within 60 seconds, I do not love Jesus. I'm fairly certain Jesus wouldn't care about such things, and I'm having trouble coming up with a deity who would. This would be beneath the God of the Machine, but perhaps there is some minor network god who really likes counting things who might care. Possibly this could be seen as a sacrifice to Mark Zuckerburg, greater saint of Empty Gestures Leading to Greater Corporate Profits.
Refrigeration is awesome! I can keep non-onion vegetables around for more than two days! Even avocados! My shopping is going to get so much more efficient. However, it does seem a bit of a cruel joke that I have a refrigerator in a cool place like Mbeya but didn't have one in the weltering heat of Morogoro. Regardless, I think I'm in love with this refrigerator. I have never felt so intensely emotionally attached to a machine since I met the office copier that could also scan entire books and had a built-in stapler.
Rigging Silks Off an Abandoned Industrial Crane
Totally doable!
For the gathering crowd of watching children, this was the most exciting thing that happened all day.
For the gathering crowd of watching children, this was the most exciting thing that happened all day.
In Which I get up and Go
This week I said goodbye to my students. My new class that I haven't been teaching very long wasn't very bothered by the news. I like them, they seem to like me, but I've only been teaching them for about half this term, and I keep being absent what with mandatory Peace Corps conferences, an important Peace Corps meeting, and a week spent in Mbeya deciding I wanted to move. My other class seemed more startled and saddened at the news, which surprised me.
I don't normally enjoy this class. There are a group of students who blatantly don't pay attention and then complain that they don't understand. They have complained that I spend all my time teaching them the practical use of the computer and don't teach them theoretically. They have also recently started complaining that I take them to the lab when possible twice a week rather than their allotted once a week and this is, and I quote, "too much movement." I am not sorry. Fortunately for my motivation, there are three or four girls who try hard and are interested and I have given up on the rest of the class and just started to teaching to them. They actually made my last time teaching in Morogoro really great. We were starting the programming unit, which I really enjoy, so just as an introduction and because I know whoever replaces me won't do this, I went over some basic features of a programming language, operators, looping structures, and functions, demonstrating each with my python shell. Then I reminded them of all the functions they had used doing spreadsheets, and wrote a summation function in Python and told them that behind the graphic interface they always use, this is the sort of thing that's really happening when they write =SUM(). One of my bright girls was sitting on the edge of her chair and her eyes just completely lit up as she made the connection, and she was smiling all over her face when I told her (well, the whole class really, but at that point I was giving the lesson to her) that this is it. This is what is happening, your computer is not a magical machine. At some point someone sat down and wrote everything you use. She looked as though she got it completely and was really excited about it. When my normal slacker boy complained that he completely didn't understand anything of that day's lesson she turned around and told him she would explain later.
And lo, the geek shall inherit the earth, and despite stereotype, the geek woman shall stand beside the geek man and we shall create the world that those who make fun of us will use without bothering to understand it, and we shall feel impossibly superior.
After class was over, all my bright girls gave me hugs and wanted email and phone numbers. One also told me I should remember to pray because that is our only weapon in the world. Had I been mentally quicker, I might have been able to respond to that with some inspiring speech about the helpless mentality of such a statement and rebut that we ourselves are our weapons in the world, we use our own strength to walk forward and help those with us, and prayer is good, channeling all our energy their will not do anything to make the status more quo. This is, however, not necessarily the sort of conversation I want to get into on my last day, particularly with a woman who grew up in a culture where it is hard to say accurately that there is something real she personally can do to fight the world. Because sexism. Also, post-colonialism. Racist imperial domination is really bad for a society, who knew? So I took the remark in the spirit in which it was meant, and thanked her.
Afterwards, I gathered all the Peace Corps volunteers in the region and we went to the river behind the college and had a bonfire (that I did none of the work for except bring the kerosene, because two of my sitemates have lots of fun building fires) with watermelon, stale chips from the street, the various dips and sauces that my other sitemate who returned to America left behind and I didn't want to pack because space, and homemade hibiscus wine. Which is tasty, incidentally. I also gave them my keys so they could strip my house of whatever I didn't pack once I left. The last I heard they were really excited and said it was like a market only everything was free and totally vultured the place. Socialist existence. It leads to less waste. Also, I am now in a fully furnished apartment with furniture and everything and I am inheriting another volunteer's things, so it's a reciprocal vulturing.
I don't normally enjoy this class. There are a group of students who blatantly don't pay attention and then complain that they don't understand. They have complained that I spend all my time teaching them the practical use of the computer and don't teach them theoretically. They have also recently started complaining that I take them to the lab when possible twice a week rather than their allotted once a week and this is, and I quote, "too much movement." I am not sorry. Fortunately for my motivation, there are three or four girls who try hard and are interested and I have given up on the rest of the class and just started to teaching to them. They actually made my last time teaching in Morogoro really great. We were starting the programming unit, which I really enjoy, so just as an introduction and because I know whoever replaces me won't do this, I went over some basic features of a programming language, operators, looping structures, and functions, demonstrating each with my python shell. Then I reminded them of all the functions they had used doing spreadsheets, and wrote a summation function in Python and told them that behind the graphic interface they always use, this is the sort of thing that's really happening when they write =SUM(). One of my bright girls was sitting on the edge of her chair and her eyes just completely lit up as she made the connection, and she was smiling all over her face when I told her (well, the whole class really, but at that point I was giving the lesson to her) that this is it. This is what is happening, your computer is not a magical machine. At some point someone sat down and wrote everything you use. She looked as though she got it completely and was really excited about it. When my normal slacker boy complained that he completely didn't understand anything of that day's lesson she turned around and told him she would explain later.
