Saturday, December 08, 2007

aren't we the problem?

Hi blog. I got Malaria—finally. I was starting to get exasperated at my inability to catch any of the really cool diseases. First off, I have another installment into the “Africa for Regaling Guests at Cocktail Parties—Like a Douche Bag” handbook:

Ha! You know you’ve been in Africa for awhile when all of the following happen and none of them surprise you:

1) You get Malaria (and go to the hospital).

2) At the hospital, the floor is strewn with large, moth-like flies, floundering around like as many fish in the bottom of a boat. Well, flying fish.

3) You go, “Doesn’t inspire much confidence, does it?” and the nearest woman with good English replies, “When they get big enough we eat them.”

Ha! So as I was saying, everyone must visit Africa. And read The New Yorker or something.

End of excerpt. Apparently the bugs you fry up with just oil and a little salt. I’ll let you know.

Anyway. Got malaria out of the way. It wasn’t that bad, really, because I was on prophylaxis—which doesn’t prevent malaria, but kind of smushes it a bit when/if you do catch it. Malaria here is more like the flu: Everyone seems to get it from time to time—you take a few days off of work, get some medicine, and then you get better and go back to work. It’s not as big a deal as it probably seems. Yeah, people occasionally die from it, but that’s almost always very small children, old people, or people with HIV/AIDS.

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Oh, some friends from college who do an online magazine for people who like both God and social responsibility (though if you ask me, those don’t mix) saw my blog post about cynicism where I talked about Dreamingers and asked me to tinker with it a bit to make it into an article. So it’s at www.catapultmagazine.com. It’s a biweekly e-magazine, and the current issue will be gone by this coming Friday. A goodly amount of you people who peruse this blog already know about Catapult, but if y’don’t it’s worth a look.

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I’m going on record now as saying Permaculture is the future of Planet Earth. (Google is your friend.) As the planet gets hotter and our unsustainable practices piss off Mother Nature enough that she really does something to get back at us, and we actually get it through our heads that we simply can’t keep living like we have, I predict 1) Massive population control efforts—cuz after all, if we’re honest, none of these things would be a concern if there weren’t so danged many of us doing the same danged things—and 2) Permaculture as a way of living for almost everyone. Personally, I want to be able to tell my grandkids I was on that wagon long before the band.

‘Cuz yeah—it’s getting pretty crazy. I mean, we’ve already obliterated so much forest worldwide, caused so many species to become extinct, and generally mucked things up to such a degree that it seems we’re kind of on a collision course with some sort of cataclysm, doesn’t it? I mean seriously. I don’t mean in a doom-and-gloom sort of way, but really quite seriously. I don’t think it’s even possible, what with people so doped up on all their frivolous technology and consumption habits, that we’ll change in time to avert major disaster. I feel kind of bad, because I’m pretty sure that as a privileged, educated Westerner, I’ll be fortunate enough to escape most of the consequences, but do I deserve to?

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Better tell you this: John is my neighbor. He’s cool—really, really awful teeth though. His family’s originally from Zimbabwe (which is somewhat more developed than Malawi); they came here a little over twenty years ago and now hardly anyone even remembers that they’re not Malawian. The men of his family were meeting to decide what to do about their niece. Her husband’s away in South Africa working. He’d been there in the past too but was fired after stealing from his boss. She just started working as a maid for a richer man affiliated with one of the political parties here. Aaand, here it is: she was raped by this guy. At the moment, she was at large—she’d fled and they couldn’t find her. They’d sent the smaller children on various missions to go out and look, but at the moment they couldn’t find her. As you might expect, the chances of the political operative seeing justice is slim to slimmer to none. As I write this, they still haven’t found her, at least to my knowledge.