If Only British Airways did Snow Ploughs like they did Croissants

That was a lovely Christmas break. Back to the blog. Ingvar is no longer in Africa; he’s in England. God save the queen! Not feeling the same sort of pride for Her Majesty’s airlines though. When my flight back here took off on December 18th, the departures board read: BA054, London-Heathrow, 21:35, Gate A18, Delayed until 21:00. To the casual observer, it would seem as if it took off 35 minutes early. But no, it was actually delayed by 47 hours and 25 minutes. A bit of snow, and Heathrow, the busiest airport in the world, just stopped working.

From my experience, the English have a poor idea of what constitutes ‘extreme weather’. When it’s 23˚C out, the BBC warns of heatstroke, and when it’s snowing, everyone just gives up. No! That’s not what you do! When it snows, you move the snow away. Ice is neither radioactive nor dark magic, so attack it with steel brushes and grow a pair. If you can invent a jumbo jet, you should be able to clear some ground from which it can take off! I read an article on Helsinki airport the other day, and it received 188cm of snowfall during the past winter alone but last closed in 2003 for THIRTY MINUTES. Britain used to be a glorious world empire, so much so that loads of people kept our colonialist sports, tea, and religion (shhh…they don’t like to think about that last one). How far we have fallen. It is time for us to step up, meet Finland’s majestic, golden standard, and not do this:










The good news is that during my two extra days, British Airways put me in a very nice hotel, where I had my first full English breakfast, ever. That might seem odd, given I lived in Cambridge all year round for twelve years, but my parents are both vegetarian and not British, so bacon wasn’t a big part of my childhood. For those of you who don’t know, a full British fry-up is baked beans, fried mushrooms and tomatoes, sausages, hash browns, bacon, scrambled eggs, and then maybe some toast and black pudding. The British Empire wasn’t fueled on Weetabix with skimmed milk you know.



Good news is, I finally discovered the point of the fried tomatoes! For years I’d heard about them, but I was always baffled. They always seemed like the worst way in the world to cook tomatoes (and they are), but I then realized that they serve two vital purpose in the heavy, grease laden mosaic that is a British fryup. First, they provide moisture, and second, they provide sweetness. Because everything else on that plate is unnecessarily dry and salty. In the sarcasm world, I’m British. In the culinary world, I’m not; the second day, I had some delicious croissants and guavas.

I did eventually catch my flight, but not before I conquered the mammoth line at the BA counter, which had three days of passengers in it. Thankfully, I managed to move forward about 500 places in 3 hours…or was it 3 places in 500 hours? Tough to tell sometimes. But now I’m back here, and I'm delighted. I’ve also realised that the best thing about England is its names. Our towns sound ridiculous; it's almost as if Britain exists to make maps funny. All of these places are within driving distance of my house: The Gog Magog, Orton Brimbles, Six Mile Bottom, and Nedging-with-Naughton. The last one could be a whole upper-class sentence on its own.

“What are you doing dearest?”
“Nothing, I’m just nedging with Naughton!”
“Oh splendid!”

Naming your places like that is one thing, but naming your people like that is another. A few days ago, my sister, Sinead, met a family with the surname “Snodgrass”. How fantastic is that?

In the end, this holiday was all about Christmas, which was wonderful. We celebrated with a traditional Christmas dinner of Chinese noodles, a hard boiled egg/carrot/mushroom dish, tofu, and apple pie. In my family, the Asians do the main course, and the Americans do the dessert. For any of you who have ever tried to eat a Taiwanese cake, you will understand why it is that way round.

Service will resume as normal on this recently neglected blog, but in the meantime:


2010 was awesome.

Communications; Internet is Back!

Internet is back!! Oh I could not be more thrilled!! ALA has taught me to appreciate three things: internet, forks, and chairs. After four months of using them in scarcity, I can’t get enough of them.

On the other hand, I’m getting pretty used to these utilities shortages. In fact, when power came back Saturday night, I wasn’t even excited…although that was because I knew that there would still be no Internet. In my opinion, communicating is the only thing that you genuinely need electricity for. Think about it: all other power cut problems can be solved with bonfires, pens, and candles. With those three things you can cook your food, write your papers, and see your papers. Some would say the last one is a luxury. What more could an ALA student want? (And what more are we encouraged to do?)

There’s a famous quotation by John Donne that says, “no man is an island”. Well, it’s wrong. If you live in a 200 student school and there’s no Internet or cell phone access, you are an island. You’re a small lump of rotting wood that nobody even cares about, floating around in the Atlantic Ocean with a single sea cucumber attached to you for company. I love over-extending metaphors.

After a few days without links to the outside world, I was getting desperate; I was about ready to build a gigantic lighthouse, right in the middle of the quad, to transmit morse code messages to Jo’burg.


..- .-. --. . -. - .-.-.- … . -. -.. …. . .-.. .--. .-- . -. . . -.. -- --- .-. . -.- . - -.-. … ..- .--.*
(U-r-g-e-n-t. S-e-n-d h-e-l-p w-e n-e-e-d m-o-r-e k-e-t-c-h-u-p.)

We might ostensibly be about leadership, but we’ve got our priorities straight.

