C, F, L, R

Club Informatique and I have been starting work on constructing our local-area network (réseau local) with the materials we got from the préstataire a month or two ago. First, I "hired"/invited a technician from Aladji Informatique to come give a talk about how to sertir (we’d say "crimp") an Ethernet cable. That was Wednesday.

It’s nice to not be at the front of the class for once.

This is one of the 4e classrooms that we commandeered for the lesson.

Domche, Cat 5 cable, Wolverine sideburns.

My hair is growing out.

This is Josiane. She’s the daughter of Madame-Ann-the-orange-lady and she’s basically adorbs. She speaks really quietly and quickly and she avoids eye contact and she’s at this stage where every time she touches the computer at all, it’s wide-eyed magical. "Try it," I’ll say, and then she will and she’ll get this look of awestruck wonder. The other day she asked how long I was going to stay here in this country and finding that it was "only" five months, she got really sad, maybe even cried a little bit. I couldn’t tell if it was honest distress at not being able to learn informatique from me — "but there’ll be other volunteers," I said, and she replied, "but they won’t be you" — or something of a girlish crush. "I can’t stay," I told her. "I’m an only child, and every day that I’m here, my parents suffer without me" — my go-to reason for why I’m not staying any longer. In a rash decision I told her that when she gets her Bac she can come visit me in the States, figuring that if it is a girlish crush it’ll give her something to fixate on long enough to get over it. I regretted it pretty much immediately but yesterday she slipped a note into my bag that says "Grand merci as you have made me go to class. What you said to me the other day was true because you told me that you’re the only child to your mother. Me too I’ve thought a lot." So who knows.

We set up a couple cables yesterday — some of them seem to work but they made about a dozen that seem faulty in one way or another and need to be triaged. I demonstrated that the network was working using the nc command to set up a rudimentary telnet server, but with luck tomorrow I can set up some real filesharing software and a web server or something. Also, I’d really love to set up a few networked games — since ZSNES is already on the computers, that would be cool, and something cute like Teeworlds would be wonderful. I’d school them, of course, but I’d be humble about it.

This is the most successful project I’ve had as a volunteer, and it’s really gratifying (as opposed to the other year and a half of pure slog). It’s a little depressing, though, that it took me this long to get to a point where something like this could actually happen. More as it develops..

Uncategorized pictures

Yaya found this amazing research paper on the different impacts of British versus French colonial policy, which she produced to support my assertion that Anglophone Cameroonians are just better in general than Francophone Cameroonians (more polite or respectful, more engaging, or just better people). It’s been sitting on my hard drive for a couple weeks, I’m only just now getting to read it. It touches on a lot of my favorite things: data analysis, judging people, and Anglophones. It is full of wonderful juicy bits:

Hall and Jones (1999) find that output per worker is correlated with language, with English having a particularly strong positive effect, which they see as being primarily caused by the positive economic effect of European settlement.

Or

The arbitrary nature of colonial boundaries in Africa provided the starting point for a number of scholars to conduct qualitative small n-studies, generally comparing members of the same ethnic group on different sides of a boundary. Miles (1994) studied the Hausa of Nigeria and Niger, Welch (1966) the Ewe of Togo and Ghana, and Asiwaju (1976) the Yoruba of Nigeria and Benin. All argued that there were very marked differences in policy across empires, with the British-controlled areas being characterized by greater economic dynamism and respect for traditional political institutions than French-controlled areas.

Or

The economic efficiency of Protestantism is supported by Acemoglu, Johnson and Robinson (2001) who found evidence for the effect of religion on per capita income.

Or

The dream of a German empire in Central Africa, and the careers of a generation of German-speaking Africans, were destroyed by the outbreak of the First World War.

You really ought to read this paper, it’s wonderful.

Uncategorized anglophones, culture shock

You may have a hard time believing that her parents really named her Bulimia, but most Zhenae don’t believe that your parents really named you a word that translates as "cloaca", so it’s perfectly plausible that she be a volunteer here, in this same village as me. We are drinking for the whole usual litany of reasons and I am noting the prevalence of those armbands. We are splitting our sixth beer, which makes it something like three per person, but I think I have been drinking a little more than Bulimia on each of those six beers so maybe it is more like three and a half versus two and a half. It appears that beer affects me more sincerely than wine or sachets because I am seething with incoherent drunken rage. Bulimia has been telling me stories upon stories and I no longer trust anyone in this village or even on this planet. I am explaining that I do not think it is their fault but that culturally I do not think Zhenae are equipped to feel love. They can’t, they just can’t the same way that we do. They don’t trust each other. Earther love is based on trust. How can you be in love with someone when you can’t even give them the truth or trust that they are giving the truth to you?

Bulimia is a little older than me and she is looking at me with eyes that say that she is about to give me the full benefit of those years of wisdom. She says, "Don’t forget about Sally," who is two villages over and marrying a Zhenae, "or her fiancé Road. I think this is one of those racial tension things. Equatorial Zhenae aren’t the same as the plateau Zhenae we have here. I think Road is capable of love in a way that David isn’t." (David being the name of a particularly notorious villager.)

