What's black and slimy?

So this morning I was waking up slowly and all of a sudden, I saw something strange at my feet. Lying flat on the ground was a two inch black frog. Cursory examination revealed that the frog was dead. The most mysterious part was that my room was sealed. The windows were closed tightly and I even put a pair of trousers at the base of my door so mosquitoes couldn't fly in that way. Yet somehow, this not-very-tiny frog found its way in and decided to sprawl out dead at my feet. Well, if they were more effective at catching mosquitoes, I'd keep a few of them on patrol every night.

Two years by the numbers

And just to give you a few numbers: 2 years = 730 days = 17520 hours = 1,051,200 minutes = 63,072,000 seconds = 57,979,678,357,440,000 oscillations of Cesium-133 in the atomic clock. Okay, while that's accurate to the nearest hour as of 9 PM East African Time, I'm probably off by a few thousand seconds and several trillion Cesium oscillations. Alternatively, 2 years = 8.13% of my life. That calculation led me to discover that on the same the day that my sister will be celebrating her birthday next weekend, I will be celebrating my 9th kilo-day (I can't believe there's a link for this, but now you can calculate it for yourself, although I disagree with their counting system of calling your birthday zero, since I would call that the first day, rather than the zero-th).

Two year anniversary

Two years ago today, I arrived at Jomo Kenyatta International Airport in Nairobi with 41 other Peace Corps trainees.

When I started this blog, the plan was that it would last 26 months and then I wasn't sure what would happen after that. I figured that this two year post would be the beginning of the end. Things haven't exactly gone according to plan.

Obviously, leaving Peace Corps after 14 months was a big part of that. But that's actually been a relatively minor change, since most of what I've been doing in 2010 feels like how I would have wanted my Peace Corps service to run. I guess the biggest change has been my expectations. (In case you're wondering about physical changes, I've returned to a healthy weight, so the biggest change there is probably the decrease in how much hair I have on my head.)

A lot of people join Peace Corps and other similar programs expecting to change the world and leave their lasting mark on a community. I wasn't so ambitious, which is not to say that I was hoping for insignificance, but rather, I figured that the biggest changes would be in my personal development and any benefits accrued by the community would be icing on the cake.

In each stage of my life, I feel like I became a wholly new person and I figured that the sequence would continue. And in a way it has. But I am not sure that I would almost call it personal regression, rather than personal development. I've been hardened by a lot of my experiences here. Some have created unhealthy levels of bitterness which I would love to move past. It's also helped me to revert to some of my more introverted tendencies (I have spent a lot of my life alternating between introversion and extroversion). Sure, I have plenty of adventures with my friends, but I spend much more time wanting to be alone than to socialize. I have more difficulty trusting people these days. My math skills (math used to be one of my favorite hobbies. Yep, I'm a big nerd.) have plummeted, and my Spanish and French are pretty weak these days (although on the flip side, my reading, writing and Kiswahili skills are probably at their strongest ever).

Well, I haven't exactly painted a pretty rosy picture so far, but then, many of my other posts are looking through rose-colored glasses, so I tend to use these reflective posts to look at larger trends. I wouldn't trade my experiences and lessons learned over the past two years for anything. It's definitely instilled a bit of patience in me (not much, but at least it's a start). I also worked out most of my argumentative tendencies (though sometimes those bubble just below the surface). And most importantly, I've built some really important friendships, with people who I probably never would have met or become close with were it not for our shared experiences over here.

At this point, I can't really say if I'll be over here for one more year or five more years or longer or shorter. However, I do know that I've barely scratched the surface of what I can learn out here.

Pick-up Frisbee

Thursday is now Frisbee Day here in Arusha. It's the only day of the week when I leave the office at 5. I head into town to the field where we play ultimate frisbee. About 2/3 of the players are ex-pats and tourists, but we've gotten a few Tanzanians who are now regulars. Most of the Tanzanians had never thrown a frisbee 5 weeks ago, but had quite a speed advantage. Now, after five matches, they still have quite a speed advantage and they can throw the frisbee pretty well.

It's one of my favorite parts of the week. Frisbee has been my number one sport since high school (we used to play in parking lots when we couldn't find a field). I was a bit out of practice my first week, but since then I've found my throws (though perhaps not my judgment since I still take the ambitious throw over the safe throw nine times out of ten). However, I tend to be one of the slower people on the field, so maybe I should work on that. I like to do my stall-counts alternating English and Kiswahili "One! Mbili! Three! Nne! ..."

I've only been going for three weeks (the weather has been mostly cooperative so far ::knock on wood:: ), but it's been a good chance for me to make friends outside of work. The sun sets after a little over an hour and then we usually go out and grab a quick drink afterward and hang out for a bit before I head back to the office for my weekly IDDS meeting.

If you ever want to join us, we play on the field next to the Sikh Temple near Friends' Corner :)

What I did this summer

Well, I kinda left my blog blank for most of the summer while I was in the states. However, I finally sat down and wrote about my experiences after the fact (but posted them with the relevant dates). It's only three posts, but they're super long (I tried to break down the first two into more manageable segments, while the third, is not much worse than a lot of my other posts). Anyway, it's a healthy dose of reading (sorry Kate, sorry Button, and sorry anyone else who feels that my posts take way too long to read), so I hope that you'll take your time.

Enjoy!

Unreasonable Reflections

IDDS 2010

An interlude with my family

Expiration Dates

When you buy a soda here, the bottle tells you the date that the bottle was filled and the date that the contents will expire.  I just drank a Pepsi that was bottled on November 30, 2010 (maybe I should have said will be bottled).  It's not the first time I've seen Pepsi connected with time travel..

Photo: Lucknow, India 2007

Election Day

Well, Sunday was election day here in Tanzania (Halloween is not really a big deal here). Although a lot of outsiders wrote off the result as a foregone conclusion, there was definitely a lot of excitement on the ground, as the opposition parties seemed to stand a better chance than usual to unseat the Party of the Revolution (CCM), which has basically been in power since independence almost 50 years ago.

The Economist had a rather shoddy effort in reporting on this one, which was a big disappointment for me (they looked at one particular village and seemed to extrapolate the conditions to the whole country) and even more infuriatingly, I couldn't comment on the article (the CAPTCHA that they had told me I was wrong 30 times, which leads me to believe that it's bad software). One of the most striking features in Arusha (I want to offer the disclaimer that my election analysis certainly is not valid beyond Arusha and even here is a tiny snap-shot) was that many of the supporters of the Party for Democracy and Development (ChaDeMa) featured a lot of people who had supported CCM at the last election in 2005 when Benjamin Mkapa was leading the party and had great things to say about him. They had become rather jaded in the last 5 years under the leadership of Jakaya Kikwete and were eager for change.

Yesterday was a bit hectic in town, and I couldn't fully understand what was going on, but it seemed like they were delaying release of the results and finally released a tally showing that ChaDeMa had won by a healthy margin. After that, vehicles were driving up and down the road honking in celebration and shouting slogans. They are still awaiting results in several other major areas, and it seems like the uncertainty may continue for a few more days. I don't have a sense whether the outcome is in question, or if it's simply a question of how big CCM's majority is (they seemed to have the tables tilted in their favor throughout the election), but it will be interesting to see how everything plays out.

Oh, and I mailed in my absentee ballot today (the last day I could postmark it). For any of you who were eligible to vote and couldn't, I submit that you should put a higher value on your role in democracy. I admit that I'm pretty lucky to be registered in a county that agreed to email me my ballot (I still had to send it via the postal system) but that luck is balanced out by the poor quality of candidates on that ballot.