Anyway, it’s obviously not that bad, because we have people here to talk to. But face-to-face interactions have a problem as well: some of us have no feel whatsoever for appropriate conversation volume. This is most obvious in group settings, notably these two:


Listening to one person speak.
Picture this: you’re sitting with 200 other people, listening to a renowned guest speaker, perhaps the CEO of a major bank, or the founder of your school. The audience is quiet and attentive. People are wary of even shifting too loudly in their seats. Then some fool next to you turns his head and begins a normal, well-projected conversation, without a hint of compunction or remorse. He doesn’t even lean towards you! Does he have no sense of shame? Can he not hear himself? Murmuring is a vital life skill, and some would do well to learn it.

However, I’m tentative about over-promoting whispering, lest the following situation become more common:


Room full of people, with many separate conversations.
Last Wednesday, all of the first years and gap years were in the back of the factory. We were in groups, and conducting an exercise centered around facilitation and NASA. Yes, ALA is a wonderful place. Anyway, things were going okay until a couple people decided to “speak up”. And by speak up, I mean make a light swishing sound with their lips. No matter how hard we tried to get them to be louder, they wouldn’t. We just couldn’t hear them over the eleven other conversations in the room. I’ve drawn a graph to better describe the problem:

(click to enlarge)



“Sotto voce” should be considered a real, medical affliction.


Finally, a fantastic piece of news! It’s almost more exciting than the return of Internet. We got our uniforms last week! Nope, I’m not happy because I’m obsessed with looking presentable. I’m happy because I only brought seven days worth of clothing to ALA, and now I can do laundry a little less often. Hallelujah!

Not sure I can vouch for their measurement process though…

(I drew this with inches instead of cm after the first panel. Ignore that. click to enlarge)



Some of the girls really are swimming in their tunics.

*This really is morse code

Thanksgiving in Jo'burg

Last Thursday, we celebrated Thanksgiving (!!), which was amazing because we had no concrete plans whatsoever on Tuesday morning. But Tuesday evening, Mr. Peter appeared out of nowhere, dragged us to a supermarket (even though Gaciru and I felt like we’d contracted the pneumonic plague at the time), and made us buy supplies. When he asked us how many people we wanted to cook for, we answered fifteen, which turned out to be a horrible mistake pretty soon after.

Then we started cooking. Actually, before we could bring ourselves to do that, we purged Mr. Peter’s kitchen, which smelled of not-so-fresh fish and coconut milk at the time. We were certain it was contagious; Gaciru though Mr. Peter was going to catch something when he made a piecrust with no shoes on (Mr. Peter that is; the piecrust was exceptionally attired).

Then we started cooking. At first the going was slow, because with the exception of Julia, who was well versed in the arts of cranberry jelly and apple pie, none of us knew how to cook any of the dishes that we were making. Undaunted, we took it upon ourselves to re-invent what felt like every single one of the USA’s traditional dishes. We peeled and chopped four bags of potatoes, boiled yams, prayed to the poultry gods that the turkeys would defrost in time, diced many onions, and tore numerous sprigs of rosemary. We even created a new type of vegetarian gravy with eggplant and soy sauce, although it quickly became clear why no one had done it before.

Regardless, we did pretty well, especially given that Mr. Peter’s kitchen was modeled after a shoebox and clearly not built to prepare large meals. He did save our turkeys (for which we are ETERNALLY gratefully), but apart from that we were triumphant and independent. When we served the food on Thursday evening, I was shocked and Julia and Gaciru were past delusional. Thursday morning, I would have thought it more likely that we’d end up hosting a family of triceratopses than finish preparing the dinner.

As is often the case whenever someone brings a holiday to another continent, we found ourselves explaining ours over and over and over again. We had numerous versions of the Thanksgiving fable, ranging from Julia’s



To Gaciru’s



After two straight days of cooking, we ate in a surprisingly familiar way. What makes Thanksgiving dinner feel like Thanksgiving dinner is not just its traditional spread of dishes, but a sense of family. And Thanksgiving at ALA was incredibly familial. I am grateful for Mr. Peter, and for all of the fourteen guests who came.

Following our meal, we engaged in a traditional dog pile on top of Akan. Trevor went first.



Unfortunately, there were a couple drawbacks to our feast.
One, none of us could move. I’m told we suffered from something called “the itis”



Two, Boubacar had difficulty concentrating on anything for about an hour.

The Legend of Peter the Positive and the Origin of ALA Power Cuts

Once upon a time, there was an isolated kingdom named “Swaniford”. And in that most diligent of lands, there lived a young population of diverse youth, who came from many distant nations. Granted, most of them were from Senegal, Nigeria, and Kenya, but indeed they were diverse. And in Swaniford, the young Swanifordians toiled all day, sweating their own caffeine-saturated blood over a variety of three letter acronyms: SRB, OID, CIE, CSP, SAT, and of course that most pervasive of abbreviations: TBA. It was rumored that the mighty founders worked with fiendishly complex combinations such as WDYDWYDWYDYDWYDDWDY, but reports were unconfirmed.

Yet because of their tireless work ethic, the scholars of Swaniford were not always cheerful, and in their times of need, they looked for a human of incredible bounciness, remarkable cooking skills, and immense disregard for humor boundaries. Thankfully, one such man existed, and his name was Peter the Positive. Peter the Positive lived in his den of joyfulness on the second level of the residential edifice, and almost all Swanifordian scholars visited him at one point or another to receive their dose of earsplitting sanity. Particularly the girls, because they lived on a fortuitous side of the building and could visit him after check-in, which was unfair. Anyway, Peter’s kindness was so overwhelming that the students were even able to overlook his kitchen, which was a borderline health hazard. Whenever the inhabitants of Swaniford were sad, they looked to Peter for guidance, and in that way, he kept happiness throughout the land.

