Musical Maladies aka The Discotheque Deception

Life is filled with experiments here. Living life here, or anywhere, is something that is met with both successes and failures, and instinctively people modify or experiment with their surrounding to isolate the successes. Example: if you want to lose weight, you’ll experiment with your diet. You want to increase gas mileage, so you’ll experiment with buying the expensive octane.

Here, our experiments are oriented towards improving our lives–how do we positively reinforce the kids study habits, how we can increase their work ethic, how we can solve conflicts and arguments, how can we get them to take care of their clothes. These often differ from my experiments, which are oriented towards improving my life—which street vendor sells the best food, how do I get the villagers to wear clothes, how do I get the village ladies to stop offering themselves to me in marriage, how do avoid confrontation with their fathers after they offer themselves to me in marriage.

My most recent experiment was simply this: How do I get them to like my music. If you remember the music posts, there are several conditions to liking music. While I’d love to play them some Toby Keith or Coldplay or Mumford & Sons, there are things that would immediately prevent them from liking it. The things are 1) they aren’t African, 2) they aren’t Michael Jackson or Celine Dione, and 3) none of those artists have committed any major criminal offenses.

Unless loving America too much is a crime, in which case Toby Keith is Guilty with a capital “G”.

In which the world is saved

One quick note to people with cell phones. More specifically, cell phones that cost a lot of money. Even more specifically, people that are reading this RIGHT NOW on their smartphonephone: Blogger told me there’s a mobile version for you. So I was like, “lets make like an autobot and transform!” And there you have it. If you’re on a computer, or a paper printout, the site will look the same.

I looked at it, and it turns out that just over 11% of the site traffic is loaded on mobile devices. That means that I either have a lot of friends who are trendy and tech savvy and rich, or the same person keeps butt-dialing me a lot.

Also, to the 12 people from Germany, 2 people from Bulgaria, 2 from Macedonia, and 8 people from Iran (not sure how) that managed to take a peek at my site the last week: Welcome, please stay a while, and congratulations to the Iranians for passing your firewall. Iran. And to all, I’m sorry for the butt-dialing reference. If you don’t know what it is, please don’t search for it. I haven’t tried it, but I’m sure no good will come of it.

And now, for something completely different!

This week, again because of time, is less meat and more potatoes. I guess here that would be less beans and more rice, and to my Iranian friends it would be less kabab and more kateh.

Any amateur (or professional) astronomers would have known that across eastern Africa last night there was a total eclipse of the moon. It was really actually super cool to see. My heart, sadly, remained uneclipsed.

Every time she does her hair the ozone layer cries.

It occurred at about 10pm local time, lasted for over an hour. The kids were asleep, so the only folks that saw it were me, the night guards, and the REST OF THE ENTIRE NEIGHBORHOOD. While me and the guards remarked how deep as shade of red it was, everybody else took up their drums and started banging them and dancing and singing for the moon to “wash itself of the blood before it brings about the destruction of the earth”.

Thankfully, after about an hour and a half the moon returned to normal and the end of the world was avoided thanks to our neighborhood block watch committee/drum corps. I tried asking people later just how the world was going to end if they did not do their drumming / dancing / singing / ceremony. I didn’t really get a straight answer.

My guess is it would have involved an unholy alliance between Xenu and Cthulhu.

You may now look up Xenu and Cthulhu.

In which TJ makes it to breakfast

Last time I was able to check in, I discovered I get sidetracked easily. I can only guess, but this week may hold more of the same. Heck, even I don’t know what it will contain. I haven’t written it yet.

So at some point it was established that my day starts by waking up, and then some time after that I go to bed. Once the day is up and going there are normally several things that need to get going before I can sit down and eat my breakfast. I need to help make breakfast for the kids and get folks started on chores for the morning, like cleaning the yard, doing laundry, cleaning dishes from the night before, the list can be endless sometimes.

Its sometime after that and before 7am that I get a bit of time for breakfast and bible study. I know for certain that it happens before 7am because that’s when we have worship and devotional in the morning. Its usually a quick 20 minutes or so of singing and prayer and a quick word of scripture to challenge, convict, or encourage us for the day. This is with all the kids and even some of the construction workers that come by to work on the girl dorm.

After that ends, my work for the day is either education or emergency. If all goes as planned (read: almost never) After devotional I’ll be teaching lessons in our cafeteria/classroom. This happens every day of the week and will go for 2 or 3 hours before lunch depending on how many groups I have to get through that particular day. So, you must be thinking we homeschool the kids here at the orphanage, right?

Wrong! Tell me you didn’t see that coming. We (meaning I, TJ) teach the kids here at home to supplement what they get at school. The reason is simply this. From the time they leave to walk the 5 minutest to school to when they get home is under 4 hours. Second, I’ve figured out that on average their teachers SHOW UP just barely under 4 days a week. Third, their classrooms range from 60-80 people. Some have higher, but nobody has fewer than sixty. And for kids in elementary school learning to read, a teacher shouting at 60 kids jumping up and down all over eachother is not an easy environment to learn in. When we can consolidate it to groups of 5-15 kids at a time, it make the learning much more effective.

