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.