"I just hope Road is…" and I fumble for a moment, trying to decide what I want to wish about him. He’s a good guy and at best he seems to love Sally. "I just hope Road is exactly as he seems."

"I’ll drink to that," Bulimia says, and so we do. Night is falling, and we have to decide whether to order the seventh beer or what. Bulimia suggests we move to one of our houses, not in a seductive way but in the sisterly way that develops when you share a village with someone. Even Zhenae friends of mine have commented on how isolated I am and how stressed I seem to be, and I would like to continue this little Earther bitchfest but I have class in the morning so if I am going to continue drinking, I should do it at home and alone. So we part ways.

Hiring transport on this planet is always an adventure. The trick is to be liberal about calling out your destination. "College Intersection," I shout, and on the fourth time a grav-drop slows long enough for me to board, and after I promise him less money than I spent on beer, we are heading uphill. He is wearing an armband, and by way of support I tell him, "Hey, nice armband". He snorts something like amusement. That’s basically as much as I can do in one night, so I just enjoy the ride and figure I’ll cope with this planet better in the morning.

Uncategorized fiction

It is the end of a Monday and I am just getting out of 2e, nominally 13h50-14h40 but typically 13h50 until I can’t cope any more or all the students are gone. Today that hour arrived at 16h, which is kind of early. I closed the lab on the last student after I got tired of watching her do the same stupid thing over and over again while ignoring my profoundly wise, Socratic-style questions. I am tired of 2e C (I am supposed to be grading their papers even now). I am tired of the way that they chat and goof off and ignore me when I lecture and the way that they subsequently fail to perform at all in the lab. I am not sure whether I am more tired of this completely rambunctious lack of self-control or its opposite, my 2e A4 class’s abject and complete indifference.

You might not know this but when I went home for summer vacation last year, I packed a few essential provisions (as in "où sont les provisions?"): sesame oil, packed in a last-minute flash of inspiration, because sesame oil is awesome. Second: a can of stuffed grape leaves. I have been saving this can of stuffed grape leaves. It is my treasure. I have never mentioned it to any other volunteer and I have no intention of sharing it. It is In Case of Emergency. I already know that a day will come when I will need that can of stuffed grape leaves — a day when sachets and chocolate are not enough, when I cannot bear to be doing this work or being in this village. When this day comes, I will lock my door, turn off all my lights, crawl into my bed with the can of stuffed grape leaves, open it very carefully, and eat every last one.

Today was almost that day. Almost. I am writing this from the sober end of three sachets and 1/4 bar of chocolate I still can’t bring myself to grade these tests.

As I said, I cut out early because "we" had a rendez-vous at the sousprefet’s house to install some software so I absolutely had to peace out. We didn’t install all of it — for some reason Nero 7 isn’t compatible with Windows 7? — but I’ve successfully unloaded the rest of that menial travail onto one of the students of the new "informatique club".

It turns out that this is going to be the blog post to bump the Maroc pictures off the front page of my blog, so I feel comfortable adding some more pictures to this post.

This is the newly-reinstated "Club Informatique". We meet whenever I am capable of being in the lab without threatening to stave someone’s head in. From right to left, there are: Brice, me, "Steven" (although I thought his name was Simeu), Domche, and I think Poula, with the lower row being André and Fokui Justin. During this (obviously staged) shot I am saying something along the lines of "And as you can see here, the problem is that this keyboard has had the wire yanked out of it and so there is absolutely no possibility that it can ever donne."

This is Brice. He approached me because his friend had installed CentOS on his laptop and he was having problems with getting various software thingies to work. Solution: install Ubuntu. Good kid, but a little slow to see implications or work things out thoroughly. (He keeps trying to get Windows software to work on Linux or vice versa.)

"See, this is where the wire would be." On the right is Fokui Justin, who came to me with a bunch of students from the 1e class I don’t teach. The school’s other Informatique teacher gave them an assignment to "go research" algorithms (which is one of his lazier ways of getting around the fact that he has no idea what they are or how to teach them) so I gave them a crash-course. Students from that class still drift in and out of the lab, trying to learn HTML from a teacher who doesn’t really know it himself.

Everyone was doing gang signs…

… But this is my favorite: "West Region!"

This is Domche, one of my students from Tle C/D. (In my head I call him "Wolverine", because he sports this thin, not visible in this photo, but noticeable sideburn-like beard.) He’s pretty motivated, comes to lab often, and takes copious, copious notes in this giant black notebook. I really like him and it is kind of frustrating to me that there is absolutely no way I can transmit to him even a significant fraction of the experience I have with computers. The Bacc now has a mandatory Informatique section, but Domche came to me early in the year saying he’d decided to also take the optional Informatique section and could I teach him?

