I'm used to inappropriate and ungraceful attentions from men. It happens. Not just in Tanzania, I used to live in Houston, where street harassment is an unfortunate and upsetting fact of life. Also, I am a woman in a field where women are seriously underrepresented which comes with a lot of less than pleasant social things. Nevertheless, there are still situation that are just so weird and puzzling I am fascinated. Among the new group of volunteers in country (and they are still trainees living with homestay families, they haven't sworn in and gone to site yet), is someone who has been collecting birth dates for all volunteers in country. Reasonable enough, there are people in country who like to make birthday cards for people and it's nice to get text messages from people on one's birthday. This man, however, apparently wanted birthdates so that he could make lists of volunteers organized by astrological sign and calculate his perfect romantic/copulatory partner from among the volunteers. He is making this blatantly obvious by contacting a lot of women who fit the bill (does he not realize we are going to talk to each other about this?), among them me. His desire is, and I quote directly, to "feel the sting of the female scorpio" and I am supposed to be his emotional support. Or something.
I would like to point out that I have never even met this person. This conversation was conducted entirely via text message.
My response was that this would require me to have human feelings and I don't do that. I refuse to even respond to the sting of the scorpio thing. He told me promptly that I shouldn't repress my feelings and substitute hard work for human connection. It's so nice that I have people to tell me what kind of feelings I really have, because otherwise how would I know? I didn't think I was doing any hard work by sitting on my couch watching anime and drinking a mug* of wine before going to bed, but I'm sure students of deriving generic personality phenomena based on extraterrestrial pareidolia know better than I. The conversation ended when I finally told him not to hit on me. I'd be willing to meet up with him because he's Peace Corps, but anything else he needs to approach in a less abrupt and non-personal medium. He did apologize and back off immediately, which was actually a pleasant surprise. Though his next move was to text another volunteer who did a training session for this group of trainees and ask about me. I think he hasn't quite realized how PC communications work, since the first thing this resulted in was the other volunteer contacting me and asking what should be said about me. I said that the party line is that I don't have feelings, and if I were capable of love, it would only be for a computer.
I haven't heard anything from the man since. There was probably a more mature way to handle the situation.
*Only the classiest drinking vessels for the Peace Corps.
In which my Computer becomes More Fabulous
It is embarrassing to go to the wrong class as a teacher. It is even more embarrassing, when one finally gets to the right class, to realize that there is scheduled maintenance in that lab that no one bothered to tell one about until five minutes after the class period began. Not that I can really complain about this, since I actually prefer to be the clueless foreigner (I get out of much paperwork and many pointless meetings by pretending that I have no idea how to read signs in Kiswahili or follow a Kiswahili conversation) but there are times when I wished I was a better and more proactive volunteer who insisted on knowing the schedule. But I'm not, so I went home and started coating things with glitter.
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| This computer is named the Nutmeg of Consolation, because it replaced my stolen computer. |
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| Much more festive than it's original design. |
"Do they Know it's Christmas?": Adventures in Self-righteous Ethnocentric Holiday Tripe
I realize this song has been around for a while. I don't care, I only recently found out about it, and I would like to beat the lyricist(s) to death with my righteous fists of educated fury and also a geography book. Following are lyrics.
It's Christmas time,
there's no need to be afraid.
At Christmas time
we let in light and banish shade
And in our world of plenty
we can spread a smile of Joy
Throw your arms around the world
at Christmas time.
But say a prayer,
Pray for the other ones.
At Christmas time it's hard
but when you're having fun...
There's a world outside your window
and it's a world of dread and fear
Where the only water flowing is
the bitter sting of tears
Where the Christmas bells that are ringing
are the clanging chimes of Doom
Well, tonight thank God it's them instead of you.
And there won't be snow in Africa this Christmas time
The greatest gift they'll get this year is life.
Ohh....
Where nothing ever grows
No rain or rivers flow
Do they know it's Christmas time at all?
Here's to you...
Raise a glass for everyone
Here's to them
Underneath that burning sun
Do they know it's Christmas time at all?
Feed the world...
Feed the world...
Feed the world,
Let them know it's Christmas time again.
Feed the world,
Let them know it's Christmas time again.