I was talking with somebody recently who remarked recently that the kid’s must be very good in English to be having it in their the lessons. Wrong again. TJ teaches them in Portuguese. TJ only speaks Portuguese. Even when talking with Christina or other Americans TJ will speak Portuguese. The only time TJ speaks English he talks in the third person.

Education and what exactly I’m teaching and why I want to expand upon much more, but I keep getting further behind in writing here, and its hard to catch up. But that takes me up to lunch. And that is when the day goes as planned. When the day doesn’t go as planned its has recently been spent:

• in the city dodging demonstrations for or against the President.
• Rewiring the electricity after several fuses blew when the electricity got trapped in a loop (technically a short, but more of a loop).
• Repairing the washing machine.
• Pulling the pump out of its 65m hole (210ft) to fix our well.
• Making tea riding out a rainstorm (the cafeteria/classroom leaks)
• ditching lessons for a soccer game because it’s been so cold it was the only way to keep warm (it recently got as cold as 60deg this morning).

Next up I might make it to lunch. Who knows. Thanks for bearing with me in the business.

And a happy fathers day to my dad. I literally have no idea if its this Sunday or the next one. The time zones are such that here it's still 1985 in Hill Valley and I've got to get back and warn Doc about the Libyans.

In which TJ gets sidetracked by the weather

I was complaining the other day that I don’t have nearly enough time to write and tell people what I’m up to. Come to think of it, it is probably better this way, because at least now people know that I’m busy. And this way I don’t have to confuse you by writing into all hours of the night only to have you wonder, “When does TJ have time to write?”. Answer: I don’t. But I still like to, and many people have a real interest and concern in what goes on here, and I want to tell you about it.

As explained earlier, a large part of the reason there was no content for a while, and why future content may stay slim, is the increase of “workload”. I have a policy of never calling this here my work because it’s not my job, it’s my life. When I start calling it work, people have their own negative perceptions of word“work”, or the word “job” or the phrases “nine-to-five” or “Dolly Parton”. But nevertheless, let me tell you about my work.

Thermodynamically, work can be defined as the transfer of energy from one system to another through mechanical means. Now that we’ve established, primarily, that my fancy-pants engineering education was not a complete waste (I’m talking to you, Mr. Super-Siphon) let me tell you what that practically means. I work, teach, drive, lift, carry, wash, cook, preach, doctor, repair, dig, paint, and perform countless other verbs all through the day so that the lives of the kids that live here will be benefited. What does that look like on a predictable day?

I’m usually up at 5am, before you gasp in surprise, keep in mind three things. The first thing is that daybreak is at 5:30am and it’s pitch dark by 5:30pm. When it is dark its really hard to do stuff because of the whole I-can’t-see-what’s-going-on problem, so it’s important to get an early start on the day. The second thing is that we are in the tropics and the variation of days is very short. Right now we are nearing our shortest days of the year. During December, the longest part of the year, we have about 14 hours of total light, so it’s still not a big gain, especially coming from Seattle where we push 17hrs of day in the longest part of the year (but scratch at 7hrs in the shortest). The third thing is that the concept of time zones or hours is largely an artificial one here, if the time zone moved so that the sun came up at 9am, people would still get up and go down with the sun.

So I get up at 5am because it’s before anybody else is awake and it guarantees me at least 30 minutes of uninterrupted time to spend with Jesus. Usually, I get closer to an hour. Its nice. After that, anything can and will happen. So my breakfast of fresh bread, oatmeal, an awesome glass of tea, and my bible usually is the last guaranteed time of peace. It also guarantees that it is going to be dang cold! About a month ago we snapped into the cold season. Which means that instead of being 72degF overnight, it is now about 65degF (18C). These are the LOWS, not the highs. While folks back home in Seattle are probably scratching and clawing for temps like these, this marks bitter, bitter cold here.

I, however, have become pleasantly accustomed to the temperatures here, and it feels cold in the morning. How cold does 65deg feel? The first week of the cold (the overnight lows changed literally in three days span from warm to cold) I woke up around 4am and decided to make a cup of tea and start a fire for breakfast (we cook with wood). I put on pants and a sweatshirt, made a cup of tea and went to the kitchen. When I got there I found 4 other kids huddled around the fire that had beaten me to the task. That’s where we spent the next hour huddled together til the sun came up.

[Broken train of thought] The problem with writing stories/updates is I write the same way that I would orally tell the story, just with more punctuation and witty pictures (back when the internet worked). As such, I’ve noticed my attempt to tell you what my day is like ended up being a bunch of meteorological mumbo-jumbo. And instead of waiting till I get polished updates all proofread and crap, I’ll just going to throw them up and see how it works. Sorry for the incompleteness, but as of last check there are still only 24 hours in the day, expect on Mars, where there’s nearly 25 hours in a day. And speaking of Mars, I can see it in the morning, along with Venus and two other planets….

Til later, thanks for the prayers.

In which TJ says just what the heck has been going on while at the same time not really saying much

Wikipedia told me that on this day in history there occurred the Second Defenestration of Prague. I find it terribly amusing that not only do the Czechs commemorate an event that resulted in throwing people to their death out of a window, but that this type of event occurred more than once.

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. As a coincidence, movie night tonight will feature Terminator 2, with portuguese subtitles so I don't have to translate rapidly what is going on.

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.