A Short Meditation On Original Sin

Written April 20, 2012
Fort Dauphin

    Imagine a group of people on a small island.  One of these people is a sailor, trained by the US Navy.  One day the sailor announces that he’s going to take a longboat out to sea towards the mainland and he will be happy to take some people with him.  However, there is only room enough in the boat for half of the islanders.  The first half of the island’s residents to arrive file onto the boat in an orderly fashion, and the sailor makes ready to shove off.
    However, the other half of the islanders have now whipped themselves into a fury, a panic that their neighbors will now be taken to the mainland to live lives of ease and prosperity, leaving them behind.  The latecomers surround the craft, digging their heels into the sand and splashing around in the shallow surf.
    Take us with you! they yell.  You can’t leave us behind, you have to take all of us!  Take us with you!  Take us, take us, take us!
    But you’re too many, the sailor calls, as diplomatically as he can.  The boat will surely capsize.  I’ll take another trip in two weeks, you can go then.
    No! they howl.  You will take us now!  You will take all of us!  We won’t let you leave if you don’t!
    The sailor quickly gets fed up with the cacophony.  You see, he never said he was taking anyone to the mainland.  His plan was to take the passengers within sight of the mainland, just for the day, then turn back.  There are any number of reefs and currents that would make the journey to the mainland impossible.
    Since no lives are in danger, the sailor has little compunction about chambering a round into a large-caliber shotgun and firing straight into the longboat’s bottom, scuttling it.  All the islanders set up a lamentation.  The first group of islanders scolds the second group for their stubbornness; the second group hurls abuse at the sailor for denying them the pleasures of an easy life.
    The sailor throws down the gun in disgust and stalks back to his hut.

    That was my English Club on Wednesday.
    I take most of the responsibility for its nosedive.  I was the one who severely miscalculated the mentality of middle schoolers in a developing country.  (Please note that that statement’s not a slur against kids in developing countries, it’s a slur against middle schoolers.)
    I failed to take into account that these kids just might be naive enough to think that learning English would be enough to get them to the United States.  No, it was not just a natural enthusiasm for a new language.  They literally thought that my English Club was going to revolutionize their lives.
    On Monday, when the students got back from Easter vacation, I announced that everyone would be welcome.  However, I forgot to mention that I was only going to let 50 people into the classroom, because that’s how many seats there are.
    So 100 kids showed up.  Half went in and sat down.  Half stayed around the windows, peering in as if their lives depended on the lesson.  It was touching, until the outside kids started making noise.  I told them they had to go home.  Then things got Dickensian.
    “We can’t go home, sir, we want to learn English!  Please teach us English, sir, please let us in, we won’t make noise, we can sit on the floor, just please, please let us in!  We want you to teach us English, sir, please!”
    Some of the children were on the verge of tears, and I wish I was exaggerating.
    But you know what?  I am not the sort of person who caves to the demands of a mob of children.  I also know the limits of my teaching style.  I cannot teach English to 100-odd middle schoolers.  Maybe if I had Education sector training, but I don’t.
    So I gave them ten minutes to leave, or there’d be no English Club.
    They didn’t leave.
    No English Club.  I packed up, erased the few words I’d written on the board, and left.  A gaggle of pouty schoolkids trailed me all the way to the market, where I stopped to buy tomatoes and oil.
    The next day in the market I passed a group of boys.  The oldest turned to his friends and whispered “Halako.” I hate him.
    Yeah, kid?  Say that to my face.  In English.  OH THAT’S RIGHT YOU CAN’T!
    Yeah, I’ll admit that only a few of the kids outside the class were actually making noise.  But I have no qualms about punishing the many for the crimes of the few.  If it’s good enough for the Church, it’s good enough for me.
    Of course, that analogy puts me in the place of God.
    But I’m not God.
    I’m just an American.

    I met with the directeur and he agreed with me that henceforth the English Club should be limited to the Troisiéme (eighth grade) students.  So English Club will continue, but in a much more limited form than I'd originally planned.
  

TV Land of Enchantment

The twins and Adolin (left) singing during a cloudburst.

I spent much of my Easter morning sharpening this knife.  Definitely did not go to no three-hour Lutheran church service.