(Repeat several times and fade)
First of all, I need some clanging chimes of Doom, posthaste. That sounds awesome. Now that's off my chest, let's discuss geography. Africa, being a large place, has, amazingly enough, a multitude of geographic conditions. Some of which not only get snow, but have snow all year round. Altitude is an amazing thing. I'm at ~5,000 feet, and I wear sweats and slippers in the mornings. As far as the assertion there are no rains or rivers, Africa is home to some of the world's largest rivers. The Nile, for example. Victoria is the world's third largest lake, and interestingly enough, for the part of the continent in the tropics, Christmas can fall during the short rains, meaning that not only can rain flow, it makes transportation difficult because not all roads are paved. Furthermore, if truly nothing ever grew in Africa, we can assume that foreign colonial powers wouldn't have had such an interest (a continuing interest) in holding controlling monopolies on crops such as sugarcane, coffee, and tea. Here in Mbeya there is a lot of coffee grown, and absolutely none of it shows up for sale in the local market because it's all being shipped off for processing and then being sold to foreigners. A bit southeast of here in Njombe, Lipton has a lot of gigantic tea plantations. Some of Africa is desert, true, but some of it isn't. Africa: it's not a homogeneous landmass!
With geography out of the way, what about this "our world is wonderfully fun and perfect, but everything that isn't us (by which we mean Africa) is terrible" theme? The gasping ignorance and arrogance of such an assertion is flooring. The difference between the underprivileged of America and the underprivileged of Africa tends to be that privileged Americans assume that underprivileged Americans deserve it for being lazy or defying "traditional values" and should help themselves while Africans can't possibly help themselves and thus deserve help (I guess that's what is going on?). Note also the unwillingness to acknowledge that anything in Africa could be good or fun. Or at all educated about holidays like Christmas, nevermind that Africa has been missionaried to death already and Christmas is generally a national holiday in a lot of nations. Also, it's not like one has to celebrate Christmas, with or without snow, to have a good time with light and no shade (though didn't they say that the sun was burning and bad and snow was good? How do we have light if it is snowing? I'm confused.) If we really want to feed the world, let's have a sustainable development plan that demonstrates actual knowledge of and respect for the targeted area, ideally without the schadenfreude of explicitly thanking God it's them instead of us.
In which I am a University Organization's Keynote Speaker!
So it's just the computer club here at the Mbeya Institute/University* where I teach, and I'm the faculty advisor for the computer club, so I'm not sure it really counts. Nonetheless, I was asked to present something I was interested in to educate club members, and the club president advertised that I was going to be speaking and some people from outside the club and the computer department entirely showed up on the basis of this! The presentation also seemed to be well received--I just did a 50 minute or so talk on emulators and virtual machines and mostly just showed people the stuff on my computer, WINE, dosbox, a Windows XP virtual machine, and cygwin installed on the VM. I talked briefly about the hypervisor and the scheduling problems it has to solve and demonstrated how to install and uninstall a VM using virtualbox. I also mentioned that I was considering switching to vmplayer because Oracle acquired virtualbox and I don't like Oracle as a corporation, but my laziness tends to get in the way of my software related political gestures. I got a lot of fairly good questions, someone actually asked me to expound on scheduling algorithms! I love scheduling algorithms! My favorite is shortest deadline first, unfortunately, multicore systems tend to break it so we have to switch to the much less intellectually satisfying credit system. Anyway, I enjoyed it, other people seemed to enjoy it, and several people asked me for the virtualbox program (I came prepared with the windows setup package) and some of my .iso files. Preaching the good news of virtualization here in Tanzania!
*I think they changed recently to a university, which leads to an acronym change from MIST to MUST, which I actually disapprove of. Mist is poetic, must is either smelly or something demanded.
*I think they changed recently to a university, which leads to an acronym change from MIST to MUST, which I actually disapprove of. Mist is poetic, must is either smelly or something demanded.
UN Human Rights Commission Takes on Female Genital Mutilation
*Warning: political.*
The UN Human Rights Commission is calling for a ban on female genital mutilation. Good on them! Now, practically speaking, such a ban from the UN does nothing. But it's some high minded rhetoric from a respected international body on rights, meaning that it gives aid and social workers a talking point. If national governments do more than just agree with this that would be helpful. The UN is calling for education efforts, which would be great.
I can't imagine this will change anything in remote villages, at least not fast. Because even if a national government is totally in favor of this and outlaws it, well, what then? To be useful, a government should have the resources to actually protect girls from the practice, which includes education campaigns to change a culture in which the girls want to be circumcised for reasons of status, and the ability to usefully respond to a situation in which a circumcision still happens.
I don't see prosecution, even assuming a meaningful justice system, doing anything to end the practice. Parents do it to their children because they believe it's the thing to do to their children adn will resent interference. For another thing, the people who perform FGM are usually respected members of the community, so the victim might be blamed for a respected elder being put in jail. Unless the government has the resources to care for and relocate a victim (assuming the poor girl speaks something other than the tribal language and will still have access to education such that she will be able to support herself away from her family) prosecution is actually going to make the situation much worse for the victim.