Funny story, actually. After that, I told him I was always around and to just come with an idea of what he wanted to learn. He asked how he could compensate me for my time and (as a volunteer) I told him I wasn’t interested in his money. He responded that it was nevertheless the way he preferred to operate and, lacking other recourse, I tried to "display some adaptability" by using the Cameroonian formulation of "no" that I’ve heard the most often: "We’ll see". I don’t know how he took it, but he said "J’ai compris", literally "I understood", but idiomatically something like "Got it".

I don’t yet have a close-up of André, one of the coolest kids in my salle. He’s younger than the other ones by at least four years, probably closer to eight, and he’s absolutely awesome. He’s one of the random kids I trust with my house keys ("Go get me more blank CDs") and yesterday he came up to me and said he wanted me to teach him HTML!

There are a few other kids I’d like to have pictures of in this post, but that’ll have to wait for the "suite". Anyhow, so this is what I’m doing after school every day when I’m not drinking or eating chocolate.

(I secretly love that Domche’s still doing the live-long-and-prosper sign.)

Uncategorized pictures

Sometimes, when I don’t put the date in the corner of the board, my students get upset. This year I’ve been cultivating something of a Mad-Hatter Willy-Wonka style persona (Last year I started from the assumption that I was their friend. You’re not their friend. You can never be their friend. You are an authority. They are your children. You are therefore their parent.) so I’ve been putting all kinds of things up in that corner when they complain that I forgot. They’re used to the French style of dates (20 fevrier 2012) or the English style (February 20th, 2012), but they don’t like informatique style (2012-02-20 or 2012 fev 20). To tweak them I’ve started putting all kinds of other crap up there, my personal favorite being "42 Septober 2088", but also a simple "aujourd’hui" ("today"). My 4es go utterly apeshit when I do things like this. They’ll beg and plead with me that they be allowed to go up to the board and correct it. When they didn’t like "aujourd’hui" I decided to correct it myself to "demain" ("tomorrow"). Personally I was hoping to provoke a riot, but not quite. (They’re just 4es.) The lesson being that: I don’t fucking care what the board says. You already know what the date is. And more to the point, I don’t care whether you write it correctly in your notebooks or not.

I’m telling you this because it’s the first thing I came up with when I wrote the date at the top of this entry. I had a hard time writing it at first because I’ve been drinking. I’ve been drinking because it’s President’s Day, or at least Tor.com says it’s president’s day and that’s good enough for me.

A real man rides a bear!

I’m ACTUALLY drinking because every day is a 10-hour day, with today’s hours being attributable to:

• class (4 "hours")
• faire-ing the marché (1.5 hours including a much-needed beans-and-beignet breakfast)
• lab time (5.5 hours, including 7 minutes of standing around and watching M. Diffo play Spider Solitaire badly while insisting that he finish the game he just started)

I got the chance to repose a little bit after yesterday (what we call "Sunday"), which was only a 6 hour day in terms of time spent in the lab, but an 8 hour day when you count the amount of time people spent standing outside my door and playing music while waiting for me to grace them with my presence.

Things I have not yet worked on today include: grading my 3es (or any other class), cooking anything, becoming a better person, etc. I’m probably going to starve while pleuring my eyes out, clutching this awful bottle of "Djindja" (i.e. "Ginger") whiskey, 1500 CFA, which is actually the worst thing I’ve drank in country, even worse than the other thing that I said was the worst thing I’ve drank in country ("Samurai Rum-Cafe", also 1500 CFA).

Things I hate: people knocking on my door after 19h, by which time I become increasingly undressed, especially after I drink.

The lab was a little bit bad today because (my fault!) Domche asked some questions: "How does one go about writing a program?" and then "How does one make that program enter into the menu of programs that I see if I click in this corner of the screen?" Both of which are legitimate questions but I think I made his brain catch fire by breaking out the terminal emulator and doing a bunch of tab-completion (which made him so angry that he explicitly asked me about it) and making things happen that, even to a Tle C student, might resemble magic. Domche, if you ever read this, I’m sorry. I’ll be honest, I’m not really good at teaching. I just watch where the first student stumbles and then I remember that, oh, right, actually, none of the things I took for granted make sense to you yet. I still need to explain what a terminal emulator is, why I used it, tab-completion, etc. whereas students tend to think of files as things you see in a window.

You know why else I’m drinking? Because I had been planning (always a bad idea in Cameroon) to wake up, go to the school, photocopy my exams, and interroge my class of 4e. Instead what happened was that I went to the secretary’s office, printed out my exam, and then there was no paper to photocopy it, so I was like "Whatever, going to the market", and then when I got back to the school, someone had taken the secretary’s keys so even the single exams I’d printed out before photocopying were lost to me. End result: 4m2 didn’t take a test today. Whatever! It wasn’t even a very good test! We’ll try to give it to them again on Wednesday. Otherwise, bottoms up!

