predictability

So one more thing about that Freshly Ground concert: A few friends and and I were hanging out near the stage, waiting for another friend who'd gone backstage to have her cd autographed. The bass player of the band walked out of a door, and walked up to my friend, M:

Bass player: Do I know you from somewhere?
M: I don't think so.
Bass player: I didn't meet you the last time we were here?
M: No, I wasn't around then.
Bass player: Are you all in public health?

We looked at each other and laughed. M is a med student, another friend with us is a pre-med undergrad, and the friend for whom we were waiting is starting med school in the fall. We were overwhelmingly medical. But it was also funny because it indexes the likelihood of any expat in Botswana -- and particularly an American -- having some connection to the medical or public health. We now come in bulk.

Then again, maybe the bass player just thought M was cute...

I did learn that some of the band members volunteer at a clinic on the Cape Flats sponsored by this organisation. I have to wonder whether it would be useful to do something like that during my proposed time in Cape Town. It might help give some perspective to my time here.

provinciality

Last night, I was up against the stage for Freshly Ground, staring right up at Zolani & co. The music was amazing, but the showmanship was something else. I had some lovely eye contact with the flute / saxophone / harmonica player, but was too damn shy to do anything about it after the show, even though this is a small town and the band was, as my friends and I were, hanging out at the hotel bar afterwards. (You know you're in Gabs when: a) everyone, including the band, is hanging out at the same bar; and b) the bar closes before the poor band members can even order a drink.) But what could I think to say besides, 'That was some amazing fluttertonguing you had going on tonight'? When I'm feeling shy, I only have two modes of interaction: bashful, and totally inappropriate.

I was also asked to write some haiku for a friend's birthday to supplement a collection of hipster haiku. I live in Gabs, people, which is a very strange place in which to meditate upon hipsters. But seeing Freshly Ground in Gabs at least bespeaks aspirations to a certain quality of urban, cosmopolitan, upwardly mobile-ish existence. In other words, provinciality is a shifter, folks. What counts as centre and periphery is always contextual.

I'm hardly immune to this; I spent most of the show meditating on moving to Cape Town. And this while I've been searching for a way to move away from Gabs to someplace less urban. Figuring out where to live for my research while trying to remain critical of representations of the centrality of the village to ethnographic research is a pain in the ass. All that to say that hipster as an aesthetic has its particularities from where I stand.

So, drawn from a combination of social commentary, self-reflexivity, and self-mockery, here are a few observations from the collection I sent out this morning.

Wi-fi internet:
I commute from coffee shops.
Isn't facebook work?

Rectangular frames,
stripy highlights in your hair;
I'm tired of this look.


Your vodka tonics
are where when you calculate
your carbon footprint?


If complaining were
a sport, you would now have won
the first gold medal.


It's great to hear you
and Bono will save the world.
Keep your day-job, eh?


What is a hipster?
Sarcasm feels like a hug,
snarky is like love.


Let's save the whales! But
don't forget the Africans;
they are both so cute.


Exploitation with
warm fuzzies: compassionate
capitalism.


Your politics are
fine, it's your attitude that
makes me want to hurl.

heartless

I spent this morning at one of the district hospitals with a friend, Q, and Q's friend, Z. Q had been concerned about Z's health, and had recently surmised that Z was: 1) HIV+; 2) suffering from another uncontrolled, unrelated, chronic debilitatingly-painful condition.

Q recently learned that Z had begun HAART (highly active anti-retroviral treatment), but Z wasn't admitting to much, and was, frankly, suffering from problem #2 far more than #1.

Q had asked me for some advice yesterday, which I'd readlily given. I showed up this morning at the hospital, where Z had an appointment, partly to see if I could help, partly out of research interest.

But this is the thing: Q has a personal relationship with Z. Q and Z are friends. I'm friends with Q; I only met Z today. I was there to help Z and Q, but I still had my research hat on. And it's hard to feel oneself moving in between personal relationships and research interests. But part of the reason I could be of any help whatsoever today is because of my research. I can help Q help Z navigate the system and decode all of the medical jargon because I've been studying the system for more than a year now.

Nevertheless, it's hard not to feel like something of a heartless wretch about my position in all this. I kept talking to Q, putting the conditions of Z's suffering and treatment (or lack thereof) in context, in a never-ending game of OK, but let's also consider that... I couldn't let it be about (or let myself get angry about) simply uncaring doctors, or simply unavailable medications, or simply anything -- not even simply one person's physical agony. What kind of demon am I?

It's hard to feel myself being something other than irate about Z's suffering -- or, better, something in addition to irate about Z's suffering. I don't want Z to suffer, but I'm also seeing that suffering as part of a larger system that I'm trying to understand. But my distance, this in addition to, troubles me. Like my affect is out of alignment. Like I must be an immoral creature to do what I do.

One of my advisors once said that anthropology is necessarily subversive. She's a smart lady and she's probably right, but that seems like rather cold comfort right now.

my new year's resolutions

There aren't many, but I think they're worth noting:

1. Stop beating myself up about my research.
2. When #1 simply cannot be helped, worry about quality of data, not quantity.
3. Travel more around Botswana.
4. Travel more around the region to places I haven't been yet (e.g., Mozambique, Namibia, East Africa).
5. Use my plasticity for good, not evil.
6. Relax more.
7. Write more.
8. Stop beating myself up about my research.

There are really only seven, but I thought the first one was worth reiterating.

resurrection ship

Hello again, and Happy New Year.

I'm sitting in Gabs after a month's absence. The Equatorial Coffee Co. at Riverwalk (the nearest mall) has undergone some serious re-decoration, and now sports wireless in addition to orange paint and leather couches. There's a new Portuguese restaurant, I'm told. And it has rained. Gabs is ridiculously green (though that's a relative epithet). And it's hot. Quite toasty, actually, and humid. I'm not one to complain of heat, but after a month of North American winter, my body's a bit confused.

As confused as my body might be, it's nothing compared to my poor mind. Being in the U.S. -- in Metropolis X, in particular -- was like waking up from the most realistic of dreams. Going to and from Botswana isn't traveling. Traveling implies some sort of slow, transitional passage through a varied landscape. This is more like a hallucinatory state. Movement is scary, and sudden, and thoroughly disorienting. I have an entire world in Metropolis X that I had largely put out of mind over the past year and a half. By world here I mean not just places and people I know, but trajectories, goals, objectives towards which I am supposedly working that are founded on assumptions I and others make about what I am doing now, and what I am doing next.

Holding the one in my mind while I'm in the other is very, very hard. I had been in the U.S. for only a few days when I met up with an American colleague I know from Botswana. She asked after M, a mutual friend, and it took me minutes of struggle to figure out who she was talking about. I had seen M fairly recently, but my frame of reference had made my life in Botswana so remote in my consciousness that it frightened me.

While it was exhilarating to find my world in Metropolis X, it was also bewildering, because I didn't remember how it worked. It's hard to describe this feeling, but it's something akin to walking into a house after not having lived in it for years, and reaching out only to realize that you no longer possess the embodied memory of the light switch's location.

And as unreal as Metropolis X felt at times, Botswana now feels. I think I will be OK when I get back to work, but the past three days of jet-lag compounded by stomach flu are compounding the question in my mind, Do I really need to be here? After months of panicking that I had no data, I found myself at the conference in DC realizing, I could throw the towel in right now and be fine. But I'm here, and I might as well make good use of it. I just need some time to re-adjust.

my big, fat vocal folds

Even fieldworking anthropology doctoral students need hobbies, right? This past week, I put more into singing than into anything else.

Anyone who has heard my laugh -- say, in the stairwell -- knows that my voice can carry. For a sometimes somewhat shy girl, I have a big voice. A big, big, big voice. Have I mentioned it's big?

According to family apocrypha, I sang before I talked. I've been in choirs forever, and most of the technique I know has been in the context of choral singing. I had sung alto through high school, and moved up to first alto/second soprano at university. The fact that I had no problem holding a harmony line explains, to a degree, my tenure in the alto section. Singing the melody became anathema to me.

