Impetuous Translations

The last survivor standing... and other observations

Okay.

Well.

Yes.

It turns out it is difficult to find something nice to say about Zim these days. There's the weather, of course, but technically the weather is out of control of the government thus it's hard to picture how they could screw that up.

There's also the general niceness of the people I work with on our HIV/AIDS project, but having said that, even they are starting to flag a bit under the humanitarian crisis. The pressure is mounting to new levels to be sure and people are really suffering.

In line with that, here are some quick observations from my first week about the latest difficulties in Zim:

1. Water can be a mirage in the African bush too. Harare and the rural project area where I work, have no piped water anymore. In light of having no foreign currency to purchase anything to treat the water coupled with the cholera epidemic, the government has shut off the water supply. On the plus side, bottled water is expensive but at least it's available.

2. US currency is still valuable somewhere. As of this visit, Zimbabwe as a whole has adopted the U.S. dollar. Every food or personal item here now costs a dollar, unless it costs two dollars or eight dollars or $1.37. On one hand, the dollarization of the economy is good because there is much more food available in the shops. On the other hand, the dollarization is bad because there are very few actual dollars, let alone U.S. coins, circulating in the economy. At this point, the only currency value available is the 20 dollar bill. Ways of dealing with this are threefold. One, someone scurries off for non-existent change when you buy something for less than a twenty and eventually just disappears without bringing the change back. Two, having grown tired of the small-bill currency searching game, you buy things you do not need just to make it to the twenty dollars. Three, you get some kind of voucher for the remaining amount which for a foreigner is the equivalent of paying for twenty dollars worth of merchandise even if it's far less. In practice everything costs 20 bucks here. Also, if you don't have a way to get dollars (read: for everyone else except tourists or people with relatives in foreign countries), you are in no uncertain terms - screwed.

3. The last survivor standing in the Zimbabwe crisis could well be the cockroach. Cockroaches crawl everywhere in our rural staff house despite the fact that there is little food. They have also set up organized camps in my 80 dollar a night "luxury" hotel bathroom. They are everywhere. I'm starting to think that cockroaches have invaded Zimbabwe with the force and numbers that every other country concerned with human rights should have.

So, yes.

Well.

Okay.

Enough for now. This list to be continued next week, I fear.

My impending silence

The guy at Bank of America, who was concerned about potential fraud from my debit card use as of late, asked me twice where I was going tomorrow (answer x2: Zimbabwe), once how to spell that (answer: Z-I-M-B-A-B-W-E) and three times in series about where this place was located (answer: Yes, a country. in Africa. the continent). No wonder a ruthless politician with only his self-interest at heart can bring down an entire population's livelihood and get away with it. The Bank of America guy doesn't even know the country exists!

In case you couldn't guess, I'm gearing up for my next big trip to Zim tomorrow. It's a long one too. I'll be back on the 9th of February, but not before spending nearly two weeks of that time in the eastern province of rural Manicaland. I'll be saying goodbye to my mobile phone and email, which are worthless there, and hello to the old-fashioned hard copies of journal articles and other papers that require no electricity to read. My aim is to be productive as possible while I'm being forced off the grid, so to speak.

When I return, I'll be looking forward to finding something good to report about my trip in the next blog... or else I'll just blog about something new that is completely unrelated to Zimbabwe. If you don't have anything nice to say - my 94 year old grandfather always reminds me - say nothing at all. I should probably listen to my grandfather's advice more often.

Have a great couple of weeks!

Yeah, that's right.

President Obama is in the house.

Souvenirs (Part II)

On one hand, you have to laugh at the absurdity of it all - like 100 trillion dollar bills. On the other hand, the joke seems to be falling a little flat these days.

Bob Herbert's reality-check editorial in the NY times today is a good reminder why, sadly, the health care system in Zimbabwe would also make an excellent souvenir. The system has all of the trappings of the perfect memento: priceless because of its rarity and yet so practically tiny, the whole lot of it fits easily into one's suitcase back home.

My packing list for Zimbabwe at the request of colleagues living there:

1. Roach spray
2. Iodized salt
3. Writing paper
4. Chocolate
5. Iodine tablets
6. Flashlights
7. Antibiotics

That says it all, I suppose.

Souvenirs (Part I)

Ten to one odds that by the time my next trip to Zimbabwe ends on February 9th, the only thing the newest Zim$100 trillion dollar bill will be good for is a souvenir. But boy, oh, boy what a souvenir that will be.

Since I'll be able to afford it by then, one hundred trillion dollar bills for everyone. Don't say I never gave you anything.

Something is funny around here

There are a lot of things about living in Britain that give me pause. Two of the leading contenders are the stunning disregard for customer service in shops and restaurants and the social norm that requires you in a pub to buy a round of beers rather than just your own drink. Come to think of it, the lack of Skinny Cows and low-fat tortilla chips in the supermarkets are other real stunners too. I mean, seriously, I don't know how I survive here sometimes. 

The one thing about the UK that does not give me pause, though, is the British sense of humor. Unlike in the U.S., witty banter is considered an art form rather than a tic. Even the B-grade BBC TV shows here have proven to be outlandishly funny in that way. The Office and Coupling, which I had seen before, and newly discovered shows, like Top Gear, Ab Fab, Celebrity Ding Dong, QI, and even the now infamous Jonathan Ross Show (once his suspension is over of course) are pricelessly-hilarious TV.