When Boris came to visit this weekend (oh, did I mention? This is why I drink) we went to a bar (naturally) and the first drink I offered a toast along the lines of "à la santé" ("to our health"). Boris responded, "To Jenny". (Who is probably in Ethiopia or something. Did you know Ethiopia was never colonized, even by Egypt? History is fascinating.) This was of course before I started insulting the drunk who had hit me up for a beer by saying that everyone from this village is a drunkard.

You know what I wish I’d had before I started writing this blog post? Pictures of the students that were in the lab today. I’m gonna film the shit out of them, just you wait. I even kept my camera in my bag but I just haven’t had circumstances line up just yet. Soon. Soon.

Look what I picked up two or three market days ago! They definitely do not fit me.

Uncategorized

"Monsieur!" my Terminale students shouted as I entered the room. "Have you heard? The lycée is sexuel!"

That’s the first and best introduction I got to the scandal at the lycée. Apparently a student walked into the proviseur’s office to find him seated with a female student on one of his two sofas. It’s not clear what the two were doing that alarmed the interloper, but now the story is that he’s been picking up (draguer) students ("as early as 2e", Brondon says, "or even 3e, if it’s an older girl"). An impromptu rassemblement was arranged so that these rumors could be properly quelled. The girl who walked in wasn’t able to name an exact date in full public view of the whole school, so obviously she’s making it up or whatever and certainly not being railroaded.

Madame Ann, the orange lady at the school, had been trying to encourage me to "leave with" Dulisse, one of my smarter students in 1ere. It’s not good, I kept saying, for a teacher to hook up with his students. This whole affair’s been helpful in making that point clear. Madame Ann’s take on this has been 1. "Is he even capable of that kind of activity?" (Our proviseur is beginning to show his age.) and 2. "Obviously that sort of thing happens but I have a hard time imagining that a man of his cunning would use his office instead of just going to a hotel in Bafoussam. I mean, the man has a car."

This is Youth Week so I didn’t have class Friday, instead being obligated to go to a matinée culturelle where the youth of our village presented whatever stupid bullshit they do, mostly dances and a few skits. Also, "interpretations", which are straight-up lip syncing performances. It is traditional for people to show their appreciation for these acts with money, either collected in a basket or rubbed on the forehead in a manner suggestive of wiping off sweat. Some of the acts were enjoyable in one way or another — I especially liked the dance number set to "Le Prince Charmant", starring a girl who exuded the kind of confidence you get from being the prettiest girl in an 800-person high school — but mostly it went on too long. One thing that always squicks me about this type of event is the gyrations that the kids do. It’s not just the underage girls, but sometimes even the underage boys. My feeling is that if you’re too young to need a bra, you’re certainly too young to need sparkly bra straps. Sexuel indeed. I’ll try to upload videos of the whole spectacle when I next get my hands on some decent Internet.

The kids in the lab have been pretty well-behaved lately, not sure if it was the threat to their game time or the threat of violence. I also suggested that if they didn’t shape up I would delete GTA, then destroy all the computers, burn them and then pee-pee on the ashes. For one reason or another they’ve started to "take conscience" and they are either trying to develop moral sensibility or pretending really hard. Last Wednesday a good number of them told me I shouldn’t open the door to the lab at all because of how unorderly they were being, and then one of them had the idea that I should open the door, then go inside the lab and close it and let in students one at a time.

So the students are starting to manage themselves. One of them even stood at the door and tried to control the crush of students, letting them pass one by one until he just gave up and ran to a computer. I kind of like seeing this sort of thing, but I never know if a given student is bossing people around just because he can, or trying to get a monopoly on the good computers for him and his friends, or what. (Smart money says they’re not doing it out of a sense of duty or fairness.) I guess they’re not really sure either, and this is all part of their development into a capable and informed citizenry.

As for beating the kids, one thing happened that made me regret ever raising a hand: in all this self-discipline discovery, one of my favorite little kids, André, was trying to get some kids out of the lab during class hours. His threats and pleas fell on deaf ears. So what did he do? He went for the stick, the same stick I used just a week or two ago. Really drove home the idea that I’m modeling behavior for these kids. Then again, Kalika writes that they like hitting each other so maybe it’s no big deal. Another time in lab, one of my Terminales was getting jostled by littler kids on the same bench, and without skipping a beat he turned around and said "I’m gonna break your head, eh?"

Haven’t been writing much, mostly due to lack of time. I have a report to write on what I’ve been doing the last four months (teaching, you goofballs!) and I should probably be writing tests. Mostly I’ve been in the lab, working with the three or four students who actually want to learn something. Home stretch..

Uncategorized

As you probably know, I follow most or all of the Volunteer blogs that I come across. Most of them don’t impress me at first but some of them are really good. Eriika is from one of the newer stages and she’s a pretty good writer. Here is her post about a ghost story that I never got to hear in full. I read this on Tuesday night when the power was out and freaked the fuck out. I’ll note that I always thought the word sounded more like "Macaque", but it’s not my patois so I’ll leave it to them.