So, when my mother gifted me with what amounted to ten months of voice lessons the year after I finished university, I found myself at logger-heads with my voice teacher. I was practically a life-long alto; I could maybe imagine myself as a mezzo. No, she said. I was a soprano, no bones about it -- a dramatic soprano, in her estimation. I couldn't buy this. My soprano friends whose voices I knew had voices that were much lighter in timbre, more delicate, and capable of those high, pretty, flowery, stereotypically feminine (if you will) sounds that I could only estimate with difficulty, if at all.

It took her six months to convince me, during which she made me do things with my voice that would make me stop and look around, wondering where the sound was coming from. That was ten years ago. Since then, when I've sung off and on, I've sung soprano. But I know my breath control is seriously lacking, as I don't control this giant instrument very well. And I just don't have one of those flowery voices. I have the kind of voice that comes to mind when you think of the name Brunnhilde, complete with the helmet with horns on the side.

Anyway, I got recruited into a local choir to sing the last movement of Beethoven's 9th. My giant instrument was well suited to shoring up the soprano section, especially over the high Bs. Time was I would have been afraid of a high B, but now high B was an old friend. So I stuck around, putting my big, fat vocal chords to work on J. S. Bach's Magnificat, shoring up the second sopranos (who were outnumbered by the first sopranos two to one).

Then a fellow soprano approached me about putting together a soprano duet for a little music soirée a friend was throwing. She proposed the flower song from Lakme; I counter-proposed the duettino from Marriage of Figaro. We wound up working on both.

Where had this been for the past ten years? How had I forgotten how much fun singing opera is? I mean, no one is going to invite me to the Met anytime soon, but I had forgotten how much fun it is to just work on the music.

Someone recently described 'the field' to me as a chronotope of unreality. This is true, but I would venture that sometimes the unreal is the place where you can reconnect with the most unlikely of forgotten loves.

accidents happen

So, um, I accidentally went on a date last night.

No, it's worse: I think I accidentally went on a second date last night. In other words, I didn't realize the first, uh, date was actually a date. It wasn't until the end of the second date that I realized that these were 'dates', not just... I don't know, social encounters of some other persuasion.

The country is small enough, and the expat scene within Gabs miniscule enough, that social networks double back upon each other all the time. You can wind up hanging out with all kinds of people, if only because you both happen to be disconnected Americans floating around the weird social space of a country with a population smaller than some major American cities (Metropolis X, included).

So I wasn't thinking much of dinner. I wasn't even thinking much of being bought dinner. I assumed it was the ploy of feeding the poor grad student who then tells you what are hopefully interesting things about wherever it is you happen to be. It happens now and again that someone takes me out and I sing for my supper (though it's more often lunch). I drove; he got to drink without worrying about driving.

Dinner was mostly a conversation about the paper I gave this week which, by the end of the evening, made less sense than it had when we sat down. Then the post-dinner conversation went in some strange directions, and the next thing I knew, we were discussing what I'm going to gloss as contemporary modes of sexuality in Gabs. Sigh. OK, I can gloss it like that, but some of those questions were more personal than I was really expecting. The whole subtext -- and to be honest, some of the text -- of the conversation caught me very much off-guard.

I guess the upshot here is that I'm incredibly thick, but I really thought this was a purely intellectual, or even (given the age of the person in question) vaguely paternal interest. There are some people here, mostly academics, with whom I have exactly that kind of vaguely advisorial interaction, and that's what I was expecting.

God, am I glad to be leaving in a week.

music to my ears

The four sweetest words in the world:

You've got real data.

This from another anthropologist, no less, who's been around in this business long enough to know.

I have survived my first experience of giving a presentation based on my own data. I took questions from the audience and everything. I even elaborated on why I had dragged Foucault into the picture. It's all downhill from here, hahaha...

en (power)pointe

You know you are having a good time when you turn a paper on Foucault and semiotics into a powerpoint presentation.

I think the last powerpoint presentation in which I had any part was ... um, 1997? The last one I remember was for the Introduction to International Business course my father talked me into taking the summer after I finished college. I was on a team with two undergrad male business school students. We had to present on Norway. They were really excited about powerpoint. I think I let them do whatever they wanted with the powerpoint as long as I had control over the content of my part of the presentation.

Someone -- you know who you are -- started going down the road of a semiotic analysis of a powerpoint presentation on semiotics, but then my brain started bleeding.

It's been that and a rehearsal schedule from hell of late. Guess who lead the ladies through the 'Gloria' of Bach's Magnificat, which none of us had ever seen before? I have a strange life. My new coping strategy for dealing with the collection of rather trite Christmas carols we are singing in next week's concert is to catalogue carols written in a minor key. The list thus far:

1. The Angel Gabriel
2. Coventry Carol
3. Crown of Roses (the goriest Christmas carol ever!)
4. O Come, O Come Emmanuel

Any contributions?

nobody tells me nothin'

I've been under a rock. Yes, even more than usual. I am finding that writing in the field is not easy. I am trying to think about adherence assessments as ritual. I am trying to think about them semiotically. Every so often, I think this is very exciting. More often, however, I come to the conclusion that I am crazy as a loon.

Anyway, so I only found out yesterday that I am supposed to sing the mezzo-soprano solo and the mezzo line of the trio for the Bach Magnificat in the two concerts we're singing in two and a half weeks' time. I can now conveniently leverage one set of anxieties against another. A friend suggested that since my last kitten was named in honour of my younger-sibling complex, I should name my next pet 'performance anxiety'.

I tried to pull an all-nighter last night with the paper, and fell apart not long after 1am. I am just not nineteen anymore and that's all there is to it. Today, I am propping myself up with tea.

My housemate and I took a scrabble break last night. We took the board and a few beers outside and played under the vine that grows over the courtyard, now festooned with the Christmas lights J found at Game City. It's been amazingly rainy lately, and Gabs is practically lush. As we were playing, a little frog came hopping over to visit us. It made my night.

sweets and the hereafter

amerThere are orange streamers taped above the front door. There's a dish of candy on the table to my right. A few gently-rotting pumpkins sag against each other on the steps. My house-mate invited friends over last night to watch 'Scream'.

You'd think it was Halloween or something. Never mind that it's late spring in Botswana.

I don't think there's a more American holiday. I know the more orthodox contestants for that superlative are Thanksgiving and 4th of July. But I'm drawing my conclusion from my experiences of explaining to a few friends -- Batswana and Zimbabwean -- where Halloween comes from.

So I try to begin by explaining that Halloween is significant because it's the night before All Saints' Day, etc., etc. I do a little bit about early beliefs that this was the night when all the dead were though to appear and do mischief to the living, etc. This is when the eyebrows start to go up. Spirits? In America? In one of these explanations, I emphasized that it wasn't necessarily the spirits of one's relations who might cause the mischief; it could be anyone. (I was trying to draw a distinction between non-familial haunting and the trouble that one's dead ancestors, or badimo, can cause to a Motswana if he or she has pissed them off sufficiently.)

But then how to explain the rest? The idea that there might be ghosts and goblins around, and that one might want to light a jack o'lantern to frighten them away, or placate them somehow, makes some sense. After all, placating scary otherworldly things makes sense here, too. But how did it come that children dress up as these scary spirits -- huh?! -- and become the ones threatening mischief it they're not attended to? How do we get from Night of the Dead to Night of Children-Dressed-as-the-Dead?

Naturally, a structuralist interpretation presents itself: Children are the least dead, so having children dress up as otherworldly works as a nice inversion. And children dressed up as dead who threaten one in return for the most earthly of rewards -- namely, sweets -- also works.

But my friends this side are still hung up on the idea that Americans truck in spirits and witches to begin with. This is regarded with surprise, if not quite disbelief. None of it makes any bloody sense when I try to explain it, other than the recognized fact that Americans will do almost anything for sweets.

cinematica, Gabs style

There's only so much to do in this small town. At least, there's only so much to do if you want to do something other than spend your weekend blind drunk. Therefore, the cinema becomes rather a big deal.

