Always Look on the Bright Side of Life

November 22,

Not my best week ever, but life goes on.  Because of the computer catastrophe, I’m back to writing blog entries in my notebook.

Birthdays are strange things.  I don’t feel any older than I did three days ago.  My supervisor threw a party at the guest house with the rest of my friends from CRS and PIH.  It was very nice of them to do, and I think we all had a good time.

Birthdays do give a good way to measure a year.  Last year at this time I had just turned in my SMP (final draft was due on the eighteenth or nineteenth if I remember right).  That month for me marked the end of being super busy and involved with schoolwork and the start of really planning and preparing to leave for two years.  That that was a year ago now is a little breathtaking.

In the other direction, I just spent a weekend with a volunteer from the CHED group one year ahead of me.  If that timeframe fits for our group, one year from now we will be the senior volunteers in country, starting to plan and prepare to go back home.  It sure puts two years in perspective.

In other news I think I finally have a solution for the rat problem here.  Actually, I realized as I was writing this that I haven’t fully described the rat situation here.  Right:  here we go.

During the time I was having trouble with my roof, I moved out of my house temporarily, until we were able to patch the holes.  Overall, this was a good idea- I would have stayed dry if it had rained, I didn’t have thatch constantly falling on me, and switching beds for a few weeks gave me an opportunity to deal with the bedbug infestation I had brought up from Maseru.

Nothing comes without a cost, though.  After I moved back in and my roof was in one piece, I noticed some holes in the wall.  These worried me, but it was getting late and I decided to deal with them in the morning.  That night I woke up around 11:00, to hear something large scurrying across my vinyl floor.  As I lay listening to it, I heard squeaking, and then -horror- a second set of legs.  Now, I am not usually that bad with the various beasties and annoyances of life here.  I don’t mind the spiders so much, and I had just dealt with bed bugs, creatures that, were they a little bigger, would have had starring roles in several 1950s horror movies.

Rats are another story.  I’ve never had a problem with rodents before; I even kept pet mice through most of elementary school, for which my mother deserves to be sainted.

When you are lying on your bed in Lesotho though, it is dark.  Not just dark, but dark without the possibility of light.  Sure, there is an unlit candle at your bedside table, but you carried it over lit and blew it out when you went to sleep.  To get to matches you have to get up and walk barefoot through rat-infested darkness to grope around on a table for them- assuming, of course, that you have remembered the right table.  So I did what any brave, intrepid Peace Corps Volunteer would do.  I hid under my blankets.

There was a flaw in this brilliant strategy though.  While I was face down with the blankets over me head, I had foolishly left my arems in the open, clutching the wool around my ears.  Just as I was falling back asleep, I felt something very warm, furry, and squeaking run across my exposed arm.  I flew upright, propelling my rodent tormentor into the air and across the room.

After a few good screams to wake up my neighbours, I remembered I had my cell phone on my bedside table.  As I grabbed at it, the pale light of its screen fell on a very surprised rat in the middle of the room.  It was approximately the size of a border collie, and seemed to size me up before taking off to one of the holes I had noticed earlier.

I didn’t sleep well that night.

Since then I’ve been in a running battle with the rates.  We’ve tried traps- the rats are smart enough to avoid them.  Rat poison rolled up in balls of tasty looking treats was eaten with gusto, but didn’t even slow them down.  Various projectiles thrown from my bed at night have been worse than useless.

In the absence of food other than the poisoned goodies, the rats have started targeting (deliberately I think) anything carelessly left on the table or folded on a chair.  Clothes seem to be a favourite.  They’ve chewed holes in my dress shirt, as well as (inexplicably) removed the pocket from one pair of pants.  The pants look fine, and are wearable, but as soon as I forget and put something in the pocket (small change, pens, my cellphone), it comes falling out onto my shoe.  This provides good Sesotho conversation starters: “Ntate, why are things falling out of your pants?” “Well gee, usually I have a better grip than that.”