Rosalie posted lately about discipline. I really admire Rosalie’s spirit and gusto and idealism and willingness to take a stand for her beliefs and all that, but my values aren’t the same as her values. Before I came to this country, I probably would have said, as she does, that corporal punishment is just unacceptable and hitting a student is bad, but this is one of those things that Cameroon has changed in me. When students annoy me — and they usually annoy me — I can make a dry remark about their intelligence, I can yell at them, but they tend to just brush that off. I can tell them to get the hell out of the classroom and they drag their feet and take their time, or they’ll just stay there and look at me with puppy eyes or beg forgiveness. But once you start kicking a few of them, man, you get your way fast!

Timothy said last year that all our non-violent methods of discipline are so laughably ineffective on our students because they aren’t calibrated to our culture. They don’t really understand that you’re angry or that they’ve fucked up until physical pain (or the threat of physical pain) is applied. This is certainly not optimal, but it is one of the realities on the ground.

Rosalie says she doesn’t have problems of discipline in her classes and she doesn’t use any punishment more painful than docking points. Rosalie is a heroine in my book and watching her manage a class is one of the best things you can do in this country, but I’m not having that kind of success, especially outside of the classroom in contexts like Club Informatique. Since I installed a bunch of SNES games on my computers, the kids have gotten utterly bloodthirsty. They will crowd around the lab door for hours waiting to see if I will open the lab or not that day. They will stay in the lab and play until dark. Students have told me that I need to stop opening the lab because the other kids won’t even go home any more, they just want to play on the computers all the time. I said if a child didn’t want to go home that’s the problem of the parents, to instill that kind of responsibility in their children, and students have said, "Yes, monsieur, the parents hit them every single day but they still prefer to stay here."

The point being that now I am faced with children who may one day stab each other to get into the computer lab. EVERY single time I open the lab door there is a mosh-pit of squirming little bodies all trying to get through the door at once. It’s my second year coping with this kind of thing and I thought once the novelty of the lab wore off, they’d be a little more blasé about it, but no such luck. Last Friday I refused to let them in until they formed a line and could only let a few in before it became the familiar type of mess. I closed the door and waited for them to calm down and order themselves again, and while I was waiting I identified a couple of my Terminales who wanted to actually work on the computers. I told the mass of kids that I was letting my Terminales in and the rest of them were going to stay outdoors until they were calm. But when I opened the door, they all rushed in! Open defiance! This is what the old-school authoritarian Cameroonian teachers would refer to as "insolence".

Of course, like Rosalie I don’t want to hit the students, not least because it’s technically illegal, so I turned off the power to the computers and screamed at them to all leave until Monday. That led them all to standing outside the door, periodically begging "Please, monsieur, forgive us!", basically making noise and being nuisances, and even dragging benches over to the windows so they could peer in at what was going on. Eventually they came into the lab without permission AGAIN. So out you go again, no computers until Thursday. But they KEEP coming in and they KEEP playing video games so now I’ve started dragging kids out of the lab by their ears. Their behavior is frankly unacceptable, and the forms of discipline I have been trying to impose just aren’t taking. But you know what worked really well? When a strapping lad from première grabbed a meaty-looking switch and brought it to the lab door with a certain expression on his face. They cleared right out, then.

We’ll see if they behave any better tomorrow, when the punishment is formally over. If not, I’m deleting all the games off all the computers. It shouldn’t be this hard.. So remind me, Rosalie, why I shouldn’t just slap ‘em around a bit? She writes that it never occurred to her to have to explain why beating kids is bad, but I don’t have too many reasons not to.

Ultimately this is the story of all development work. It’s easiest to work within the constraints of their culture, to limp along with them using the tools available. It’s way harder to fight that culture, to go outside it and bang on it until it works better, and it’s not what I’m good at.

A bunch of villageois kids sitting on what should be a fountain, but doesn’t work. Among them is Kamgang Basile, easily the worst student in the school. Somehow he graduated 3e and he’s in me 2A4 (Séconde Arts) class, which is probably my worst class. They’re raising their hands and shouting "No, no, no!" because I didn’t ask permission to take their picture. (Obviously the polite thing to do would be to ask first, but these are the kids who have never been polite to me and thus do not merit politeness.) Afterwards they asked me if I was going to use it in my "reports" or to show "the behavior of blacks". Then they said that the only fair thing to do was to pay each of them 200 CFA.

This is the kind of bread we call "gateau". It comes in rectangular bricks like these. This particular one is getting mustard and tomatoes to make a sandwich out of.

Timothy’s library. (We’re using it for a regional meeting.)

My Terminales are learning HTML. "When it’s good, it’s really good, but when it’s bad, well, you know how it goes.."

Babies! This is the baby of a German woman and a Cameroonian man. He can be described by the word metise, which is something like "mulatto". (Describing the race or color of someone in Cameroon is not inherently rude as it is in the States.)