Tanzania has outlawed the practice of FGM for some time now, and according to a schoolgirl I talked to in Morogoro, therefore no one does it. She may be a tad optimistic. It is well known that FGM occurs among the Maasai tribe, and there are lots of NGOs (non-government organizations) spending a lot of money to try to change this. On a grass roots level, a friend of mine who volunteers on the Maasai steppe with the African Wildlife Foundation is good friends with a lot of Maasai men and she has gotten a very positive response from casual conversations in which she explains to men in graphic detail what they need to do to make their wives want to have sex with them more often. Note that in Tanzania, fast and dry is the ideal sexual encounter. So my friend talks about foreplay and fingering and the role of the clitoris and lots of other fun stuff, and the men are fascinated and want to learn more. Opposing misogynistic practices like FGM in terms of better sex for men is, of course, not ideal, but behavior change happens slowly and for reasons that people already agree with. Next step, trying to change a culture in which a woman's moral compass is supposed to be between her legs, and remove the major justification for FGM, i.e., women are huge sluts who must be prevented with extreme measures from having sex except under controlled circumstances.
The Maasai, however, are a bit of a special tribe in that foreigners are willing to pay good money to study and photograph them. The less cool tribes don't get that amount of foreign aid. Besides which, Maasai are not ethnically Bantu, unlike most of the rest of Tanzania, and are generally the butt of jokes told about groups of people. (E.g. restaurants that advertise their form will often include at the end the phrase "na kingine" meaning "and others." It's the etc. phrase of Kiswahili. The joke is that it is the Maasai who walks into the restaurant and tries to order the na kingine.) So it may also be the case that the Tanzanian government is more than willing to other Maasai, because people are always more in favor of cultural change when it happens to definitely other cultures that can be conveniently looked down on. How much of a problem FGM is among other tribes here I'm not in a good position to know, in that I have always been in towns, which tend to be cosmopolitan enough to not have strong tribal identities. A lady I met in Babati did tell me about a tribe in the Manyara area that spends all their time singing and dancing, but is very misogynistic and practices FGM, but I forget the name of this tribe. Also, I don't just ask about FGM, or actually about anything that might seem obviously a sensitive subject. If people ask me about something sensitive, I take that to mean they feel comfortable about it and respond as best I can, but I am not the one to bring these things up. A paper from Mzumbe university citing sources from about 10 years ago suggests that about 18% of women in Tanzania suffer from FGM and about 20 out of the 150 tribes practice it, and there's a newspaper article from fairly recently talking about the practice up in the Mara region, so I'm going to say it's quite the issue.
By the way, this does happen in developed nations, usually among diaspora populations, as the UN points out. Most well-known (to me at least) are the cases of girls in Britain taken to other countries to visit their relatives and cut while there. Infuriatingly enough, I cannot imagine the US doing anything to about this because the justification behind FGM is that it prevents women from having extramarital sex, and it is STILL a serious talking point for the US whether easy access to contraceptives and life-saving vaccines like HPV will encourage women to have sex. Sluttiness: still more of a concern than health. Grr.
Anyway, I'm still happy that the UN is trying to make a gesture. If money can get thrown into good education campaigns, that will be even better.
The UN Human Rights Commission is calling for a ban on female genital mutilation. Good on them! Now, practically speaking, such a ban from the UN does nothing. But it's some high minded rhetoric from a respected international body on rights, meaning that it gives aid and social workers a talking point. If national governments do more than just agree with this that would be helpful. The UN is calling for education efforts, which would be great.
I can't imagine this will change anything in remote villages, at least not fast. Because even if a national government is totally in favor of this and outlaws it, well, what then? To be useful, a government should have the resources to actually protect girls from the practice, which includes education campaigns to change a culture in which the girls want to be circumcised for reasons of status, and the ability to usefully respond to a situation in which a circumcision still happens.
I don't see prosecution, even assuming a meaningful justice system, doing anything to end the practice. Parents do it to their children because they believe it's the thing to do to their children adn will resent interference. For another thing, the people who perform FGM are usually respected members of the community, so the victim might be blamed for a respected elder being put in jail. Unless the government has the resources to care for and relocate a victim (assuming the poor girl speaks something other than the tribal language and will still have access to education such that she will be able to support herself away from her family) prosecution is actually going to make the situation much worse for the victim.