This week, I watched Clive Owen run around with a gun and a newborn baby. I read the film as an interesting, in underdeveloped, treatise on contemporary fatherhood. (Yes, I'm serious.) And I loved the music, which gave a nod to such things as Tony Hawk for PlayStation in a way I thought appropriate to the movie's production design in general. STWW and BMK, thanks to you, I can't hear 'The Ace of Spades' without seeing digital skateboards in my mind's eye.

And what is it with CO and newborn babies? He ran around with one in Children of Men, too. I'm wondering where the third element of this series is. CO + baby + post-apocalyptic violence = ? Nothing brings out post-apocalyptic violence like newborn babies.

But I'd rather have variations on CO and infants against the backdrop of post-apocalyptica by far than what I suspect is going to be a heart-breakingly awful adaptation of the first book of 'The Dark is Rising' sequence. Entitled 'The Seeker' -- will The Who be included in the soundtrack, I wonder? -- this looks like an attempt to capitalize on the LoTR/Harry Potter frenzy by bastardizing another series of children's books. Super. It's always nice to see people take imaginative, intricately worked-out fantasy stories and put them through a wood-chipper. I think I'll stay home.

o solo mio

I have been singing with a group called the Gaborone Music Society since this past March. I was semi-Shanghai-ed in by a doctor-friend of mine, who burst into the fifth movement of Beethoven's 9th symphony in the hallway of one of the clinics -- yes, auf deutsch -- and assured me the group needed some soprano power.

This weekend, we are performing something called the President's Concert on Friday and Saturday evening. Tickets don't appear to be on sale, and I don't know quite what the deal is. But I'm told the President will actually be there on Friday.

The point is that, as of last night, I appear to have been assigned the solo for the Sanctus from the Misse Solonelle Sainte Cecilia by Goudnod that we are singing. When else in my life will I have the chance to sing a solo for the President of any country whatsoever? This is hilarious, on the one hand, and terrifying, on the other. I have the next three days to prepare. Yikes. Hiccup.

This other hilarious aspect of this is that I don't think anyone I really know is coming, so it'll be the soprano equivalent of a tree falling in the forest.

the way one looks at distant things

I don't know what I'm doing with myself these days. I am interviewing a lot. I am setting up interviews a lot. I am running around and knocking on doors. I am sitting outside of offices. If I am lucky, I am running into people I know while I am waiting. I am waiting to hear about last week's auditions. I am accidentally double-booking myself. I am trying to sort out my academic affiliation, my residence permit renewal, and the continuing ethical approval of my research, both here and in the US, all at the same time. I am always a networking fool. I am trying not to panic when other people tell me either that they want to read my work, or that they want to write something with me. I am working on a paper, off and on, when I am not wholly absorbed in quelling the anxiety I feel about writing this paper. I am juggling many balls at once. I am trying not to let other people get to me. I am trying to think semiotically. I am trying not to care what Žižek says about anything.

So here, for you and for me, another example of the beautiful things that can be done with language. These days, I have to believe in language, especially measured language. It may be the only way for me to make sense out of the sturm und drang of which my life seems to consist.

Love means to learn to look at yourself
The way one looks at distant things
For you are only one thing among many.
And whoever sees that way heals his heart,
Without knowing it, from various ills -
A bird and a tree say to him: Friend.
Then he wants to use himself and things
So that they stand in the glow of ripeness.
It doesn't matter whether he knows what he serves:
Who serves best doesn't always understand.

--Czesław Miłosz

off-topic, still

I am still working on the saga of my long weekend adventures, but in the meantime, you can read this.

And while we're thinking on American formalism, you can read this, too, which, for me, dates back to senior honours English and Mrs. Theibert, who had taste as well as style.

things about which I wish I knew much, much more

Those of you who know me well will probably not find it surprising that, as I find myself struggling to express complex ideas -- my reaction to the NYT article mentioned below, for example -- I turn to poetry. The poem that is rattling around my head is 'Elegy of Fortinbras', by Zbigniew Herbert, presumably written for Czeslaw Milosz.

I read this poem for the first time in an English class at Mount Holyoke taught by Joseph Brodsky. I was a true neophyte. I didn't know who Brodsky was; I didn't know enough to join the rest of the class in their obsequiousness. The class focused on Frost, Hardy and Auden. (I truly fell in love with the last of these, and have never strayed or tired of his writing. For that, I am ever grateful to Brodsky.) Towards the end of the semester, however, Brodsky lost patience with his own syllabus, throwing Akhmatova, Milosz, Herbert and others in our direction.

At the beginning of every class, we had to reproduce on paper a poem from memory. 'Elegy' is not one of them, but it has never really left me, and comes back from time to time.

I wish I knew more about Milosz, about mid-20th-century Russian and Polish poetry, about the Slavic intelligentsia, about their quarrels and disagreements. I wish I could read Milosz and Herbert in Polish. There's something in the passion of the argument, in the feeling of what is at stake, that's appealing right now.

Would anyone like to send me a tutor?

anthropologist as counterinsurgency weapon

Oh, bloody freaking hell. I've just returned from a conference on 'public anthropology', which raised good and, for me, incredibly relevant and timely questions, such as, What are the potential roles for anthropology vis-a-vis public policy? How might we dialogue with other institutions (e.g., public policy) without relinquishing our critical stance towards them them or towards ourselves? How do we use anthropology's historically-informed self-criticism for good (whatever that means), not evil? We are the original handmaidens of colonialism, people. We helped make indirect rule 'work'. We know what's at stake in working for the man.

Then I get this. The NYT is really doing a number on my blood pressure this week.

It's nice to know that I'm spending eight years of my life working (you'll pardon me and my nod to Norman Rush) my tits to nubs so that I can explain "subtle points of tribal relations" to some guy holding an automatic weapon. From my point of view, this looks like a biopolitical gesture toward making the world safe for American capitalism.

I know, I know -- let he among you cast the first, etc., and I'm not even on the job market. But my god... So much for sociology as a martial art. This is anthropology as martial tool.

savage minds

I have to say, if there was one thing that the ethnographers of the 1930s had going for them in the field, none of their informants ever quizzed them about their methodology.

It is a pain in my ass.

Can you imagine some Nuer elder giving Evans-Pritchard shit about whether he was using survey data, who he was interviewing, and how generalizable his findings would be?

On the one hand, this has everything to do with the fact that the informants about whom I am bitching are well-educated, largely American professionals. They are not unaware of how social science research gets done. Some of them are steeped enough in particular authoritative registers that they at times they sound like they know more about what I'm doing than I do.

Yes, I find that aggravating beyond measure. The thing no one reminded me about 'studying up' is that it involves people stomping on your head.

But it also speaks to how power plays out in social science research: who has the authority to ask questions? Who has the authority to question the questioner? What is the proper object of anthropological research? Who defines this? Is a non-exploitative, non-objectifying method of knowledge production possible? And if it's not -- and I have my doubts -- how might one approach it, if only asymptotically?

I absolutely salute, even as I thoroughly problematize it, this questioning of me-the-researcher. But, oh, god, as a lone, junior researcher who has to actively coach herself through this project on a daily basis, I find it excruciating.

a Paul Farmer moment

Over coffee today, a friend asked me what I thought about the argument that welfare actually encourages, or 'rewards', single-motherhood, particularly among African-American women. I went into a long rant among structural racism in the United States. Earlier in the conversation, the friend and I had been talking about SDS and the student protests at Columbia University in 1968, which also had me ranting about structural racism in the United States.

Then, tonight, I read this.

I find two things objectionable in this. First, I find the recourse to genetics, and its reification of race as a measurable health indicator, objectionable. I don't find it surprising, though, given the current obsession with finding a genetic basis for every goddamn thing that could happen to a person.

The second thing I find objectionable is the article's concluding statement, wherein a researcher is quoted as saying, "Even though we don’t know how to prevent asthma, we really do know how to control the symptoms.” Excuse me? Haven't we just been presented with information suggesting that children who are darker and poorer and who have shitty access to both in-patient and out-patient health care are more at risk not just for asthma but for the complications of mismanaged asthma, including death? The 'socioeconomic' and 'environmental' factors contributing to asthma and to its poor management are mutually implicated here.