We decided to refresh ourselves at Air Force One, which is either affiliated with or at least neighbors with Denver. (These are bars, naturally.)

Uncategorized

[Note: Today's coping mechanisms include: two little packets of Swedish fish from my parents (thanks guys!), three sips of refrigerator-cold Sprite, and this little bit of writing.]

Zhenae aren’t unattractive, exactly. Some are even beautiful, and like humans, occasionally you find one who is breathtaking. Sometimes people talk about Zhenae looking like slightly less refined humans, or the other way around, but they really look just different — you couldn’t confuse a human with a Zhenae — but within striking distance. It’s the same way they think different, but still close enough that you can communicate with them. They look different, but not too different. And anyhow, I’m thinking now of a Dutch woman from a long time ago and people aren’t really all the same either, no matter what they look like.

There’s a funny story about this. One time I was in my village visiting a Zhenae friend and his daughter was there outside, cooking, but her voice sounded oddly different. I know he has lots of daughters and I thought to myself, "I’ll bet that’s not Betteu", but I didn’t know how to approach the subject. She recognized me, of course: "Good evening, Sandiego! How’s the school?". But one thing I really do love about the Zhenae is their frankness, so I just said to my friend, "That’s not Betteu, is it?" And he laughed, a grinding noise like a whetting stone, and he said "You can’t tell them apart?"

I had this moment of shame, oh no, I’m *that human, that thinks all Zhenae look alike*, and then it was replaced immediately with relief when he said "That’s Djan. They’re twins."

This is the kind of thing I’m thinking about as I sit in the club, letting my mind drift in a pool of whiskey. I’m in my "region" and I am noting with approval the black arm-bands, symbols of the political unrest we’ve been actively fomenting. It’s about a month after I chose my regional Zhenae counterpart for Revolution Committee, and judging by the arm-bands, he’s been doing well. Each flashing light picks out some arm-bands, tied between the first and second arm joints (just north of a bicep on a human). The black of the bands are pleasing to the human eye against the dark-green Zhenae color.

I’m at this club with a few Zhenae friends, one of whom is female and very, very into me. This wouldn’t normally be a problem — I’ve gotten very good at blowing off Zhenae in general and women in particular — but this is one of my closest friends, one of the few people on this planet who makes anything like sense to me. The truth is that I would be interested in her. That "would" encompasses a lot of things — if this whole disaster with Morgan weren’t still reverberating through my psyche, or even if I weren’t actively trying to overthrow her planet’s government. I’ve tried explaining this to her, once, when she called me on the phone. "I just can’t right now," I told her in Sumi, conscious of how little credit I had for this phone call, wishing in vain that she could understand English, or at least enough English for me to let her down gently. "I just can’t right now." was the best I could do. She responded, just one short sentence in a voice so small: "I understood."

So here we were again, at a club, and she’s pulling me to dance, and dancing close, and she’s brought her A game, she’s pulling my head down to her diminutive frame, into spaces near her ears that a platonic friend of any species should not be entering, and I’m keeping my hands clasped together behind her back and trying to stay away from any zone that could be erogenous. My own stubborn human biology isn’t cooperating. I can’t let anything happen, it wouldn’t be good. I’m usually better at self-control than this. Wait: all I need to do, I think to myself, is to outlast the whiskey. So I pull away from her and go to sit down. A few songs later she follows me, takes up a position kneeling between my legs. The implications are not lost on me, and I need her to stop.

I’m not sure exactly what I said to her this time, but she just hung her head, and I waited for her to pull herself together again while thinking about the juggling act I was trying to pull here — how nice it feels to be wanted, and how you can’t just queue up girlfriends like songs on a playlist, and how I would like her friendship but it is becoming increasingly clear to me that I can’t even have that if she is going to get over me. Is this what Morgan felt like? At first she told me she wanted to be friends, and I even tried to do that out of some eulogy for an emotion I used to have, but all I got was dead air.

Whatever. I’ll be happier when I’m off this rock and the only communication I have with her is the conversations we have at reunions about how great the life is that I am living without her. (I’m not bitter.)

My Zhenae friend pulls me up to dance again, and this time when we get onto the dance floor, she lets the seduction aside and just leans into my chest and sobs. This is more familiar ground for me, consoling a friend, and I’m much better at it, so I just hold her and wait it out, even as (in the back of my mind) I’m wondering if this is authentic, her actual response to pain, or whether maybe this is just what she learned from some movie, how she thinks Earther romance normally works. It’s not a good thought — unworthy of me — one more example of how being a Missionary is just making me more speciesist..

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The school administration had been hoping that teachers would have given all their exams before the Christmas Break, so that grades could be put onto papers and report cards filled out as soon as the school year started. Of course, due to my little jaunt to Morocco, that wasn’t a real possibility for me — in fact, I haven’t technically taught anything during the 3rd sequence, so the last couple weeks have been a fire drill of make-up lessons, hastily-written tests, and generic anguish. I haven’t even started grading the tests that I have given, except of course for the practical exams — because like last year, they’re the last, best, hope for last-minute student evaluation. Except..