For the last couple of nights, my flatmate and I have been catching up by DVD on Seasons' 1 and 2 of one such 'new-to-us' BBC TV show, Gavin and Stacey. The half-hour weekly series, which is just going into Season 3 this month, explores the marriage between two soul mates, an Essex bloke, Gavin, and a Welsh girl, Stacey. From the sounds of it, the Welsh to the Brits seem to be the equivalent of West Virginians to Ohioans. In other words, there's always a good joke to be had at their expense.

Inadvertently, the show has added a whole new vocabulary to our household, which results in us starting all our conversations with "I won't lie to you" and "What's occurring is" and concluding them with such complex summations as "crackin'" and "fair play." The two supporting actors, James Corden (Smithy) and Ruth Jones (Nessa), who are the writers as well, must seriously test the BBC censoring system. The first episode of Series 1 and the toliet brush incident is, well, I won't lie to you, crackin. 

Check out the series if you can find it where you live; otherwise, be sure to allocate an extra day on your next visit to our flat for some not-so-serious time with our new favorite friends. Fair play, indeed.  

This American Life by the Numbers

This American Life is one of my favorite radio podcasts. I wait every week for a new episode to be posted and I listen to it in the morning before I head out to work on the day that it's posted. The series is never not interesting, never makes a miss, so to speak. Ira Glass has even persuaded me to give him money to support the internet bandwidth in these difficult financial times. That's just how much I like the show.

All of this blatant advertisement aside for This American Life, what I wanted to say was how funny I found the last podcast, Numbers. The episode presents vignettes of people's stories about quantifying what shouldn't be or isn't usually quantified in life, like relationships and art. I guess it's not too surprising that I find this intriguing.

In the opening vignette, a single woman about my age is featured for having turned all of her dates, serious relationships, kisses with random men, anything that involved something other than a fantasy into a number per year. She then elaborately tracks this number on an Excel spreadsheet titled My Love Life: A Ten Year Span.

When looking at her past relationships in this way, she says she can think of those numbers and the trend as successes rather than failures, no matter how badly the experience with the person actually was. For a longstanding serial dater, I can sort of see how this might be a nice coping strategy.

The best part of the vignette is her analysis of the trends. She plots her rise over time in her teenage and college years. Then she explains away the big fat zero in the late 1990s to the six months she lived with her mother and the recovery time from that. A few years after that where her number for a brief time soars, she chalks it up to her slutty years abroad. One of the closing sentences of the story from her: "What can I say, me and David Hasslelhoff do better in Europe."  Classic, so succinctly stated and clearly true. That line has made me laugh for three days straight. 

Give it a listen. It's free until Ira Glass guilts you into paying for it.

What goes up

must come down (and preferably via the balcony).

Christmas is officially over. Happy Valentine's Day.

Penguins are pacing on my doorstep

It's apparently colder here in London than it is in Antartica right now. Fortunately, and even in spite of the complete and utter chaos in the country, there's only a few more weeks until I'll find myself back in warm sunny Zimbabwe. From the looks of my travel itinerary, the 18 days I'm planning to spend there should be just enough time to thaw out.

Choosing your words carefully

Listening to special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald read from the Rod Blagojevich taped phone conversations might have been one of my 2008 Top 10 "Happy to have witnessed that moments" even in what was a busy year of political gaffes. Fitzgerald's thoughtful substitution of the word "bleeping" for the word "fucking" while trying to accurately quote Governor Blagojevich apparently made a similar impression on William Saffire, who in this Sunday's New York Times, dedicated his weekly On Language column to an etiologic discourse on the words we use to categorize our own dirty words and deeds.

The Blagojevich reading, coupled with Saffire's column, also reminded me of the old Seinfeld episode where a love interest of George's summarily recounts her weekend plans with an ex by saying they had dinnner and then "yada, yada, yada. I'm very tired." This invocation of the girlfriend's "yada" placeholder differs in some respects from Fitzgerald's substitution game, in that the former leaves the juicy details open to the listener's interpretation while, in the latter, no self-respecting adult would be left wondering what Fitzgerald really meant.

The subtle but deliberate choice of words to both say and not say what we mean is a fascinating science - one that many people don't give much thought to. Jeremy Butterfield's book Damp Squid in layman's terms tries to help us think about just that. Since reading his book, I'm much more aware of the words I choose to use as a result. For example, a few nights ago, at dinner with a friend, I listened to myself attempt to answer the simple question - what will you do after your PhD ends? In Sarah Palin-esque like sentences, I jumped from stating the obvious, that at some point my studies here in the city will end, to a factual truth that in some fashion I will have to again get a job, to note that the job will undoubtedly have to have something to do with what I'm studying, that I could live anywhere I want to but London and Africa and the U.S. all of their draws, to a final thought that I am the type of person who has been lucky enough to know what she wants out of life.

In other words, I came to London, yada, yada, yada, and I still have no "bleeping" idea what I'm going to do next. Sadly, Butterfield's book doesn't seem to be of much help there.