Unfortunately, Peter the Positive could not continue so tirelessly forever, especially during that most hectic of times, the Christmas Holidays. He soon found it necessary to recharge periodically. So great were his energy needs that he drew his vitality not just from sleep and food, but also from his surroundings, and in particular the electrical sockets. Even today, you can always tell when Peter the Positive is in a state of deep-recuperation, for Swaniford is plunged into a period darkness. We mortals like to call these periods “power cuts”.



It seems that Mr. Peter is resting more and more these days.

Business Hours are Over! ... Temporarily.

Silly Little Culinary Annoyances

Yesterday, I learned about how Senegalese salesmen price their goods. It's time forrrrr:
(Click to enlarge)


This Is Africa; we bargain.

So onto the theme of this post. If you’re a student at ALA, and not me, your academic life feels quite similar to what I imagine drinking water from a fire hydrant would be like. And if that weren’t enough, there are a number of other ways that your existence could be made harder, most of them in the dining hall.

If you’re vegetarian, you could suffer from an extreme protein deficiency, curable only by mass ordering margarita pizzas.

Also, apparently the bread is laced with preservatives. Don’t eat it! Actually, there’s no way to survive without it. Go ahead, kill yourselves! I do.

And if you do manage to avoid the bread, you have to have cereal for breakfast, and you’re in trouble then too. Here’s why: At the beginning of the term, we had a lot of small, very shallow bowls, and some big hexagonal ones. Because I enjoyed eating more than three cornflakes per sitting and wasn’t able to find a pipette with which to douse them in milk, I used the big bowls. Then, for no discernable reason, the big bowls vanished! Now, eating cereal is one of the hardest parts of my day. It requires concentration, fine motor skills, and balance.

ALA Guide To Eating Cereal.

1. Fill a bowl with between 10 and 15 Branflakes/Cornflakes, or 3 teaspoons of Rice Krispies.
2. Even them out along the base of your bowl with a plastic spoon.
3. Fill the bowl with milk, very slowly. It is recommended that you actually pour into the milk carton’s cap, and transfer it to the bowl that way. Pause after each capful to inspect potential space for the next one.
4. When the bowl has reached maximum capacity (around 5 capfuls), pick it up and walk gingerly back to your seat. Caution! – if your bowl deviates more than 4˚ from the horizontal, all of your breakfast will be on the floor, and you’ll start to feel a lot like the Danaides.

(The Danaides were forty-nine maidens in Ancient Greek mythology who were condemned to an eternity of trying to fill leaky jugs with water in the underworld after they all killed their husbands.)



Okay so what really happened is that we lived like that for about a week, and then found a workaround (thank you Entrepreneurship class!). We began using separate mugs for cereal and milk. Now we don’t have to eat cereal out of saucers!

Nothing makes life hard for us Americans like the absurdly heavy South African soda cans though. What is going on? A Fanta can in Gauteng is about three times heavier than its US equivalent. Honestly, they might as well have been hand carved from granite, lined with lead, and then given an anchor. Not only are they a waste of good aluminium, but they’re very off-putting. I have been trained to feel how much liquid is left in a can, and an empty South African one feels like it’s about two thirds full to me. The experience of drinking from them is always a huge let down. I’ll be looking forward to that last mouthful of ginger beer, only to tilt the can back and realize that I had it five minutes ago. It’s a lot like seeing a really attractive girl flirting with you on the other side of the street, crossing the street, introducing yourself, and then discovering that despite appearances, she’s actually in her middle ages, and dedicates her entire life to cataloguing and naming her toenail clippings.



South Africa needs lighter soda cans.

Lions, and Giraffes, and McDonalds Oh My!

It’s come to my notice that anyone reading my blog would have a very difficult time working out what my daily existence is like. So today’s blog post is all about the recent five day holiday, which was fairly typical going for my life at ALA. Heh.


Saturday
On Saturday, I did not go off campus. I stayed at school, vegetating and basking in the glory that is a non-class Saturday. In the US we like to say, “Thank God it’s Friday" (there’s an entire restaurant chain named after the phrase). But only the most pious of students would ever thank The Almighty for an ALA Friday. Here, Fridays are just glorified Thursdays.

We rounded off the day with ALA’s first all-night movie marathon, which fizzled out at about 4am, when all of the exhausted zombies in attendance finally got their priorities straight. It’s a miracle the whole thing happened at all though; Mr. Peter had to dig deep within himself to find the trust to allow teenagers to watch a late-night movie unsupervised. I think his thought process went something like this:

ALA students have hormones
At 3am, they will be sleepy. They don’t sleep enough anyway.
They will also be in closed, dark rooms.
Sleepy teenagers with hormones in closed, dark rooms.
AHHHHHHH!!!!!

Fair point actually.

Before we could leave the dorm, the teachers made us line up and walk out in single file. I thought we were going to have to remove our shoes and go through a backscatter x-ray machine, but we were just scowled at. Anyway, thank you for allowing the movie night Mr. Peter, because I was given free popcorn and watched the new Karate Kid. Twas awesome.