I gave a quick lesson or two on file management to my 2e classes last week and this week we tried to put it into practice. I didn’t think there was really all that much complexity here — you have paths, they have separators, you explore the folders and you’re basically done, right? But as usual my students surprised me by utterly failing to put into practice the concepts we had briefly discussed. The assignment is pretty straightforward — open this file, write down what it says inside, create this directory, copy this file to that directory, rename this file, delete that file. But 2C (the "scientific" 2e class) managed to pretty much bomb the whole thing. Maybe it’s because I didn’t give them enough time, or assumed they’d understood better than they did, or didn’t give the directions clearly enough. I told them yesterday that their performance was shameful (une performance honteuse) and that I was going to give them another lesson today so that they could do better on the make-up exam Monday, and then today when we finished the lesson in 20-30 minutes I wondered aloud how they could have taken something so simple and fucked it up (niquer, which I learned from Timothy). Some students asked me what niquer meant so I told them it was a technical word meaning to fail. All of which is a roundabout way of saying that I’m getting more comfortable using French to express my feelings about my students, which helps me keep my spirits up. I’m flipping through Merde! et Merde Encore! that my parents sent me (thanks guys!), but haven’t quite settled on a way to ask Kamgang Basile of 2A4 (the "arts" 2e class) why he’s being a douchebag.

Of course, I’m no stranger to the surprising complexity that computer stuff represents to my students. Did you know you have to do four different things to copy-and-paste? And that only the last one provides anything like feedback for what you’ve done? But we mastered that and I don’t see any hidden complexity as regards the directory tree. My only hypotheses are that 1. they didn’t think through the implications of what I talked about in class, which actually goes without saying, and 2. that the instructions, which amounted to some stuff written on a chalkboard in class and incomplete directory names that I wrote on slips of paper, were confusing to them. Yeah, well, blame the administration for putting me under such time pressure. I’ve printed out written directions that are as complete as I can make them without giving anything away. The make-up test is Monday and we’ll see how that goes.

My self-medicine lately (instead of alcohol) has been food and video games, hence today’s title, jeux. Food is easy to explain: it’s lettuce season, and also avocados are starting to show up, and I think mushrooms maybe around the corner? I made fried rice the other day and I’ve been using the sesame oil that I squirreled away from when I came back from the states. It is delicious. As for the video games, I’ve lately been playing through the games that I downloaded from the official Ubuntu archives, figuring that when I finish playing them I can uninstall them and free up a little disk space. I have played: Freedroid, Dink Smallwood, Lincity-ng, Micropolis (long enough to discover that yes, it is exactly SimCity), and FreedroidRPG. Dink Smallwood was smirk-worthy in a couple of places, but basically forgettable. Lincity-ng is actually kind of cool, especially since as a Volunteer "sustainability" is a concern for me. FreedroidRPG was also surprising — a compelling little game, kinda like Diablo, but free-software-nerd themed. Chiz has been muttering darkly about Spacechem lately, so I’m liable to try that next, even knowing that it’s bound to consume me entirely.

Also on the subject of jeux, we have the lab. Students put games on computers, like tomcats marking their territory, and it’s as inevitable as the tide so there’s really no use trying to control it. Lately I have seen GTA: Vice City, which they find so compelling as to even play during classroom hours. To the extent that they even care about the storyline, they certainly don’t care enough to save their progress. Instead the current fad seems to be commandeering a tank and rambling around the city, blowing up whatever crosses your path. I’ve also seen something called Super Mario Worlds (N.B. not Super Mario World, the classic for the SNES), which appears to be a small knockoff of various Mario games. The first level is a fairly-faithful copy of the first level of the original Super Mario Bros., but the second level graphics portray rain, and they took the carry-objects mechanic from Mario 3 and the charge-jump from Mario 2. I have learned, from the comments students make while playing Super Mario Worlds, that Mario’s fireballs are actually sauce tomate, tomato sauce, which I guess means that what we always thought were fire flowers are actually tomato plants.

Curiosity got the better of me and when I got the chance I sat down and decided to see how far I could get. To my dismay, there are only three levels, after which you return to the first level. Of course, most of the students haven’t found that out yet because they can’t get past the third level.

The students are terrible at Super Mario Worlds. They prefer to do charge-jumps instead of running jumps, which is just setting them up for failure when they attempt other platform games later on. In fact, they hardly run at all. They rebind the keys so that to jump you press Up, about which words fail me. Most of them are convinced that the third level is impossible if you don’t have the fire flower, so after they inevitably die for the first time, they just quit and restart. For some unknowable reason, all of this makes me incredibly angry. It’s not even real Mario! Why are you so bad at this?? You’re crap at crap Mario!