And may I also suggest that concentrating on the supposed genetic factors predisposing poorer, darker children to asthma contributes to the erasure of how structural violence, American style, plays itself out on their bodies?

What angers me is that the logical conclusion is that the way to prevent asthma is to not be poor. Duh. This reminds me of something I read when I worked at HSPH. A list had been formulated of the top ten steps one could take towards better health (or something like that). The first item on the list was "If you smoke, stop smoking." The first list was sent around with a second list critiquing first list's bias towards the presumed agency of individuals with poor health towards ameliorating their own conditions. The first item on the second list was, "If you're poor, stop being poor."

I wish I could find that list. I'd really like to hit the NYT over the head with it about now.

hip, hip, hooray

Monday is a holiday in Botswana. Holiday weekends in Botswana bring on two complicated things. One is a travel frenzy. The other is a massive overriding sense of guilt and shame if one does not travel. You're in Africa, for christ's sake! What are you waiting for? Go somewhere!

I've been looking around at where I can go with the time I've got. My schedule's a bit complicated as I'm in Pretoria for the next few days, and I really can't leave until Saturday morning as I don't want to drive back to Gabs in the dark. I've also got a birthday party to attend in Mochudi around noon on Saturday, which I'll be able to attend if I really get on the road early on Saturday. But I don't think I can go straight from the birthday party up to any of the spots I've got in mind. All this means is that I get a one-night trip out of a three-day weekend.

All this has put the out-of-doors on my mind. At dinner, a friend was talking about having camped one night in the middle of hippo territory. Before I could stop myself, I said that if I ever opened a game lodge, I would put it right in the middle of hippopotamus territory and call it:

(you guessed it) hippo campus.

but for the grace of...

Throwing a dinner party for fourteen is no mean task, and I am a bit wiped out.

But today, through a bit of internetworking (if you'll allow that) I learned that someone I know is currently undergoing treatment for breast cancer. Chemo, surgery, the whole nine yards.

This someone isn't someone I know well; I know her through friends. She's also a doctoral candidate, doing work that overlaps with mine to a degree. In the tiny little bit I've gotten to know her, I found her a lovely person whose mind and sensibilities I respect. We haven't had much contact -- certainly not since I've been in Botswana -- but I think on her from time to time in that way one does with interesting people, often friends of friends, who one doesn't know that well but who one wishes one had the opportunity to know better.

So I'm in a bit of shock. I think it's safe to say that cancer is alarming in anyone, but it's scarier to hear it happening to someone so (for lack of a better term) structurally similar to me. There but for the grace of...

I am wishing her well as hard as I can, even if I don't feel in the position to do so directly.

a big stack of love on the table

Those of you who know me know that I am the reigning queen of overcommitment. It will not surprise you to hear that I have somehow managed to find myself hosting dinner for twelve this weekend.

That aside, I also volunteered to read nominations for a mentoring award in my discipline. I have a stack of paper on my table (amidst all the other stacks of papers) that are the nomination letters, written by current and former students of the nominated "senior or mid-career" scholars. My volunteering for this is somewhat symptomatic of my current fieldwork freak-out, wherein I feel very cut-off from my discipline, and I'm having a hard time putting what I'm doing here in the context of the larger project that is my graduate school career. I don't really feel like I have a career right now. This, along with some other voluntary reading and writing projects, is an attempt to give myself some professional context.

The length and quality of the letters seem to vary, but what unifies them is their tone. It's somewhat akin to reading love-letters or, perhaps more accurately, like reading the kinds of things children write about their parents when they make Mother's Day or Father's Day cards at school. There's something of the "I love my mommy because she always kisses me goodnight, even when I've been bad, and she helps me tie my shoes" genre to them. It's a bit embarrassing to read, as a third party, accounts of such devotion. But it's also very touching. The advisor-advisee relationship is such that we -- I lump myself in with the advisees here -- probably never really get a moment to express to our advisers what we feel for them and for the help and guidance they give us. There's really no forum for it. We know what we mean when we gush, or when we see other people gush. But there's no room for declamations in this relationship, at least not of the I-thou variety.

So, even though it's one more stack of paper I've piled upon the table to get done between now and next Tuesday, I'm rather glad I asked for it.

nary a drop to drink

The water utilities corporation people turned up this morning to shut off my supply.

Before they left, the good folks from whom I inherited this house (if you will) talked me through the processes of paying bills. Bills are largely paid in person in Botswana. Each month, one goes from utility company to utility company, paying in cash. (It's hard to open a bank account as a foreigner; I usually just withdraw as much cash at one time as I can.)

Sometime in late June, I ponied up to the Water Utility Corp. ('we keep it flowing for you') to pay the bill. Our water consumption as a household averaged between P500 and P600 each month. The bills for March and April reflected this, but the bill for May was P1,575.

P1,575! That's almost a $300 water bill, folks.

I chatted with someone who works in customer service, explaining that there had been only two of us living in the house for May, and that there was no way the two of us could have tripled our water consumption. The gentleman with whom I spoke said the WUC would do two things: 1) They would inspect the system leading into the plot for leaks; 2) If I paid P55, they would inspect the meter itself. If the meter was found to be faulty, they would credit the P55 to my account.

I heard that the WUC folks had come round, and tried to blame the tripled water bill on the morogo (a spinach-type green) that the student who rents the flat behind the house had planted. I didn't think so. In any case, I received two letters in late August. The first, dated 17 August, informed me that the WUC had found no leaks in the meter, and I was responsible for the outstanding amount. The second, dated 23 August, informed me that the meter was found to be out of order, and that my consumption would be monitored for three months before the account would be adjusted.

So I didn't pay the water bill. A former housemate had actually tried and failed to pay for only March and April, so I didn't think it would be possible to settle the bill until the WUC figured out what I owed them.

About 9am this morning, someone buzzed the gate -- for longer than was strictly necessary, I might add. When I opened it, two guys walked in and handed me a card informing me that my water was being shut off due to an outstanding balance of more than P4000. Then they walked over to my meter and shut the thing off. They were quite rude about the whole thing, too. I don't know if they are customarily rude, or if there was some amusement in seeing a lekhoa get her comeuppance.

I changed out of the jeans and tank-top in which I had planned to spend the day and into a skirt and blouse. You are usually helped out in bureaucratic encounters in Botswana if you smarten up a little. I marched down to the WUC. The guard-lady there and I are chummy; she's amused that I try to speak setswana, and pushes me on it. She chided me for not answering my phone when she called, but sent me off to the customer liaison office. The lady I found there explained that the disconnection orders were supposed to go through her office so she could remove the ones that were in dispute or still open cases, like mine, but that this hadn't happened for some reason. She advised me to pay what I thought my average consumption was for the past four months, but that she would get the water turned back on today.

In line at the cashier, I got into a lovely conversation with the man in front of me, who was quite complimentary about my paltry setswana skills. Reinforcement in this area is always welcome. The cashier, as I was leaving, handed me a plastic ruler with the WUC logo on it and a blue plastic bracelet of the kind Lance Armstrong made popular "for your child."

What to do with that one...

The upshot is that I was expecting a major fight at WUC. The guys have not come back to turn the water on yet, but it's only half past noon. But this is so Botswana, in a way: bureaucratic, polite, a bit slow, not necessarily always functional but not corrupt or totally inept.

In other news, a friend and I had arranged for dinner last night, but things ran late, so I just started cooking. I was eager to put those sun-dried olives to good use. He arrived around 9pm, and we had a little informal dinner. And in the middle of it, I kid you not, a cockroach crawled out from behind the set of wooden cabinets in the dining room. Yes, winter is over and it's roach season again in Botswana. I disposed of it with a shoe. My guest asked me if I wanted help killing it, which I found kind, but startling and distinctly hilarious. Mount Holyoke women are not meant to require help in these matters. It wouldn't even have occurred to me to ask.

field, schmield

I am taking kind of a break this week. OK, to be truthful, when I left Cape Town last Wednesday, the friend dropping me at the airport asked, "So, it's straight back to the field, then?" "Oh, yes," I replied, with every intention of getting up the next morning and heading to the hospital at quarter past seven.