And lo, the geek shall inherit the earth, and despite stereotype, the geek woman shall stand beside the geek man and we shall create the world that those who make fun of us will use without bothering to understand it, and we shall feel impossibly superior.
After class was over, all my bright girls gave me hugs and wanted email and phone numbers. One also told me I should remember to pray because that is our only weapon in the world. Had I been mentally quicker, I might have been able to respond to that with some inspiring speech about the helpless mentality of such a statement and rebut that we ourselves are our weapons in the world, we use our own strength to walk forward and help those with us, and prayer is good, channeling all our energy their will not do anything to make the status more quo. This is, however, not necessarily the sort of conversation I want to get into on my last day, particularly with a woman who grew up in a culture where it is hard to say accurately that there is something real she personally can do to fight the world. Because sexism. Also, post-colonialism. Racist imperial domination is really bad for a society, who knew? So I took the remark in the spirit in which it was meant, and thanked her.
Afterwards, I gathered all the Peace Corps volunteers in the region and we went to the river behind the college and had a bonfire (that I did none of the work for except bring the kerosene, because two of my sitemates have lots of fun building fires) with watermelon, stale chips from the street, the various dips and sauces that my other sitemate who returned to America left behind and I didn't want to pack because space, and homemade hibiscus wine. Which is tasty, incidentally. I also gave them my keys so they could strip my house of whatever I didn't pack once I left. The last I heard they were really excited and said it was like a market only everything was free and totally vultured the place. Socialist existence. It leads to less waste. Also, I am now in a fully furnished apartment with furniture and everything and I am inheriting another volunteer's things, so it's a reciprocal vulturing.
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| The Ulugurus after sundown |
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| Back in the day, we were the only two volunteers in the region. *sniff* nostalgia |
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| He got way too happy about being able to burn things. |
A Monkey in Parting
Excited as I am about Mbeya, I am really going to miss Morogoro. This is such a beautiful place. I love the monkeys that run around while I do silks.
In Which I Don't Talk about Masturbation
Sometimes staff meetings rise above their normal boringness when the headmaster uses them as an opportunity to talk about whatever he has been thinking about recently. He seems to have recently happened upon sperm banks and artificial insemination, and wanted to know if it was true that "women could have babies without a man doing his part." I actually thought he was talking about parthenogenesis until he explained further. He asked me if it was true that such a thing can be done freely at hospitals (well yes, but one has to pay, and it's not really at hospitals, but this isn't the time to explain the difference between TZ and American hospitals), how a woman would select the sperm she wanted (I have no idea), and concluded by wondering how they got the sperm from the man. I honestly couldn't tell if he was joking or if he truly didn't know, the latter being not so much an impossibility as one might think given that masturbation is so Not Done it's not even a joke. And I didn't follow up because I can't start talking about masturbation in front of about 100 teachers. I just can't. Condoms yes (talking about condoms at any possible opportunity is in my job description), masturbation, not so much. Which is a pity, really, given that I happen to think we should be pushing masturbation. I know that sounds odd, but there is a deeply held societal belief that no one can be without sex for very long. Women in particular are told that they will go crazy if they go too long without sex.
As a side note, this may be one of the reasons behind the demon possession of girls, other than the obvious reasons of exam time possession and claiming it is the fault of some disliked teacher. Imagine one is a teenager in the hormone-riddled morass that is high school, trapped in a world of rigid gender roles, told that nice girls don't, pressured to do it by boys (or raped by teachers. It happens), told (not in so many words, but the way almost all abstinence-only sex education happens is that boys are assumed to have the want-tos while girls are just the holders of a commodity that boys want) that they do not have sexual desires of their own and are there for the male gaze which it is their own fault if they provoke through dress, but by the way, no sex leads to craziness. To make this more fun, only prostitutes have condoms, but pregnant girls get kicked out of school and absolutely no one should ever masturbate. I'd probably have a bout or two of demon possessed craziness myself out of confused frustration. I'm sure there's also some placebo effects going around, if people told they are poisoned act like it, why shouldn't people who sincerely believe they are going crazy start experiencing some symptoms? This may also be somehow related to the Victorian beliefs about green sickness and vibrators as cure for hysteria, but that's me wondering about things I know very little about.
