Evi asked me via email a little while ago about any final thoughts I had. I’m still struggling to figure out what those are. In the meantime, perhaps you will appreciate this Ph. D. retrospective by Philip Guo. So why would anyone spend six or more years doing a Ph.D. when they aren’t going to […]
[I don’t remember whether I actually talked about genders on Zhen. I’ll have to revisit all the old posts later..] I was in the teachers’ room, nominally grading papers, but really focusing more on the conversation between Mur Kang and Muh Cham. Kang’s a first-female, and apparently her husband had called her asking her to […]
[Edit: I just renamed this post to "Malhonnête", due to a namespace collision with the post of 2012 March 4th, which was the first to be named Confiance…] … which is the closest word I’ve found to "trust", although as usual things are a little more complicated than that. Warning: this is gonna be one […]
Some words are really difficult to translate into French (lately I’ve been thinking about "home", "acknowledge"/"acknowledgment", "mind", and even "get"), and at first "grateful"/"gratitude" gave me a hard time too. But if you open your trusty M-W French-English dictionary, issued by Organization Cameroon Headquarters in Yaoundé, to page 534, you’ll see that "grateful" is translated […]
As promised, here are some pictures of the telecentre. You can see it’s not a big place, just the four computers. Still, they’re pretty well-equipped — scanner, photocopier, printer, and UPSes for each machine. The girl in the shiny jacket is Cecile, she’s the "secretary" and somewhat-manager of the place. Like most people who know […]
I’m sure I’ve mentioned this before on this blog, but "they" say about service as a Volunteer that "the days go slowly, but the weeks go fast". It’s true; I’m counting 66 days until I’m the hell out of this country, and each one is unbearably long and tedious but I can still remember one […]
I think every volunteer has a moment — maybe I shouldn’t say every Volunteer, but many do — where the stress and frustration of their service are too overpowering and they just snap. I know Ben D. had a moment like that towards the end of his service — he described utterly losing his shit […]
[This section of the story kind of came to me once in the shower but then I didn’t write it down and I had to rewrite it. This is the second version, from a week or two ago, but I wanted to wait and let it mulch until I could see if it was any […]
Haven’t been writing much lately. Mostly due to being busy and frustrated, but also due to realizing that mine is (as Pat Murphy wrote in About Fairies) "one of those extremely tedious personal blogs that I am amazed that anyone writes and even more amazed that anyone reads". I’ve got some ideas on stuff I’d […]
After we got back was the Books for Cameroon ceremony, which I mostly avoided, playing gopher and otherwise trying to try to defray the amount of hassle Cristina was no-doubt going through. Pre-party. The beneficiaries. My proviseur is bottom-middle, looking directly into the camera. This is my neighbor, who makes wooden food (and apparently beer). […]