Yeah, that didn't happen.

Anyway, the 'official' reason I am not at the hospital this week is so that I can do some serious reading and thinking about the paper I am giving in late November. (I am slated to give a version of this paper in a local forum in early November. I feel like I need to get my ass in gear.) So I am alternating bouts of reading and thinking about how to frame an inquiry into the epistemological problems posed by paediatric hiv adherence monitoring with bouts of being heartbroken. Conveniently enough, sitting over a cup of coffee and staring into space could be interpreted as either of these sets of activities.

This alternating dynamic is, naturally, punctuated by feelings of guilt that I'm not doing 'real' research. I keep telling myself that clocking hours on the ward is not what this is about, that I need to be researching smarter, not harder. (From what infomercial hell did that phrase come?) And yes, I can excoriate myself while sitting over coffee and staring into space. I am that talented.

Two things made me feel better:

1. I found sun-dried olives. Now I can make puttanesca sauce.
   
2. One of the smartest anthropology graduate students I know told me she has collected no data. I don't actually believe this; I don't even think she believes this. But it's nice to think that my I-don't-have-any-data! panic is probably peaking this week less because I don't have any data and more because I am having a shitty week.

rough

So I'm having kind of a rough week month. But not as rough as Nadia Abu El-Haj.

In any regard, let me thank all of you who sent your condolences. I do appreciate it.

I don't really have much to say yet. But I did make M a memorial mix. Yes, I guess that's a sign of either my desperation or a sign of my generation or just a sign that I am as batty as a bedbug. Whatever, here are the tracks:

1. Warning Sign by Coldplay (A Rush Of Blood To The Head)
2. The Lovecats by The Cure (Standing On The Beach)
3. SinnerMan by Nina Simone, mixed by Felix da Housecat
4. All Cats Are Grey by The Cure (Faith)
5. Cataluna by The Gipsy Kings (Tierra Gitana)
6. Tell Him I Love Him by Lauryn Hill (The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill)
7. Scatterbrain by Radiohead (Hail to the Thief)
8. The First Cut is the Deepest by Sheryl Crowe, covering Cat Stevens
9. Peace Train by 10,000 Maniacs, covering Cat Stevens (In My Tribe)
10. Grace Cathedral Hill by The Decemberists (Castaways and Cutouts)
11. Something's Got A Hold On Me by Etta James (Her Best)
12. Something So Strong by Crowded House
13. Something Against You by the Pixies (Surfer Rosa)
14. You've Said Something by P. J. Harvey (Stories from the City, Stories from the Sea)
15. You Do Something to Me by Sinead O'Connor, performing Porter (Red, Hot & Blue)
16. Águas de marco by João Gilberto (self titled 1973)
17. Warehouse by Dave Matthews Band (Under the Table and Dreaming)
18. 32 Flavors by Ani DiFranco (Not A Pretty Girl)
19. Plastic Bag Theme by Thomas Newman (American Beauty soundtrack)

There. Now you can make your own.

M.

I lost my fieldworking buddy last night.

P, my neighbour, found Methodius by the side of the road, and sent me an sms. (What I was doing when I found out and with whom is a whole 'nother story. Suffice it to say that managing the moment of loss in front of someone you don't know very well is its own particular experience.)

I was really hoping P had the wrong cat, but Methodius' collar made the identification easy.

He was my fieldworking buddy. He was supposed to be there for the whole dissertation. He saw me through the really rough spots of my first few months here. He was the one who came running when he saw me. We were what mattered to each other. He was going to make the transition from Botswana kitty to American kitty with me. He was my witness to all the ducking, twisting, diving and dislocating this stupid career involves.

I tried to take good care of him.

He was the best kitty, ever.

double-edged sword

There is something enormously gratifying, if also terrifying, in having the people around and with whom I'm doing my research tell me they want to eventually read my thesis. This happened twice just today.

This is even more so in a week when I feel like I don't have the foggiest clue what I'm doing. I've never done this before.

I am going to Cape Town at the end of this week so someone (preferably my advisor) can tell me either: a) what I'm doing up here is not obscure, irrelevant, or naïve; or b) what I'm doing is, in fact, obscure, irrelevant, and naïve, but that this is OK.

Being a research institute of one is not always an easy task. But at least I can jet off to Cape Town on my own initiative, and chalk it up as 'work-related'.

a smack in the jaw

Every Thursday, one of the clinics located on the campus of the local referral hospital holds a journal club. A doctor, resident, or medical student presents an article. The article is sent out by email earlier in the week. The person presenting gives an exegesis of the article, provides some contextual information, and discusses the article's strengths and weaknesses, and its applicability or relevance for clinical practice in Botswana.

My medical student friends joke with me now and again about how much medical knowledge I've picked up in the course of my research. I'm getting to the point of feeling that I 'speak doctor' well enough now, and that it's time to move on and find another perspective. (There are a couple of problems here: 1) 'med student' is the easiest role for me to slip into; 2) I have a good idea of what things look like from an American practitioner's perspective, but the non-American practitioner's perspective is not so easy to obtain, in part because of point #1.)

But no matter how well I blend in among the American doctor crowd, my little anthropological mouth fell open yesterday afternoon when the following article was referenced in a presentation on HIV and renal failure:

Cantor et al. 1991. Effect of race on expression of acquired immunodeficiency syndrome-associated nephropathy. Archives of Internal Medicine 151 (1)

All of a sudden, I was an anthropologist again.

Where do I begin? Is 'blackness' a risk factor for renal disease? Can data from 'black' Americans be extrapolated onto 'black' Africans? What proof is there that this has anything to do with 'blackness', or is 'blackness' here a gloss for the corporeal manifestations of structural racisms with their own particular histories? What to make of a medicine that refuses to relinquish or interrogate its categories and cartographies of difference?

There is so much -- about race, about the conditions of practicing American-trained biomedicine in 'Africa', about difference -- that is glossed over in these institutions. I keep my eye on it when I can, but so rarely does it jump out and hit me in the jaw like this.

I didn't design my research to be about race or racism, but there's absolutely no way I can talk about what's going on here without talking about it.

no comment

... and that's just how it is, folks.

hospitaliano

You know you've been hanging out at the hospital too long when, in a feverish state, you find your inner monologue describing your own condition using the terms 'productive cough' and 'well perfused'.

As of today, I've been in 'the field' a year. I guess something is sinking in...

Zim, part I: getting there

For a long time -- I forget exactly how long -- a friend of mine engaged to a Zimbabwean woman had been working out his lobola. (In Botswana, we call this bogadi, and for our purposes here, let's just just gloss it as a transfer that generally happens from his family to hers.) I got a message from this friend sometime in June informing me that the lobola had been finalized, and that they were going to have a wedding sometime in August. A few weeks ago (by which I mean mid-July) I got a message that the wedding was on 4 August.

Well, what else does a girl do? She sorts out her car registration, goes dress shopping, and drives up to Bulawayo by way of Francistown.

But it's always a bit more complicated, isn't it? The groom in question is a classmate of mine. The next nearest classmate of ours stays outside Cape Town. This fellow -- let's call him Mr Bojangles -- arranged to fly to Johannesburg, where he would catch a bus to Bulawayo. The only catch was that Mr B was engaged until early afternoon on Friday, and so wouldn't be able to arrive in Bulawayo until 9am Saturday, an hour or so before the wedding was meant to begin. I planned to drive the 700km from Gabs to Bulawayo during the day on Friday, arriving before darkness fell. I agreed to meet Mr B at the bus station Saturday morning, and go from there to the wedding.

Mr Bojangles ran into some trouble, however, in booking his bus passage. And because our doughty heroine (by which I mean myself) is mad as a hatter, she suggested that Mr B fly from Johannesburg to Gabs, and drive with her from there to Bulawayo.