Anyway, in a culture that sees sex as something no one can possibly abstain from despite all efforts of the perennial and perennially annoying missionaries to the contrary, masturbation seems the obvious solution to some cultural catch-22s as described above and risky sexual behaviours like having multiple partners, which, based on the girls willing to tell me about their multiple boyfriends, is common. I can't really have these conversations with men, but a male volunteer friend of mine says that he hears similar things, and late at night in bars when men ask how he manages not to have a girlfriend he has actually tried to explain masturbation, and just wasn't believed. Granted, the concept translates into Kiswahili literally as "I hold myself" (najishikia) which to me sounds a little odd, but I think the point still gets across.
As a side note, this may be one of the reasons behind the demon possession of girls, other than the obvious reasons of exam time possession and claiming it is the fault of some disliked teacher. Imagine one is a teenager in the hormone-riddled morass that is high school, trapped in a world of rigid gender roles, told that nice girls don't, pressured to do it by boys (or raped by teachers. It happens), told (not in so many words, but the way almost all abstinence-only sex education happens is that boys are assumed to have the want-tos while girls are just the holders of a commodity that boys want) that they do not have sexual desires of their own and are there for the male gaze which it is their own fault if they provoke through dress, but by the way, no sex leads to craziness. To make this more fun, only prostitutes have condoms, but pregnant girls get kicked out of school and absolutely no one should ever masturbate. I'd probably have a bout or two of demon possessed craziness myself out of confused frustration. I'm sure there's also some placebo effects going around, if people told they are poisoned act like it, why shouldn't people who sincerely believe they are going crazy start experiencing some symptoms? This may also be somehow related to the Victorian beliefs about green sickness and vibrators as cure for hysteria, but that's me wondering about things I know very little about.
Anyway, in a culture that sees sex as something no one can possibly abstain from despite all efforts of the perennial and perennially annoying missionaries to the contrary, masturbation seems the obvious solution to some cultural catch-22s as described above and risky sexual behaviours like having multiple partners, which, based on the girls willing to tell me about their multiple boyfriends, is common. I can't really have these conversations with men, but a male volunteer friend of mine says that he hears similar things, and late at night in bars when men ask how he manages not to have a girlfriend he has actually tried to explain masturbation, and just wasn't believed. Granted, the concept translates into Kiswahili literally as "I hold myself" (najishikia) which to me sounds a little odd, but I think the point still gets across.
Of Women, Marriage, and Money
I'm on marriage proposal #4. 1-3 were from complete strangers, on the street, some shopkeeper I was buying stuff from, and some guy on the bus. For all these men, apparently the natural followup question to a negative response is "why?" That it is not immediately obvious why a woman would refuse marriage to a stranger who doesn't even know her name says something less than complimentary about this culture. Some volunteers have made a game out of demanding cows or other livestock goods from their would-be bridegrooms, since paying livestock or the cash equivalent thereof to a lady's father is the usual price for marrying a lady here. A Peace Corps woman on the Masai steppe has received an offer of 100 cows, and one in Manyara (I think) was told indignantly that while her suitor was not a Masai and didn't offer cows, he could give her 14 cats. Just to illustrate how much a racist colonial system has turned white people into marriable representations of wealth and power, a male volunteer was offered a car, a shop on Zanzibar, and a flock of goats if he would marry someone's daughter. Supportive and sensitive to gender issues as the Peace Corps always is, we told him he should have married that lady, because marriage offers don't get better than that, and for men don't typically happen at all. Who needs love when you've got a car on Zanzibar? Not to mention goats.
Proposal #4 was a little more awkward, first, because it came from one of my coworkers at the college, second, it was delivered entirely by email*, and third, it kept escalating. I ignored the initial email and started getting more and more, which became more and more passionate and lovelorn. I finally responded with a refusal to which I did not attach a reason, because I owe such men no explanations. The flurry of emails I got from my refusal were reminding me that I was causing him to suffer by loving me until he died and demanding that I pick from a range of reasons for refusal including and limited to:
I'm moving to Mbeya next week. Since marriage proposal no. 3 came during my week long visit there less than a month ago, we'll see if Mbeya can offer me more annoying suitors than Morogoro. For the record, I have decided that I will not marry for less than 60 cows and a small flock of chickens. What my father would do with cows I am having trouble imagining, but I know what I'm worth.
*There are less romantic forms of communication.
Proposal #4 was a little more awkward, first, because it came from one of my coworkers at the college, second, it was delivered entirely by email*, and third, it kept escalating. I ignored the initial email and started getting more and more, which became more and more passionate and lovelorn. I finally responded with a refusal to which I did not attach a reason, because I owe such men no explanations. The flurry of emails I got from my refusal were reminding me that I was causing him to suffer by loving me until he died and demanding that I pick from a range of reasons for refusal including and limited to:
- I do not like his kind of man.
- I already have some man.
- My plan is to be lonely.
I'm moving to Mbeya next week. Since marriage proposal no. 3 came during my week long visit there less than a month ago, we'll see if Mbeya can offer me more annoying suitors than Morogoro. For the record, I have decided that I will not marry for less than 60 cows and a small flock of chickens. What my father would do with cows I am having trouble imagining, but I know what I'm worth.
*There are less romantic forms of communication.
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