Written April 12, 2012
Manambaro

    Anyone who knows my mother knows that she is crazy about two places in the world: Italy and New Mexico.  I spent the last two weeks getting reacquainted with the latter via a certain AMC show, on my laptop over dinner, so as not to waste my daylight working hours.
    On the 31st Wes gave me all four seasons of Breaking Bad.  For those who don’t know the show, it’s about an Albuquerque high school chemistry teacher, Walter White, who finds out that he has terminal lung cancer.  By coincidence he stumbles across a former student of his, Jesse Pinkman, who cooks and sells methamphetamine.  Lacking life insurance and wanting to store up money for his family before his death, Walt offers to team up with Jesse in the drug trade.  With their combination of chemistry expertise and (nominal) street smarts, the two set out to corner the local market on crystal meth.
    All the characters are well-rounded.  The most interesting thing about Walt’s character is how his diagnosis virtually eliminates his fear of a quick death, allowing him to face down armed drug dealers with steely calm.  At the same time, he has to keep up the charade of a mild-mannered husband and father while at home.  Sometimes it’s uncanny how much the character sounds like my own father.
    The episode Negro y Azul is pure genius.  Don’t bother checking the episode titles, you’ll know it when you get to it.
    So as I’ve been copying some of my notes on Manambaro onto my computer, I’ve been able to charge my computer at the local FIVOY bank and then watch two episodes a night with dinner.  The FIVOY staff are very gracious to let me use their office space to work on Peace Corps research, although sometimes I write blog posts instead.
    Project-wise, I think I’m going to have to nix the neem cream project I wanted to do, or at least modify it so if it were to go ahead it’d be ineligible for Peace Corps funding.  The only neem trees around here are in Mme Fleur’s yard and right next to the Catholic church.  I can create demand, but if the supply’s not readily available... Fleur’s curious about the cream, so she and I are going to experiment with her leaves on Monday.  Once I have some sample cream, maybe I can interest some of the merchants in planting neem in their yards, with the prospect of making and selling it in the future.  By this time next year, who knows?
    One thing I know I’m going to be doing next year, as opposed to this one, is a town-wide anti-malaria festival for World Malaria Day on the 25th.  I just... didn’t plan for it this first time around, okay?  But now I know that it’s coming up again in 378 days I can announce it ahead of time and have people come from miles around.  We can have games for kids, lectures for the adults, maybe even a mural-painting session. 
    I especially want to figure out a way for kids to build a sentimental attachment to their mosquito nets.  (“This is my mosquito net.  There are many like it, but this one is mine...”)  That way it’ll be harder for their fathers to take away the net and use it for fishing.  I’m thinking of doing a magazine drive so kids can cut American celebrities out of People and strange beasts out of National Geographic and tape them to the net, personalizing it.  Well, all that won’t be for a while.  World AIDS day comes first in December, and short of tying red ribbons around all the trees like they did at Guilford, I got no idea what to do then...

Happy Birthday, Mom.

High Fantasy Hangover

An Antandroy man sells razor-sharp throwing spears in Manambaro's market.  No, I did not buy one.

Written April 3, 2012
Manambaro

    This past week and a half I have been reading.  I’ve been working too, adding some cartilage to the bones of a future project on neem cream.  Neem is a tropical tree whose leaves have insect-repellant properties.  The cream is an easy-to-make alternative to bug spray, one more tool in the fight against malaria.  I’ve also been making plans to run a tabletop RPG, and if you don’t know what that is, it’s best left to a surprise.
    But mostly reading A Dance With Dragons, the fifth novel in the Game of Thrones series.  It’s not the best in the series, because it falls just short of A Storm of Swords.  And it is long.  Remember seeing Return of the King in theaters?  Or Pirates of the Caribbean?  It’s like that, in book form: so long you start to wonder just how it can still be going, but at the same time so good you don’t want it to end.
    I think it’s fair to say that I spent more time in Westeros than in Madagascar recently.  And you know you’re in Peace Corps when you start thinking, Tsk, tsk, those peasants in this completely fictional albeit pretty true-to-history medieval fantasy world have too many children.  They need some family planning counseling.
    Serendipitously, the second season of the Game of Thrones HBO show premiered on Sunday night.  Once a digital copy of the first episode arrives here, probably thanks to some intrepid online buccaneer, there’s little doubt it will explode among us PCVs.  That isolation is one of the problems of doing Peace Corps on an island, although I don’t imagine we’re as isolated as South Pacific Volunteers.
    Of course, after you finish such a grand epic, especially one that has sucked up every spare moment of your time with its black hole draw of WHAT HAPPENS NEXT?? you’re bound to feel a little empty inside.  Actually, the feeling is not so different from the one I felt when I left Niger for the cushiness of Rabat.  I’m no longer invested in this world of dragons, knights, and mercenaries, just like I got plucked out of one of desert winds, Muslim ceremony, and my Peace Corps duties.
    So instead of dwelling on the feeling, I began the second novel my dad sent me, Death of Kings by Bernard Cornwell, book six of his Saxon Tales.  It’s about King Albert the Great’s death in 899 and the next step in the Saxons’ ongoing struggle to oust the Vikings from England.  And it follows pretty much the same recipe as most of Cornwell’s other books: the intrigue in the first half only serves to set up the blood-drenched battle scenes in the second half.  Formulaic, but does that matter if it’s a good formula?  If I ever start writing war novels, which would naturally be set in a post-apocalyptic Shenandoah Valley, I hope I can write half as well as Cornwell.
    I’ve also been figuring out my new shortwave radio.  Nothing like a squealing radio on a tropical island to make you feel like Sayid from Lost.  It always takes a while to hunt down the BBC World Service, because it seems to be on different frequencies at different times of the day, but it’s worth it.  Mostly news about the coup in Mali, the violence in Syria, and Japan’s resettlement efforts in the nuclear zone.  I love the BBC for one simple reason: no frivolous news.  No Kim Kardashian, no Fox News fear-mongering, and not a word about Romney or Gingrich.
    Of course, the British are not at all immune from silliness: “I’m coming to you live from the New Forest, in the south of England.  It’ called the New Forest because it was new [very slight pause] when it was established by William the Conqueror [very slight pause] in 1079.”
    But then that story turned into a very interesting piece on local-level environmentalism.  Rule Britannia.