Due to Mr B's above-mentioned engagement, his flight to Gabs only arrived at half past eight. I had been running errands in preparation for a funeral with a friend whose sister had been killed that week in a combi accident, and was nearly late meeting Mr B at the airport. Mr B actually had to dash out of arrivals to ask me my address, and then dash back to complete his immigration process. As he walked back out through the arrivals gate, he was followed by one of my informants. Yes, this is a small town.

Mr B and I hit the road. We drove some 200km before stopping in Mahalapye, where we bought some snacks and we -- OK, I -- had a long chat in setswana with a some folks who worked at the petrol station about who we were, where we were going, and how many cows my parents might want as bogadi. (New vocabulary word: dinaka - horns; as in dikgomo le dinaka - cows with horns.) Some of this arose out of questions as to whether Mr B and I were hitched, a theme which was to follow us all weekend and which inevitably resulted in a duet wherein I described in detail my parents' demands, while Mr B asserted his poverty. Mr B ga a na dikgomo. Dikgomo ga di yo. Mr B later told me a story about an anthropologist who made increasingly extravagant claims about her availability, first asserting her domestic incompetence, then that her parents wanted a lion. Batsadi ba me ba a batla tau ka bogadi. Claiming Mr B was my brother, o kgaitsadiake, got me nowhere at all.

We continued on to Francistown, some 433km from Gabs, rolling into town sometime after 1am. A friend in Gabs, C, had given me the keys to a furnished flat where he stays when his works takes him up north. He had left out one crucial turn in the directions he had given me, though, and Mr B and I drove around Francistown for much longer than we would have liked. We eventually called C, who was lovely and generous about being woken in the middle of the night to think about the geography of a city he barely knows. We got ourselves sorted out, and after some late-night tea and snacks, went to bed -- but only after a long deliberation about where we should put my cellphone so as best to wake at least one of us two and a half hours later.

The cellphone woke me first (after several minutes of peeping away). The plan was to purchase whatever we needed in Francistown, including 50L of petrol, cross the border, and arrive in Bulawayo with enough time to change our clothing and find the church. As we were getting ready, the groom SMSed me, asking if we could pick up 'some bread, maybe 10 loaves'. Where do you find ten loaves of bread on Saturday morning in Francistown? The proprietor of a milk bar directed us to a bakery, where we also picked up some samoosas for breakfast. (Samoosa, samosa, let's call the whole thing, etc.) We filled the car with petrol, as well as the two 25L jerry-cans I had brought from Gabs, and headed for the border.

legal ownership

Let me tell you about how I became the legal owner of my car last week.

First, you may wonder why this was an issue last week. It actually has been an issue for, oh... ten months or so. When I bought the car, I didn't have a residence permit for Botswana yet, or at least didn't have it in hand. (I did actually have one, but it was sitting on someone's desk at UB, entirely unbeknownst to me.) In Botswana, one can't register the car without a residence permit or proof of registration. Also, in Botswana, the car's plates don't change; they're just registered to different people, and it's the registration (or 'blue') book that changes hands.

The man who sold it to me filled out the change of ownership section on the vehicle registration and gave me a copy of his passport. Everything should have been in order for me to march down to the Transport Office and sort this out...

... except that I didn't.

(Family members are hereby barred from commenting on this state of affairs.)

This didn't actually have much impact on my life. No one at any of the police roadblocks dotted across southern Botswana noticed the expired registration disk on my windshield. None of the border officials at either the Lobatse or the Tlokweng crossing ever asked to see the blue book. Crossing to and from ZA, one has only to write one's plate number in a book. That's it.

But I aspire to be a good girl -- or at least I suffer occasional sudden pangs of guilt that make me attempt to put my life in order every so often. So I took the blue book out of the car a few months ago, meaning to look over it carefully and figure out what I needed to do in order to register the car. Just as I did this, however, there was a flurry of people moving in and out of the house, and somewhere in all this, the blue book disappeared. Vanished.

Then, just a few weeks ago, I got word from a friend who stays in Zimbabwe that he was getting married. Upon hearing my plans to drive to the wedding, another Zim friend informed me that the police at the border post separating Botswana and Zimbabwe would under no circumstances let me drive the car over the border without all the paperwork in order.

What to do? I tore apart the house; then I tore apart the car; then I tore out some of my hair. (Don't worry; no one will ever be able to tell the difference.) Then I went to Transport, where they handed me an affidavit form so that I could request a duplicate blue book. But because I wasn't the legal owner of the car -- it sounds so bad when I put it like that! -- I couldn't make the request, and anyway, the form had to be notarized (or, as it goes here, 'witnessed by a commissioner of oaths').

The next hurdle was tracking down E., the guy who had sold me the car. I SMSed him, and we agreed to meet at the central police station. I waited for an hour, and E. never came. This was the lowest point in the entire saga; no registration, no wedding (the travel plans for which were becoming increasingly convoluted, but that's another story). E. did eventually check in, and we arranged to meet the next morning. After waiting an hour at the central police, they told us we needed to go to the Criminal Investigations Department. The CID stamped the affadavit without much ado, and then it was off to Transport.

At Transport, things got a bit hairy. After waiting all the way through the queue -- and Batswana are very particular about queues -- E. and I submitted the paperwork and the P130 for the duplicate blue book. Upon receiving it, we took it to the other side of the room, where E. proceeded to fill it out with his information, as if he were selling it to himself. So we had to go back to the counter and pay another P130 for a second duplicate. I filled this out, we submitted it, and -- presto! -- the car was legally mine.

I actually walked out of the door at this point before realizing that, although the car was mine, I hadn't paid the registration fee. I went back to the counter again, and asked to buy a registration disk. The woman behind the counter took my money, gave me the disk, and said, "Don't come back again."

This was all over by lunchtime. I was shocked. I had expected at least a little yelling and some public humiliation over the fact that I had failed the register the car, that I had been driving around with an expired registration disk, etc. I was anticipating some commentary to be made in front of me (of which I would understand only a tiny bit) on the sheer stupidity and nerve of makhoa. None of this transpired -- at least, not in my presence. Sure, I think I paid a P50 late-free for the registration disk, but P50 seems peanuts compared to the bureaucratic wrath I was expecting.

tensions of empire waist

Having embarrassed myself by making such a fuss over the dress I didn't wear to the wedding, I might as well share with you pictures of the dress I actually wore.


Who can go wrong with a purple strappy sundress?



Those of you who know my fondness for stoles will not be surprised to see one here.

Thus ends my very public girly moment for the year. Yes, I know -- gender, capital, labour, value, consumption, etc. At least the sign of my complicity fit me well and was comfortable enough to wear for twelve hours. We will now return to my regularly scheduled programme wherein I pretend I don't indulge in this kind of thing.

a compatriot

This is one of the funniest things I've read. I also deeply appreciate that this is a blog authored by a graduate student that seems to have a level of anonymity similar to mine. It's nice to have company.

failure

Today is one of those days when I want to just throw in the towel, and go find a job that pays. Or, better, go find a job that doesn't feel like I am taking sandpaper and a cheese grater to my soul on a regular basis.

Recently, I was catching up via the internet with a friend who currently stays in England. We hadn't chatted in quite some time, and I was bringing her up to speed on the shape of my research (such as it is). "Is it hard?" she asked.

Hmm...

This is a deceptive question. The honest answer is that if it's hard for me, it's only hard for me because it's so easy for me. I have the luxury of it being hard for me; I'm never really inside that 'hard'. Yes, some of this is the manifestation of the need to beat myself with the fieldwork stick because I don't work in a village, I don't have that quintessential 'village' experience that all good anthropologists are supposed to have (in some sort of slippage of anthropological and Peace Corps rites de passage). I have, up until this point, done all my work in and around the main hospital in the capital city (albeit the capital of a country whose population is less than that of some major American cities). But part of it is also this sense of buffer, of floating around experiences of difficulty and harship and suffering rather than being inside them. It's hard for me because it's not really hard for me, and that makes me feel like shit.

The feeling of failure as an ethnographer is something I think probably most anthropology students in the field grapple with at some point, but it's not exactly one of those things over which you can bond, even in an alcohol-soaked state.