Recently the rats have moved on from clothes to electronics, chewing through the cords for my speakers.  Apparently they were tired of hearing American music.  I’m not unconvinced there isn’t some kind of rat-hacker that is responsible for my computer dying.

Soon, though, I unveil my secret weapon- felix horriblis, the common housecat.  Another volunteer heard about my problem and offered me one of her cat’s kittens, as soon as it is done nursing.  I’ve since watched the kitten run up to a full grown dog and bat at the dog’s tail, avoiding grievous bodily injury only by the quick intervention of its mother.  It should be a good match for the rats.

A cat also has the benefit of being some kind of companionship.  At a volunteer get together a month ago, several of us compared notes on how we were dealing with isolation.  Unlike some, I haven’t started having long drawn out conversations with the spider in my window, but it wouldn’t be that far of a stretch.  Somehow, a cat just seems like a better idea.

Mac the knifed

My computer is no more, at least for awhile.

Yesterday it froze while I was typing, and when I tried to restart it displayed a flashing folder with question mark:

Combined with a clicking sound coming from the body of the laptop, I’m pretty sure it’s a hard drive failure.  So updates are going to be a little sparse for awhile while I try to figure this out.  There is an apple store in Cape Town, where I was thinking of going after Christmas anyway.  With any luck they’ll be able to do the neccesary repairs. That would sure be easier (and probably cheaper) than shipping it back and forth from the States.

Haha! The Computer’s back!

Give me a few days, and I’ll try to have a video blog up.

The morning after

November 5,

I had something written for last night.  A few weeks ago I sat down to write up my thoughts on the election, and what it would mean for our country and all of us.  When California and Hawaii were called last night, and CNN ran the “Obama Elected President” banner, all that thinking and writing were left behind, along with so much else.

One of my first posts on this blog was on the anniversary of Martin Luther King’s death in April.  I posted a video of his last speech, under the title ‘why.’ I know at least some took it to mean “why am I joining the Peace Corps?”  The real question, while maybe a bit related, was also most pessimistic: “why did it have to end like that?”  I grew up thinking of the Civil Rights era as one of the noblest in our countries history, and a time when my family was very involved.  The Kennedys and Dr. King were (and are) to me the great heroes of American history, a history that all too often feels like a Shakespearean tragedy.  The Kennedys and King shot, the architect of the civil rights act disgraced by Vietnam, Grant Park the home of police clashes which hobbled the movement’s ability to recover.  If American lives (and political movements) have no second acts, than surely this was a bitter curtain.  Forty years later we told ourselves that things were better, that we had come a long way, but not due to any closure of what took place before.  If we were to see Dr. King’s mountaintop, it would be a stumbling, grueling journey without a compass.

And then last night a new scene from Grant Park- not of violence, but of hundreds of thousands coming together to celebrate what is possible if we put our minds to it.  As I sat watching last night, all I could think about was the Ernie Dunns and Jack Corys of the world, the Powells and the John Sinclairs; the millions of Americans that did the right thing because we’re Americans, and we’re decent to other people, and it doesn’t need to be any more complicated than that.  Watching Grant Park last night I realized that my question why was a faulty one: nothing ever really ended.  As we were reminded last night, we’re not at the promised land yet, but every day we make progress: brick by brick, calloused hand by calloused hand.

The next four years could be some of the hardest our country has ever faced.  President Obama will take office with a long list of crises, any one of which could have qualified as the defining challenge of Presidencies before his.  Expectations could not be higher, and I expect this week we’ll already be hearing about political battles over the cabinet and the direction the country will take from here [as of this writing, Rahm Emanuel has been announced as the new chief of staff].  For now though, let’s all take a breath and realize what a thing we’ve achieved.

Know Hope

It’s five o’clock in the morning here, and a few of us diehards are still up watching returns come in on CNN international. The birds are chirping, Ohio was just called for Obama, we can see some sun in the sky, and this feels like a symbol of the day as a whole as far as politics go.

This is a big, big night for us crazy liberals living on the edge of American Civilization.