Sunday
On Sunday, the Gap Years partook in another staple of ALA life: The Lion Park. With Ms. Laura as our intrepid guide, we saw ostriches, zebras, wildebeest, and lions eating cows’ legs. The three of us covered a whole spectrum of reactions. At one end of the scale was Julia. Julia could not have been more excited if the lions had been Disney cartoons, dancing to an Elton John soundtrack, and handing out McFlurries. She was bouncing. Then there was me. I like animals a lot (my dad is biologist), and I thought watching lions up close was fun. And lastly, Gaciru was not chuffed. She did not enjoy the sight of giant carnivores ripping apart a mangled and bloody limb, complete with hooves and hair.

After that we got to pet lion cubs, and Gaciru’s mood didn’t pick up much, especially when Julia asked her for a favour:



I took the pictures instead; baby lions are really cute, and very similar to household cats. Then Julia petted a giraffe and her heart almost gave in. She looked like a mother whose child had just won a spelling bee.

In the afternoon, we went to the mall, ate lunch, and found ice-skating! The man at the skate hire place was determined to be Gaciru’s gardener in America, and very kindly offered her his services in return for just a plane ticket and $300 a month. Strangely, she declined.

The ice reminded me of sandpaper, but it was really fun nonetheless.

Thank you so much Ms. Laura!


Monday
By Monday, Mr. Peter was pretty sure that I’d had more off campus fun than any ALA student should be allowed, but he was kind enough to drive the gap years to the mall to buy phones (I sat on my previous one). It was unexpectedly simple:

“What is the cheapest phone you sell?”
“This one.”
“Ooo, that looks Spartan and unadorned. How much?”
“259 Rand.”
“Excellent!”

My new phone is the Nokia Unsophisticator. It takes 40 minutes to charge, and has a flashlight, a battery that lasts a week, and a screen with seven pixels. It’s perfect.

At some point during the return journey, the two girls convinced Mr. Peter to take us to McDonalds. I have no idea how it happened, but it was probably juju.

I thought wildlife made Julia happy, but she was McDelusional when we arrived. Her eyes widened, her heartbeat tripled, and she began salivating like a St. Bernard. I think she needs to see the life coach for her acute case of “Americawithdrawal Syndrome”.

Luckily, McDonalds provided her with much needed medication: a double quarter pounder, fries, and coke. Julia was McDelighted.

And then there was Mr. Peter. Mr. Peter had never really been to McDonalds before, so we got him a McFlurry, with extra caramel and chocolate. Unfortunately, it turned out he was not used to that much sugar, and he started shaking. He could barely contain himself, and claimed that we tried to murder him; he was McSugar High*. It was one scary return drive to campus.


Tuesday
On Tuesday, I went swimming and then to my advisor’s house for burgers with the rest of the advisee family. All in a good day’s work.


Wednesday
On Wednesday, I stayed on campus and caught up on all the work I had left until the last minute. Now that's typically ALA.



*Ms. Chemeli was the first person to say this. Credits to her.

L&E Faculty

Contrary to popular belief, I do not live a life of lackadaisical freedom, unencumbered by every aspect of student life, from community hours to classes. Although I probably sleep about two hours more than the average ALA student every night, I also take six subjects and work as an assistant in the Leadership and Entrepreneurship Office. For example, I’ve researched Corporate Social Responsibility in Africa, catalogued some of the office’s library, and gathered information on community service sites. But enough about me. The best part of working in the L&E office is the L&E faculty, who I will now attempt to describe. Here’s the lineup (click to enlarge, as always):


There used to be five, but Ms. Carter left to go have a baby (hoorayyyy!!), and it took so long to draw the remaining four that I decided to use that as an excuse not to depict her as well. But if you want a mental picture, she has wavy brown hair, and sometimes wears long cardigans and big glasses. We miss her!

Right so here goes:


Mr. Ngozi

In the 1890’s a physiologist called Ivan Pavlov conducted an experiment in which he got some dogs to salivate, even when they didn’t actually intend to. Mr. Ngozi’s sarcasm is sort of like that; it's reflexive. For example, there is no difference in the tone with which he says these two sentences (this is from personal experience):

Negative chastising: “Hmm, telling me how to teach my class on the first day, interesting.”
Positive complimenting: “Hmm, that’s a good point. Interesting.”

Unfortunately, this makes Mr. Ngozi harder read than a Stephanie Mayer book. Yet we all know that inside lays a heart of pure gold. Actually, it’s not pure gold, because Mr. Ngozi's blood stream is about 60% caffeine; he was responsible for the L&E office’s coffee machine purchase, and he has never been happier.

Mr. Ngozi is also ALA’s hip-hop choreographer extraordinaire, and as I learned from absent-mindedly whistling in a room next to his, he dislikes Katy Perry. I was suitably reprimanded and embarrassed.


Mr. Bennin

Unlike most students, Mr. Bennin has a laptop, and he’s not afraid to show it. In fact, I’m pretty sure he’s afraid to put it down (as you can see from the picture). The marginal benefit of placing his laptop on the table does not exceed the marginal cost (Mr. Bennin also teaches economics). In any case, he is also the only member of the L&E department who we actually refer to with a full surname, and that’s not a coincidence. After Ms. Carter left, he graded my class's presentations, and he did it bluntly and irrefutably. I think I’m going to sleep with the rubric under my pillow from now on; Mr. Bennin’s catchphrase should be, "Well, if you had really wanted to go for the A*…"

After we finished the assessment, Mr. Bennin proceeded to teach the next unit via a slow paced yet knowledge-saturated lecture.


