And now that you’ve returned from looking up the word defenestration, on to our regularly scheduled programming…
Many people have been sending me messages, emails, and singing telegrams the last several weeks to wonder if I’m okay, how I’m doing, if I’m succumbed to sleeping sickness (a real thing) or if I’ve given up and moved to a bunker to ride out this whole apocolypse/rapture thing that was supposed to come. And I’m proud to say that the list of the concerned included more than just my mother. So first let me dispel some myths about the reason there is a lack of information getting out.
Myth #1: TJ’s dead. While this would probably triple the asking price for the movie rights to my life’s story, this has not yet happed. Although statistically speaking I’m sure I’ll kick the bucket at some point, I just pray the day comes before “the singularity” occurs.
Myth #2: TJ went into hiding. Although in my semi-professional opinion this country is always one bad decision away from society-crippling riots, nothing has pushed me into the shadows just yet. Even when the U.S. Embassy in Mozambique sent out a warning after Osama bin Laden bought the farm, the only “heightened danger” in my life was an insatiable urge to play Call of Duty: Modern Warfare after hearing the details of the raid.
Myth #3: TJ gave up. Before I came back to Nampula somebody asked me point-blank, “Why the heck are you going to Mozambique?” I gave them an equally pointy and equally blanky response. My response, then as it is now, is because that’s what God made me for. I’m not going anywhere yet.
Myth #4: Too busy preparing for the apocalypse. Since my personal, biblical belief is that the apocalypse will involve zombies and not rapture (email me if you have questions), I was not preparing for the end of the world. However, many folks here were. The quack that was putting out these radio broadcasts apparently has a huge following in South Africa, and these people felt it their responsibility to put out (mis)information here in Nampula of all places. Billboard ads around the city and print flyers just told people judgement day is coming and you’re pretty much screwed.
The general populace here responded like uninformed, easily-panicked, uneducated masses that were under the impression that “America” said the world was going to end on Saturday could only be expected to respond: a few especially scared people sold all they had, and the rest just hedged their bets and drank themselves into oblivion.
As for what has really been going on with me…
Reality #1: Computer problems. The charger on my computer broke about 6 weeks ago (when posts started to get even slower). This left me w/o computer for about 3 weeks. And if any of you are thinking, “Why didn’t you just go to the mall and get one?” or saying to yourself, “I’d die without checking my email 6 times a day.” or lamenting, “That’s such a disaster. Did all of your fake plants die on your fake facebook farm in your fake reality?” you have clearly never been to Mozambique nor were you ever intended to.
Reality #2: Internet (In)Security. In the best of times here in Nampula, you are gauraunteed to not have the internet working for at least one day a week. That’s just the reality. It’s recently gotten better and can manage about 10kb/s, but if anyone has ever talked with me on Skype you know that you frequently have to ask if a raccoon is attacking my computer or if the connection just makes it sound like that. Ever since my computer got working another thing happened. I’m telling the truth, and I don’t want you to think that I’m just making excuses. For about the first week the internet didn’t even work anywhere at all. As in nobody that has a computer anywhere was getting the internet to work. Since that (about 3 weeks ago) it has come back but it is sparce at best.
Basically U.S. based sites have a hard time working consistently. This isn’t so much a problem for news or weather or info because all that can be accessed from European or African sites. And checking the news every once in a while is nice, because out here it feels like the world could end and you might only hear about it from somebody who heard it from their cousin who read something somewhere.
The problem is trying to use U.S. sites like google, or more specifically, my email and access to this blog. The email maybe will come if I have patience (~30 minutes) and the blogger hasn’t worked the two times I’ve actually tried to post something since Mother’s Day.
What usually happens when the internet goes out here is the connection is horrible and then once it returns to normal we hear that there was an infrastructure problem. The root of the problem stems from that when Al Gore invented the internet he apparently only designed two tubes going to Mozambique. One is an undersea cable and the other comes overland. And that is on top of the, like, 3 super-tubes that connect all of Africa to the rest of the world. When any one of these five or so tubes go, the internet takes a huge step back to 1996. And that’s on top of it already being in 1996-like conditions.
To keep myself from becoming crazy crazier, I rely on Jesus and a good sense of humor. That’s why I find internet outages really funny—after it comes back to normal there is always a ridiculous story that accompanies the cause of the outage. In one such case, they discovered a flaw in the transmission line that only carries the interweb to the entire northern half of the country. The flaw was that it was not buried deep enough and animals (probably goats) had diggen it up, chewed through the conduit to eat the cable inside.
My favorite story is from the first time I was here in 2009. After a particularly long internet outage, it was discovered that a main undersea cable accidentally got ripped up by a boat using it as an anchor. This would be excusable had officials not discovered a pattern of this fishing boat REPEATEDLY speeding along until the anchor hooked the cable and then anchoring for the day.
The problem was further exacerbated only got 10x more hilarious when the government sent a letter to the U.S. Embassy asking them to please fix “the internet” and then waiting three weeks for an official response before asking India to do the same thing - a move that I feel was chalked full of racist misconceptions.
Sorry if that got off track. Long story short: Internet here has been “touchy” at best.
Reason #3: My Busy Schedule. This by now could probably be the only reason. Things are busier than ever and on one hand I enjoy it that way. Mainly because I know when things are getting too busy to stay “Stop, this is crazy”. On the other hand, being super busy does not give me the time I need to put together a half-coherent posts riddled with grammar and spelling mistakes and random pop-culture references that are completely lost on all but 4 of you.
So why am I super busy? I’ll expand on this later, but lets just say grades came back from the first third of the school year and I’m not too pleased. I tried letting the kids be responsible for themselves but it was clear they couldn’t cut it, so now I’m intervening. If you’re thinking to yourself, “Gosh, he almost sounds like an irritated parent.” I would say that it is a little more than “almost.
In the mean time, I'm literally mailing it in. I can't access the blogger website successfully, so I'm emailing my posts up automatically. Coincidentally, I'm actually able to view my website, just not get the bandwidth to edit it. We'll see how this works.
And happy birthday to my mom, who will be turning X years old today, and still looks every bit of (X-1) years old. My brother will now get to explain the math to her. Love you, mom.