Tanzania has outlawed the practice of FGM for some time now, and according to a schoolgirl I talked to in Morogoro, therefore no one does it. She may be a tad optimistic. It is well known that FGM occurs among the Maasai tribe, and there are lots of NGOs (non-government organizations) spending a lot of money to try to change this. On a grass roots level, a friend of mine who volunteers on the Maasai steppe with the African Wildlife Foundation is good friends with a lot of Maasai men and she has gotten a very positive response from casual conversations in which she explains to men in graphic detail what they need to do to make their wives want to have sex with them more often. Note that in Tanzania, fast and dry is the ideal sexual encounter. So my friend talks about foreplay and fingering and the role of the clitoris and lots of other fun stuff, and the men are fascinated and want to learn more. Opposing misogynistic practices like FGM in terms of better sex for men is, of course, not ideal, but behavior change happens slowly and for reasons that people already agree with. Next step, trying to change a culture in which a woman's moral compass is supposed to be between her legs, and remove the major justification for FGM, i.e., women are huge sluts who must be prevented with extreme measures from having sex except under controlled circumstances.
The Maasai, however, are a bit of a special tribe in that foreigners are willing to pay good money to study and photograph them. The less cool tribes don't get that amount of foreign aid. Besides which, Maasai are not ethnically Bantu, unlike most of the rest of Tanzania, and are generally the butt of jokes told about groups of people. (E.g. restaurants that advertise their form will often include at the end the phrase "na kingine" meaning "and others." It's the etc. phrase of Kiswahili. The joke is that it is the Maasai who walks into the restaurant and tries to order the na kingine.) So it may also be the case that the Tanzanian government is more than willing to other Maasai, because people are always more in favor of cultural change when it happens to definitely other cultures that can be conveniently looked down on. How much of a problem FGM is among other tribes here I'm not in a good position to know, in that I have always been in towns, which tend to be cosmopolitan enough to not have strong tribal identities. A lady I met in Babati did tell me about a tribe in the Manyara area that spends all their time singing and dancing, but is very misogynistic and practices FGM, but I forget the name of this tribe. Also, I don't just ask about FGM, or actually about anything that might seem obviously a sensitive subject. If people ask me about something sensitive, I take that to mean they feel comfortable about it and respond as best I can, but I am not the one to bring these things up. A paper from Mzumbe university citing sources from about 10 years ago suggests that about 18% of women in Tanzania suffer from FGM and about 20 out of the 150 tribes practice it, and there's a newspaper article from fairly recently talking about the practice up in the Mara region, so I'm going to say it's quite the issue.
By the way, this does happen in developed nations, usually among diaspora populations, as the UN points out. Most well-known (to me at least) are the cases of girls in Britain taken to other countries to visit their relatives and cut while there. Infuriatingly enough, I cannot imagine the US doing anything to about this because the justification behind FGM is that it prevents women from having extramarital sex, and it is STILL a serious talking point for the US whether easy access to contraceptives and life-saving vaccines like HPV will encourage women to have sex. Sluttiness: still more of a concern than health. Grr.
Anyway, I'm still happy that the UN is trying to make a gesture. If money can get thrown into good education campaigns, that will be even better.
Things I Find on the Inside of my Clothing
Algorithmic Thinking
Some of my students care. Well, enough that they stay after class. On Mondays, I have class from 10:00am to 12:10, and then another class at 1:25. So I often just stay in the lab between and answer questions for whatever students was to come talk to me about programming, or computers in general. Or just about the somewhat complicated way I use my computer. I demonstrated making a virtual machine, and the students' eyes got big and they thought it was wonderful. VMs really are cool. It reminds me of why I did my graduate research on them in the first place. Anyway, this Monday, I was going over the modulus operator with a student (mod being one of those things that few people who aren't computer scientists use, and on first introduction, it's somewhat incomprehensible why one would ever use it), and had an example with the turtle in which we have a loop that repeats m time but we only want the turtle to draw a circle every 10th time through the loop. This is a good way to show how useful mod is. One of the students commented that he didn't understand how computer science people could take a problem and just come up with the steps to solve it. Good on him for noticing that this is the essence of computer science! I took the opportunity to wax lyrical about algorithmic thinking. Frances Allen, who is one of my heroes, being as she is the first woman to win the Turing Award, actually said in a lecture I was privileged to attend "algorithmic thinking is what computer science brings that revolutionizes thinking and is why computer science can become queen of the sciences." (I might be paraphrasing because I don't remember it exactly). And talked about how I give them assignments in class and first I talk about how to break the problem into steps and then I try to force people to follow the steps exactly. (It is amazing how people, given exact pseudocode to follow, don't bother to try following it.) Anyway, it is students like that that make me think I might not be wasting my time playing around in Africa on government money after all.
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