Mr. O

Mr. O is my ‘boss’ and the only one of the L&E faculty whose class I am in. A few days ago, he told Lailat to “find the words” when she was struggling to explain something in English, and he waited while she did. The class ended up clapping for her after she made her point elegantly, and it was one of the best teaching moments I have ever seen.

It would be impossible to talk about Mr. O without mentioning clothing though. To quote another unnamed person in this school, Mr. O looks like he’s preparing for a flood in the 1950s. (As you can see from the group drawing, his belt is a good twenty inches above Mr. Ngozi’s.) Yet although Mr. O’s trouser line is a little higher than usual, he dresses with superb style, from his cap down to his very visible socks. He has caught many a female student’s eye, and he is certainly doing his upmost to show technical leadership in both the fashion and teaching worlds. Mr. O doesn’t just explain paradigms; he sets them.

Perhaps most importantly, Mr. O has soul. Whenever we read in class, he puts on a soothing, barely audible jazz soundtrack. Also, when I’m working in the office, Mr. O sometimes bursts into a shatteringly audible and spontaneous falsetto warbling.


Mr. Ismoila
Mr. Ismoila is the strong, silent type. Word has it that he used to be rifle sergeant in the US army, and that he did one-armed pull-ups during an advisee meeting (see illustration). And that he can run through a brick wall and bench press a matriarchal elephant. Okay so not really, but Mr. Ismoila is actually a giant mass of muscle, barely contained by his classy assortment of cardigans and loafers. Let's just say that I've seen a fair few arguments between girls extolling the virtues of Ismoila and O.

Other important details that people have mentioned to me: Mr. Ismoila smiles a lot. Mr. Ismoila spends a lot of time in class twirling his board markers, dropping them, and then picking them up. And Mr. Ismoila loves his Blackberry as much as Mr. Bennin loves his laptop.

Languages, Part 2.

My last post was about how I find it difficult to understand people sometimes, but I was sort of making a mountain out of a molehill. Yes, I have a hard time comprehending Amharic (which has a mind blowing 200-something letters!) when I’m standing between two Ethiopians, but this is an Anglophone school, and I’m used to that. Yet for students from Francophone West Africa, Mozambique, Algeria, or anywhere else that doesn’t really speaks English, ALA feels like studying for an anatomy quiz with a some Picasso portraits.

The English problem is genuine. This one of the hardest schools I could imagine, and it’s a miracle that any non-Anglophones, let alone all of them, keep going. Many of them were the most brilliant, accomplished students in their home countries, but now, they have a hard time even being understood. Their courage is inspiring.

Yet I have had some amusing experiences. The person with the most positive attitude towards the language barrier is our old friend, Boubacar. He and I have a lot of excellent misunderstandings, and I’m going to roll out my first titled comic strip to depict a recent example! Pleeease Welcoooome: (You might have to click on the picture and then zoom in)



Even more hilarious communication difficulties occur when Mr. O uses American phrases in class. A few days ago, he threatened to throw his pen at Julius with a “snap pass”, and a wall of just the blankest canvases I have ever seen stared back at him. Clearly, the future leaders of Africa need to learn more about American quarterback terms.

But there’s one aspect of language here that is just mindboggling: hectic. Hectic might seem like it’s just one word, but it is so much more than that. Hectic is versatile, hectic is all-encompassing, hectic is omnipotent. Hectic couldn’t have been more one-size-fits-all if it were a pair of elastic-waist trousers with drawstring cuffs. In fact, I might mention it to the English as a Second Language faculty soon, because it would save Francophones from having to learn a lot of superfluous vocabulary. They could avoid unnecessarily specific words such as busy, arduous, atrocious, catastrophic, or bad.

That having been said, I’m not sure that anybody has looked hectic up in a dictionary yet, or if they have they’re being pretty laissez-faire about it, because it means “full of incessant or frantic activity”. Here are some usages of the word that I’ve heard recently:

“The Central Business District is sooo hectic!” This is actually quite plausible. The CBD is, in general, quite hectic, particularly at rush hour.


“My test was really hectic. Oh my God.” So this seemed less likely. Most of the tests at ALA are what I would describe as “quietly intensive”, but none of them have widespread commotion. For the most part, people stay in their chairs, suffering in silence. This is a hectic test:


“And then she was decapitated by her own seatbelt. I don’t even know how to describe it… It was HECTIC.” For obvious reasons, there’s no cartoon for this quote, and I'm sorry it's a little macabre. But to summarise, a girl was in a car crash, and her seatbelt took her head off. And I’m sorry, no, that isn’t hectic in any way whatsoever! Horrible and mortifying, maybe, hectic, no.

Ahh the wonders of slang.

This Verbal Class Distinction, By Now Should Be Antique

Yes, I have watched My Fair Lady way too many times.

Languages are difficult. At ALA, I frequently find myself surrounded by tens of languages, none of which I understand. This is relatively new to me; my greatest experience in linguistic disorientation prior to ALA was when I left the comfort of my American upbringing to attend a British private school in 1999. Five weeks in a spiraling hamster ball would have left me feeling more grounded than that one day of scrumhalves, jammy dodgers, toad in the hole, flapjacks, pelican crossings, and plimsolls. Even definitions made no sense; when I asked what "toad in the hole" was, someone replied that it was “a banger, stuck in mash, all in a Yorkshire pudding.” I thought people were speaking to me in some sort of code.