So last Sunday, when I was getting all my files in order for the aforementioned 2e practical exam, and also formatting a couple of the GTA’d computers, I decided to discreetly sprinkle a SNES emulator and some ROMs here and there. (Allison asked what the right stance is regarding teaching Cameroonians how to pirate stuff well, as opposed to letting them pirate it poorly. The stance I take in my lab is quite inconsistent.) Nobody is going to discover a SNES emulator by themselves, of course, so when I had a little free time, I started it up and loaded Super Mario World. It was only a matter of time before one or two students saw me and marveled at the fascinating capabilities of this new Mario game, where Mario can even fly! (And by the way, Yoshi’s not a dinosaur, he’s a horse. A green horse.) When I got called away from the computer, I shut everything down quickly without leaving any indication of what I’d done or how, and then relished the puzzlement of the students as they tried to figure out how to "put" the game I’d just been playing.

But you know what? There’s a lot of stuff going on, even in the first level, and SMW is English-only, never translated to French. So, e.g. the fact that there is both regular jump and spin-jump is kind of mysterious, and the idea that you pretty much always need to be running is kind of taken for granted (because everyone who was going to play SMW had already played Mario 1-3). So the next time, I started up Super Mario All-Stars (which, by the way, Super Mario Worlds took the opening screen from). This game showcased polished, SNES-ified versions of the original NES games. The first level is recognizably the first level from their crap Super Mario Worlds, but it all looks a ton better. But you know what? The first Super Mario is hard! I can get pretty far now that I’m way experienced with platform games, but even I die a lot and without the "continue" that All-Stars offers, I’d get nowhere. And when I think back to how hard it was when I was just a kid, I realize that when I was first starting to play video games, I didn’t know to run either, and the idea of ever beating Super Mario seemed like an impossible fantasy, and people that could were wizards, heroes without limit.

Anyhow they’ve started to figure out how to use ZSNES, even though it’s been less than a week. I think they’ve picked it up so quickly because for a while there was a MAME emulator floating around some of the computers, so they already understand in some vague unarticulated way the idea of emulators vs. ROMs. They aren’t terribly interested, actually, in any of the Super Mario games, probably because they’re so bad at them. One of my students started up the French version of Secret of Mana (one of my favorite games ever), but then gave it up as "too hard" before he even got the first sword. I’m trying not to be disappointed. Maybe he’ll come back to it later. Maybe not.

Since a week and a half ago, today’s the first day that I’ve had "off" (after I taught two hours and printed some exams for tomorrow). Every day I come home totally exhausted, but then a few hours later I start to feel energized, cognizant of just how awesome I am being and how cool I am for doing what I’m doing, and then I figure out how I can do it even better. Is this the effect of being a 2nd year volunteer? The fact that I’m drinking less, or playing video games more? The simple pleasure of knowing that I only have seven months, five days left in this country, or contrariwise the pressure of knowing that the time I have left to effect a difference here is slipping away like sand through an hourglass? Maybe that’s why I don’t blog so much, but I’m thinking of you all the same.

P.S. Thanks to Lee for posting a link to this scallion pancake recipe. Turns out the only thing you need that you can’t get here is sesame oil, and you can fake it with some of the sesame seeds you see being sold on the street. Now, onward..

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[N.B. I'm posting a lot of text-only posts right now because the front page of my blog has like sixty pictures and it takes forever to load.]

School restarts tomorrow, marking the first time I’ve taught class in about a month. I’ve forgotten my entire schedule and lost my place in each class. I’m not sure what the hell I’m going to do about 3rd sequence, which basically just vanished. So in other words, business as usual at the lycée. The good news is Boris finally left today, liberating me to pursue an afternoon of housework and finally some video games. Bathed for the first time in three days, cooked for myself, and generally doing much better. I really would have preferred another day off, but what can you do?

Preston mentioned that he was getting a little ready to go back to school, that he was starting to feel useless without classes to teach. Sure, but I’m also tense about going back into duty. Back to the grind, back to the soul-sucking tedium of it all. Maybe I should spend less time in the lab, or maybe I can stop going to classes so much.

Last year, at the beginning of winter break, one of the senior Volunteers sent us an email saying something along the lines of "Congratulations! You’re 2/3 done with the school year, because the rest of the year is as a Swiss cheese of vacations and holidays." And with the 2012 on the calendar, I feel tangibly as though I have entered the home stretch. Seven months of service left! This is doable, right?

Last year, I resolved to be focused outside instead of inside. Did I manage it? I’m not sure.. a part of me is saying that I’ve only succeeded at pretending to be focused on the outside when really spending much more time inside. I still greet everyone I see on the street, and I’ve got a few more friendships with people here in village than I did last year, but I still play stupid games with conversations and when I’m in the lab after school, sometimes I just sit there and read. So a partial success, let’s say. This year I think my resolution will be: get creative. Make something awesome. And get through this thing in one piece.

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