Impala on ice, part II: preparation

In response to one gentle reader's comment: I almost titled one of the photos of the freezer Dead Life with Peas.

In response to the question about preparation, here's an exegesis:

1. Turn off freezer.
2. Extract carcass and put in black garbage bags.
3. Take to butcher.
4. Bring home, dump pieces large enough to be grilled in several pots.
5. Add peri-peri seasonings and hot sauce to meat.
6. Stack pots of meat and trays of leftover pieces all over kitchen, creating a bloody mess (literally and figuratively); leave overnight.
7. Next day, collect the pots and depart for the braai. Leave trays of smaller left-aside pieces of meat for your housemates to deal with in a kitchen bespattered with drippings and marinade because you are leaving the country the next morning and couldn't care less. (NB: It's best if you can pass this off as a gesture of generosity.)

I will have to get back to you about the taste. Frankly, the smell of dead impala and warthog so permeates my house (and my nose, and my hands) right now that I don't have much interest in tasting it. It is quite possible that packing five freezer bags full of raw meat using my bare hands has kind of soured me on the whole experience. The only thing that sounds good right now is hummus. Yes, I am a total wimp, but if it were between no Nando's forever or butchering my own meat, I'd return to vegetarianism. I still might.

things that make the heart beat faster

This arrived in my inbox this morning:

Dear Ms X:

Thank you for your submission of "manuscript" to Journal of Q. I have taken on responsibility for the review process, so if you have any questions you should feel free to contact me at this address.

Sincerely,
Mr Z
Collaborating Editor,
Journal of Q

For all I know, they may reject it, but the agony of anticipation is itself a pleasure of a kind. It's like the feeling you might get when the cute boy on the other side of the classroom sees you smiling at him. Your game is totally up. He may ignore your presence for the rest of your high school career -- but then again, he might not.

That's probably the worst metaphor ever concocted, but it's barely 7am and I need to leave for work in twenty minutes, so cut me some slack.

(Compliments and apologies to Nil for swiping the subject line.)

urge overdressed

A good friend is getting married in Bulawayo in about two and a half weeks. I am going -- yes, not even political chaos is going to stand in the way of me attending this particular friend's nuptials. But I've got a major problem: What does one wear to a formal event in a country in the midst of an economic strangehold and skyrocketing inflation? I feel like I need a combination of Martha Stewart and Che Guevara to figure this one out. Yes, I am worried about etiquette. I realize I am stressing over the pillow arrangements on the deck chairs while the Titanic is going down.

(Can't get away from that metaphor, can I?)

I found a dress in Jozi last weekend, a dress so fabulous I had to buy it (after practically biting my nails to the quick over it.) But I simply can't wear it: It's too much. It's much too much. Here, you can agree with me:

Yes, yes -- full-length, strapless, the whole nine yards...




What you can't see (because I forgot to photograph it) is the complicated lacing down the back.

But you do get to see the exquisite detailing. All this from a store in Jozi that sells one-offs by local designers. sigh...

All this to say that I'm going dress shopping again this weekend.

impala on ice

Last night, a visiting friend accidentally hit what she thought was a light switch. It turned out to be one of the 'panic buttons' attached to the house's security system. I have never heard a noise as loud as the alarm that went off, and my blood pressure is still normalizing.

But this even wasn't even remotely as shocking as the experience of looking inside my freezer yesterday morning:




Why, yes, that is half an impala in my freezer...




And now it's time for your impala anatomy quiz...




No, it's not wrapped in plastic bags or foil or anything...




One word: ew.

I knew my housemate was going hunting, but I didn't expect to find half an impala congealed into a solid block in the freezer. He says he's going to cut it and season in on Wednesday for a braai on Saturday. (He said this only after I asked; there's apparently no need to explain an unwrapped, un-butchered impala carcass thrown higgeldy-piggeldy into the freezer.) I don't see how he's going to get it out without de-frosting it. I expect it will be a bloody mess (in many senses).

And, freezing notwithstanding, the kitchen is a bit smelly.

It's raining Americans...

I know it's summertime in the northern hemisphere. I know this because, very suddenly, Gabs is crawling with Americans.

There are some aspects of this influx I am enjoying: new friends, more apples to apples players, etc. Some of it has been professionally edifying: I had a meeting with an administrator of global health programming at University X, who invited me along to a couple of group meetings at the Ministry of Y.

And tonight is the first meeting of a three-week reading group I have organised for some undergraduates from University X who are combining summer internships with independent research projects. Admittedly, these kids are already privileged as hell (Univ. X being a private institution), but I guess I had built up a serious teaching jones. Besides, one gets tired of talking to oneself.

make-up design for the revolution

Because I had said I would and because I am a good girl (most of the time), I went to the 'American Community' 4th of July picnic on Saturday. (Nevermind that it was a July 4th picnic on July 7th... We don't want to seem un-American by pointing that out, do we?)

Anyway, I had signed up paint the faces of little kids. This is a fine idea, except for the fact that 99% of the kids I approached looked terrorized or bored by the idea. (Can face paint compete with a jumping castle? Can anything?) So I painted a lot of young(er) adult (read: my age-mates) and adolescent faces instead. (Yes, there is just a teensy-weensy bit of inner-playground-bully that comes out in these moments: 'You will be decorated!' Still getting over all the thumpings I took in grammar school? You bet, but in a Julie Taymor kind of way.)

But I was being a good girl. (Being a good girl means not writing, for example, 'Stop the War' or 'Bush lies, people die' across picnickers' faces in red, white and blue.) So, using a very cool set of face-painting crayons, I drew red stars with white and blue sparks coming off them, little clusters of stars (one in each colour), etc. Someone requested the presidential seal, and I was absolutely up for it, but we would have been standing there half an hour at least.

As inevitably happens, someone noticed that the painter herself sported no paint. So I handed over the crayons and allowed a friend to draw a white star on my cheek. I thought this was a very funny visual pun, overlapping symbols of American patriotism and sinking ships.

I don't think anyone else got it. They probably thought I was from Texas. So much for subtle insurrectionary humour.

channeling the bad fairy

Recently, a good friend of mine had strange experience wherein he responded to a public blog entry with a private email. The blogger then posted that email, in its entirity, on the blog itself, making what had been a private commentary a very public one. We (and by 'we' I mean good friends with whom I generally see eye-to-eye with whom I discussed this situation) all agreed that this was bad form on the part of the blogger.

That said, and fully admitting that I know better, I am going to do just that. I am that annoyed. This is probably going to seem really petty at the end of the day, but whatever.

Some background: There are two kinds of Fulbrights for students, the IIE and the Hays. The IIE is administered by the Dept. of State, and open to anyone with a bachelors degree. The Hays is administered by the Dept. of Education, and open to students enrolled in Ph.D. programmes. The grants don't differ greatly, though there are some reporting and financial particularities to each.

Or so I thought.

The experience has been a bit different. Sure, I invited myself to the Fulbright reception last September on somewhat dubious grounds, as I hadn't actually activated my grant yet. But when my paperwork finally went through a few months later, I did got through all the orientation crap at the Embassy. I have received mail there. I signed up for the weekly newsletter. Hell, I even volunteered to paint children's faces at the Embassy 4th of July picnic this Saturday.

But the fact remains that the IIE students are far more present on the Embassy radar than Hays students are. I was warned about this by someone who held Fulbright-Hays here in the late 1990s: she gave me the impression the Embassy hadn't a clue who she was or what was doing. So much for institutional support.

Here's the sticky part: this is a small town, and I know the students who have spent the past year here on IIE grants. (In fact, I've been sharing living accommodations with one of them for the past month.) And it's ususally from them that I hear about Embassy events. In fact, I think I was able to crash the Fulbright reception last September because one of them had mentioned it to me, assuming I was already in the know.

Well, yesterday my IIE housemate asked if I was going to the 4th of July party. Why, yes, I replied, I've already signed up to paint faces at the picnic on Saturday.