The point is, that was only one day, and I’ve stayed in places that speak English and Mandarin for 98% of my life. On the other hand, many days at ALA are like living in the enigma machine. I found myself using Google Translate a lot with Boubacar during the first week, but then it told me that “tu puisses” means “thou mayest”, and I stopped. I don’t want my roommate to sound like he lives in a Dickens novel.



Some of my confusion was to be expected; I cannot understand Arabic or Bambara because I did not grow up in Morocco or Mali. I also didn’t spend my entire childhood flicking my soft palate with my tongue or taking mouth supplements, which is I cannot click louder than pneumatic drill, like Andile. For the record, Xhosa is the single most fantastic language I have ever heard. It sounds like they swallowed a drum kit.

Yet when it comes to mystifying, nothing beats Pidgin. For those of you have never been to Nigeria, Pidgin is the lingua franca there. My Uncle Courtney speaks Jamaican Patois, Rima speaks Creole, and it puts them both to shame. Apparently it’s partly English, but I have no clue what’s going on when I hear it. I did get some insight into how Nigerians learn their pronunciation though. Ola said that when she was younger, her mother used to tell her off for saying ing instead of in' at the end of words. Based on my textbook knowledge of Nigerian parenting, this is how I imagine that conversation typically went:

Freedom House ALA

To introduce my post’s theme, I need to briefly explain Freedom House. Freedom House is a website that publishes annual ratings on liberty in every country in the world. It gives each nation a number between 1 and 7 for Civil Liberties (1 is the best), another one for Political Rights, and then averages them out. Depending on its score, each nation is given a tag of “Free”, “Partly Free”, or “Not Free”. For example, Somalia and North Korea are “not free”, but Mali is “free”. Way to be Mali! North Korea, step it up.

www.freedomhouse.org

All of that might not seem very relevant to my life, but I believe that it is possible to apply similar ratings to this school. To do that, I would like to take a look at the library during prep time. For those of you who are American, prep is homework.


Mr. O’s Watch: Free

When Mr. O is on duty, he spends very little time actually inside of the library. He strolls in, looking like an absolute bro in his fantastically dapper cap and some sort of excellent sweater, surveys the room from the door, and then does one circuit of it, briefcase in hand. When that is done, he takes another quick scan, and strides off, probably to go laugh at people with bad fashion sense. Half an hour later, he returns and does another circuit. Under Mr. O’s watch, students in the library enjoy the occasional side conversation, travel freely and breathe lightly.

Below, is a simplified map of the library during prep time under Mr. O. The red crosses are students.


Civil Liberties: 1
Political Rights: 1


Mr. Gyampo’s Watch: Partly Free

Mr. Gyampo exudes respectability and quiet discipline. I cannot even begin to count the number of times I’ve heard him say, “No you cannot, I’m afraid prep time is for private study”. Then he nods sagely and interlocks his fingers, and the student in front of him feels a profound, semi-religious guilt. I once watched Mr. Gyampo kick five consecutive students off of the same computer for going on Facebook. If they were dogs, they would have walked away with their tails between their legs. Under Mr. Gyampo’s watch, students can travel freely, but they need to focus on their work all of the time.


Civil Liberties: 3
Political Rights: 4


Ms. Gater’s Watch: Not Free

Julia Paolillo is a confident young woman, born and raised in Connecticut, and when she’s in the zone, she could probably intimidate a blind man into buying wallpaper. Ms. Gater scares the bejesus out of her.

When Ms. Gater is on duty, the library is more efficient than a Soviet Era steel factory. Absolute quiet reigns, students sweat profusely when they drop their pencils, and the mere sight of blonde hair triggers a mass trembling that vibrates the entire building. Woe betides you if you’re caught interacting with your surroundings, because you’ll be subject to a terrifyingly frosty: “How many times do I have to tell you?? Do you think I want to spend my entire evening telling people to do their prep?! Jesus.”

“No Ms. Gater, we know you don’t, PLEASE DON’T EAT MEEE.”


Civil Liberties: 7
Political Rights: 6


In the interests of balanced reporting, I would like to acknowledge the massive academic benefits to library tyranny. Also, Ms. Gater is English, which makes everything okay. Rule Britannia!

The Pen Are Pure Gold

So I’m just going to post seven weird and wacky facts today:

1) One of my teacher’s thought that Mohammed’s name was Nohammed. I don’t actually have anything to say about that, but it’s hilarious.

2) The weather here is bizarre! It hailed today, and it was probably 80˚ at the time. It’s really warm down here, but it must be pretty cold up there.

3) 100% of West Africans can dance better than me. I know that because I watched them in yesterday’s cultural show. I gave a stupid slideshow about the U.K., and all of them rocked out on the stage.

4) In the same cultural show, I also wore a football jersey to present the US, and I discovered that Patriots jerseys (or at least the ones sold to fans) are made in Russia! I think Bill Belichik has been outsourcing. Or the Cold War is still on and they've got us where it really matters.

5) I’ve been looking at student feedback on the Leadership and Entrepreneurship curriculum as part of my job, and there is a mass epidemic sweeping across this continent. Yes, I am talking about the widespread misspelling of “Integrity”. Students of ALA! It is not “Intergrity”. INTEGRITY.

6) Also, since you’ve been taking it as a class for a full 13 months, you should all be able to spell the word “Entrepreneurship” by now! A truly woeful number of you add a superfluous u’s and r’s. ENTREPRENEURSHIP.

7) Somewhere on campus, there’s someone who does a lot of eavesdropping, because they take the interesting things that they hear and post them on the notice boards. Sometimes I think they get desperate, but on the whole it’s a very interesting part of my day. Wherever you are, Mr./Mrs. “Amaricop”, I regret to tell you that you missed some fantastic words of wisdom from my roommate the other day. Here’s what he had to say:



Grammatically imperfect though that sentence may be it, is one of the purest truths I’ve heard all year. As Boubacar went on to elaborate, “You write a lot, but you have only one pen.” He’s right; ALA biro-hunger is at an all time high. Four different people have tried to pilfer my pens this term. One individual in particular was not even content to stop at the first one, which I actually gave him out of kindness (and a lack of mental fortitude to withstand his almost daily pestering). Are some people never content with a simple gift? As they say in Senegal:

Idea and Image of Anglophone Vocabulary

Annnnd after a short break, we’re back. The Internet over here in Jo’burg has been a little shaky, and I was also lazy. But more posts to come regularly, I hope.

In other news, we just finished a project in African Studies about the Idea and Image of Africa. My group concluded that the global image of Africa is mostly one of god-awful governance, gore, and giraffes. Okay so that’s not true, but I had a hard time with the alliteration. All that having been said, I have some choice observations on the African reality that we didn’t include in our presentation:

First, as you may have gathered from the first sentence of this post, utilities such as power and Internet can be shaky even in South Africa, which is one of this continent’s more developed countries. The water cut out a few weeks ago and no one so much as batted and eyelid. Everyone just said, “TIA. It’ll come back eventually. Eat fruit.”

Yet there is one detail that I find weird: In South Africa, the cold water runs out first. For the love of God, WHY?! Every morning I get out of bed, try to find my glasses, give up because I need them to find stuff in the first place, and then crawl blindly back under the covers. Then I get up again and take a shower a few minutes later. And for no discernable reason, only the hot water tap works. Five scalding minutes later, the cold water comes back on…but only to taunt me, because it leaves almost immediately. Showers here swap between “kettle” and “glacial”, and I think Twoface is manning the switch.


Some of you may be under the impression that what we have is better than feeling like an icicle whenever the hot water runs out, but none of you have ever had to chose between feeling clean and being boiled like egg.

Second, forget warthogs and hippopotami; the Jacaranda trees here are gorgeous. Africa is not about savannah animals; it’s about beautiful purple trees. Honeydew is full of them, and they are my new favorite plant. You’ve not lived until you’ve seen one.

Right, so now for the African view of the US. For this, I will call on my primary case study, Mr. Boubacar Diao Diallo. Boubacar basically thinks that Americans live in a mixture of a Captain America comic, MTV, and the last page of The Sneetches, by Dr. Seuss. To him, America is a land of acceptance and baggy pants. And for no obvious reason, he loves The Star Spangled Banner. He’s working on memorizing the song’s lyrics, and frequently makes me put it on repeat. And then he sits on my bed, conducting and humming to his heart’s content. It’s the stuff of legend; Uncle Sam would have been proud.

I also think Boubacar has an inaccurate view of how eloquent Americans are. I’m not sure who’s been writing the vocabulary list for his writing class, but they definitely skipped over some of the more obvious options. Most American’s can’t spell “armchair”, but Boubacar can already use “grandiloquence”, “flabbergasted”, and “fungible“. I’m Anglophone, and I thought that fungible was an adjectival form of the word "mushroom”! But no, it actually means mutually interchangeable.

Needless to say, this sort of thing happens often:

A Better Food Pyramid

If you ask any ALA student what they think is the biggest problem on this campus is, they’ll give you one of two answers. Some of the ones who don’t own laptops would say it’s that they don’t have a laptop. But the vast majority of them would answer that it’s the meals.

But I am not here to whine; although the food could be more varied, it could also be much worse. For one, it could be what about a third of the students here seem to desire, which is a diet based almost entirely on steak and burgers. Nor do I care about the much hated “Vegetarian Mondays”, partially because I’m a rabbit and love vegetables, and partially because meat is terrible for the earth - its production is responsible for 18% of global greenhouse emissions.

My treehugging aside, it’s important to realize there are some unavoidable realities to a boarding school diet. To describe what the typical ALA student eats, I have drawn a food pyramid. For those of you who have never seen one before, this is a standard one that all British schoolchildren see at one point or another:

The idea is that you eat more of the stuff at the bottom of the pyramid, because it’s good for you. Yes, I am well aware that “Wilderbeast” is spelt “Wildebeast”; I didn’t want to do the whole drawing again.

Now for ALA’s! (It’s largely based on my own experience, but I think it holds true for the broader community in many cases):

1. Bread. ALA has seven core values: Integrity, Curiosity, Excellence, Diversity, Humility, Compassion, and Bread. Bread is an absolutely essential part of any ALA student’s routine; it is the air we breathe in between meals. Dimeji told me that he didn’t like bread last week, and I was so overcome with a sympathy that I almost fell to my knees. Life would have been easier for him if were born a vampire and couldn’t go in the sunlight.

I’ve already mentioned our “PB&J, All, Every Day” motto, but there is a dark side to our bread-heavy diet: addiction. Snack time has conditioned me to want a cheese sandwich every day at the 9 o’clock p.m. Nothing gives me greater pleasure than seeing a two small triangles of low quality white bread with grated cheddar and butter in between them. They put out chicken salad sandwiches instead of the usual cheese the other day, and Akan (a fellow addict) and I were on the verge of tears.

2. Chicken. I don’t really like red meat, so I always take the chicken option at both lunch and dinner. Chicken here comes in all shapes and sizes: drumsticks, medium sizes chunks with sauce, filets, drumsticks, small chunks, and drumsticks. It’s also useful as artillery ammo; Madia likes to fling the bones at Mohamadou.

3. Chutney, Ketchup, and Salt. No ALA student worth his salt (ha) goes a day without adding flavors his meal. House favorites include: chicken with chutney, rice with ketchup, and anything with salt. Adventurous individuals add pepper, but it’s not necessary. As a rule, you eat about as much ketchup as you do meat.

4. Chicken Triple Decker. Lets be honest, you cannot live off a diet of bread, cheese and chicken. You need to melt the cheese, add barbeque sauce, sour cream, ricotta and tomato sauce, chop the chicken up, put it all onto three calorific pizzas, all layered on top of each other. Now THAT’S a diet. Thank God for Debonairs Pizza and all that it has done for my body mass index.

5. Vegetables. Vegetables are good for you.

6. Lays. Lays are provided at snack time and also sold at the tuck shop, which is why we eat more of them than any other junk food. As a side note, the crisps here have a much stronger kick than in the US; cheese and onion genuinely tastes like raw onions, and I feel like I’m drinking acid whenever I eat salt and vinegar.

7. Apples with Peanut Butter. Africans love to take bits of Western culture, from hip-hop to high tops, but this snack could be America’s greatest contribution yet. If you haven’t tried it, it’s not disgusting. In fact, the gap years have a 100% success rate with converts so far. Apples with peanut butter are also a brilliant use of limited culinary resources; few people would think to put sandwich spreads on fruit. But most importantly, they are scrumptious. Don’t be shy and give them a try!

8. Bovril/Marmite. These two condiments are on the food pyramid, but only so I can say that I see no reason for them to be on our dining room tables. Bovril is basically beef extract tar, and marmite is mildew jam. If you ask me, both of them smell and taste awful. Bovril used to be put in hot water and drunk as “beef tea” in the trenches during WWI, but I think the threat of being machine-gunned gave the soldiers an exaggerated appreciation for it. At ALA, nobody eats the bloody Bovril. The Bovril jars sit on the table, sullen, lonely, and as untouched as Mr. O's hoodie drawer.

Mythbusters, Mary Antoinette, and Money

For those of you who do not enjoy the wonders of The Discovery Channel at home, it broadcasts a show called Mythbusters, which takes popular ‘facts’ and tests how true they are. The program is hosted by two men called Jamie and Adam, who wear an awesome combination of farmer’s caps, glasses, and beards. I’m still working on the beard, but I do wear glasses sometimes. So…..Welcome to Liam’s version of Mythbusters!

1) “Let them eat cake.” Madame G mentioned the following well-known allegory a couple days ago: Marie Antoinette heard about how all of the French peasantry were starving and remarked, stupidly, “Let them eat cake.” I did some research though, and it turns out that there is absolutely no evidence whatsoever to support that story. Some bloke called Rousseau did attribute the phrase to a princess in his memoirs in 1767, but Marie Antoinette was still growing up in Austria at the time.



2) “One Nation, One Meal”: Nigeria made a cake big enough to feed the entire country. “Let them eat cake” is not an exclusively French philosophy though; the Nigerians also adopted it for their fiftieth anniversary ceremony. During the event's build up, newspapers reported that the celebratory gateau would be 100ft long, 65 tons, feed the whole population, and set a Guinness World Record. The articles were accompanied by a picture of the empty football field that was going to be the plate. Oh Lordy.

Let’s back up though…65 tons?!?! That’s a lot of hens, working very hard to make a lot of eggs. Does Nigeria have no poultry labour laws? And just how much of the area’s milk and sugar supply had to be diverted to create this baking monstrosity? Tea in West Africa probably sucked for the entire month of September.

Unfortunately, I haven’t been able to find a picture or an article about the cake’s unveiling. There was one image of Jonathan Goodluck cutting a moderately large pudding, but it was neither in a football field nor 100ft long. I have devised two possible two conclusions: 1) Mr. Goodluck was especially hungry that day and ate 61 tons of dessert before the press could get a picture of the whole thing, or 2) The cake was never made.



3) Two-rand coins are worth two rand. Before I came to ALA, I assumed that the number on a coin indicates its worth. For instance, a £2 coin is more valuable than a £1 coin, which is in turn more valuable than a tuppence. But it turns out that sort of logic was for innocent simpletons.

At ALA, the clothes dryers only work if we put in two-rand coins. That would probably be alright in the real world, but since we aren’t really allowed leave campus, we can’t go to stores very often, and that means that we don’t have too much loose change. The end result is that an absolutely vital function of my life requires something that I have very little of; massive demand, low supply -> high value. Students at ALA prize two rand coins like they would prize diamond encrusted MacBooks, Sauron’s ring, or a whole case of Kit Kats.

Desperate times call for desperate measures, and since I’m not actually willing to trade my laptop for dry laundry, I’ve only been able to find one solution:




Two rand coins are not worth two rand, they’re worth about one hundred. MYTH BUSTED.