Not that one, she said. The one on Friday, pulling out a fancy, embossed, card-weight invitation bearing her name in flowing script and admitting her to the ambassador's residence this Friday from 1pm to 3pm (business dress).

Let me take this moment to assure you, Reader, that my housemate wasn't waving this invitation in my face; she was only hoping to have some company in what she rightly thought would be a stuffy affair.

I wanted to know where my invitation was. I had checked my mailbox on Friday, so what could the matter be? I sat down and wrote the person at the Embassy who generally handles such matters:

Dear Ms X,
I hope this finds you well. I have a quick question regarding the Embassy's Independence Day celebration on 6 July. I fear that the Embassy doesn't have a record of my postal address, and therefore any invitation that would have been mailed to me would not have reached me. This is an oversight on my part, for which I apologize. Please let me know with whom I should update my contact information.
Many thanks for your help,
-Fluffy

She wrote back:

Dear Fluffy,
I will see if an invitation was issued to you. Meanwhile, where would you suggest, in the case that one has been, that it be sent? Or would you collect it from Public Affairs?
Ms X

Now, how on earth am I to imagine where the Embassy would have sent the invitation? I don't think like Embassy folk; I don't have that particular chip in my neck. But I tried to play along:

Dear Ms X,
I'm not sure whether it would have been sent at all, because I can't remember whether my postal address is on file with the Embassy. It's entirely likely that it went to Public Affairs. I will check my post box today just to make sure.
Thanks very much,
-Fluffy

And this is what I got in response!!!

Dear Fluffy,
I am sorry, but you are not on the list of invitees for the official reception on July 6-- it may be that, as we hadn't heard from you for a good while, we made the assumption that you were no longer in country. If you would wish to come to the all-American Saturday, July 7 picnic at [xxx] School, do contact [Y], embassy community liaison officer, at [Y@email.com], or give her a call at xxx-xxx ext. xxxx
Best,
Ms X

Not on the list of invitees? No longer in the country? Oh, I was furious. Not that I am so deeply in love with America these days, but look at it this way: I am a graduate student. I thrive on free food. I thrive on relationships wherein people with more money than I have pick up the bar tab while I tell interesting (but, they hope, not deeply problematic or disturbing) stories about my research. (That probably sounds smarmy. I do reserve the right to discriminate among possible (m/p)atrons.) Regardless, the fact is that I would have enjoyed it. Yes, I would probably have walked away thanking my lucky stars I didn't wind up in the foreign service and gone back to ignoring the Official Americans for at least a few months, but I would have done so on a full stomach.

Anyway, I was angry -- angry like Maleficent was angry when she got left out of Aurora's christening. I lost my temper:

Dear Ms X,
I'm sorry that it comes as a surprise that I'm still in country, particularly since I've had fairly regular correspondence with various embassy personnel, have retrieved mail and packages from the embassy, etc., etc. over the course of the past six months that my grant has been active. I'm sorry also that some Fulbright students seem so much easier to keep track of than others. Thank you for your reminder of the Embassy picnic on Saturday, for which I signed up a month ago.
Very best,
Fluffy

Now, I know I lost my temper, but really: who wouldn't?!

constantly gardening

I've been on holiday this month, but it's not like there's been nothing going on in Botswana. But the weird thing about doing this project -- and particularly doing this project with an internet connection, at least for the time being -- is the strange and parallel events going on thousands of kilometres away that remind me that this project is worth doing, even if it sometimes feels like I'm picking up grains of rice one by one and trying to imagine what the paddy looks like. By way of example, I give you this.

fish out of water

Growing up, I spent the bulk of the summer -- which in practice was most of the year -- in water of some sort. We played a game called (for reasons unclear to me) 'Marco Polo', which was a kind of water-logged blind man's bluff. The person who was 'it' had to keep his/her eyes closed, and call out Marco. Those playing the game called back Polo, giving the seeker some indication of where in the pool they might be. If the seeker thought someone had hopped out of the pool and was moving about on dry land, they called out fish out of water, and those on land had to jump back in (thus giving away their locations).

Well, this past week I was fish out of water at a conference outside my discipline. There were a few people whose names I knew from their work, and a few I knew through one person or another. But it wasn't that kind of thick web of connections and reputations and citations one knows and feels (or, as a graduate student, aspires to know and feel) in one's own discipline.

But the most important lesson I took away from the event was that surly grad students can be found everywhere. I knew this in theory, and I certainly experience a certain surliness among my peers from time to time, but it was an interesting thing to observe a graduate student clique to which I had no aspirations of belonging and from which exclusion meant little. What surliness! What insecurity! What inability or unwillingness to engage with strangers!

There have been times when I have felt myself behaving like this with my colleagues at my home institution, and it has bothered me. Watching this clique, though, I felt a strange kind of dispassionate sympathy. Either I was a threat (it seemed) or I wasn't worth talking to. In actuality, I posed about as much threat as a blueberry muffin, and I didn't much care whether they talked to me or not.

The only thing I felt sorry for was that I couldn't easily convey any of this. But I stored these observations away in my head. I hope I can still find them when it's time to leave the field.

geek love

OK: Not only do you know you're a geek when you find yourself having these kinds of exchanges; you know you're extra special geeky when you find them downright hilarious.

X: Hey, nice chicken sandwich. You know what Adorno would say about it? He'd say it serves the culture industry and is without liberatory potential!

Y: I'm sure the chicken would agree that it's without liberatory potential. Unless becoming a sandwich counts as transcendence.

X: Mmmmm... Transcendental chicken sandwich...

This is a clear sign that I've been around my classmates of late. This, and the frequency with which words like over-determined escape my lips...

a new kind of drug war

This is so not my project, but I find it fascinating: Abbott Pharmaceuticals are suing ACT-UP Paris for a 'netstrike' they organised at the end of April. (ACT-UP and its affiliates have been the heavies of AIDS activism for more than twenty years now. ACT-UP, for example, took over the FDA in 1988.) Anyway, ACT-UP Paris organised the 'netstrike' (or what the Chicago Tribune calls a 'cyber-attack') in response to Abbott's policy towards Thailand. Oh, god, this is hard to boil down... Forgive me if I get a bit catechismic, stylistically.

OK, so Thailand can, under the amendments to the TRIPS (trade-related aspects of international property rights) laws, issue compulsory licenses. In response to the Thai government having done so, Abbott announced that it would not register a new heat-stable formulation of one of its antiretroviral drugs in Thailand. This provoked a lot of outcry, a lot of very public positioning by Abbott, the Thai government, the US government (including the office of the US Trade Representative, which is responsible for assembling a 'watch list' for countries not abiding by the principles of TRIPS, for example and therefore susceptible to some kind of trade sanctions, etc.).

Here's what ACT-UP Paris says about it, en anglais et en français. Read about it in the Tribune.

But that a legal suit is coming down to a whole lot of people having visited Abbott's website on the same day is fodder for the media and social movement scholars out there. But: wow... just...wow.

how's your hooter?

So... We rented a little VW citi golf for the week we were in Cape Town. The car had largely been behaving itself -- until tonight. We were just driving back from Stellenbosch, where we were hanging out with a friend. Stellenbosch lies outside Cape Town, with the airport situated between them. The car gave some strange random hoots when we started it up in the parking lot, but nothing really seemed amiss, and it had no immobilizer or random and confusing security system of which we were aware. We got petrol and started on our way back to the city.

We hadn't gotten very far when the car's horn began hooting of its own accord -- just one long continous sound. It only stopped when I turned the car off. We phoned the rental company, who in turn phoned one of their maintenance sub-contracters. A fellow named Erik called us, and after advising us to play around with the horn itself (which had no effect), he suggested that we simply return the car to the airport. We weren't very far away, it would take some time for his people to reach us, and we weren't in a very safe place to just hang out in the dark for a while.

So we drove the car to the airport and through what seemed like the entire airport complex to get to domestical rental car returns, hooting all the way. (No, we weren't at all conspicuous; why do you ask?) The folks at the rental company were lovely. The man helping us asked us if we wanted another citi golf. I told him we weren't picky. Then he said (I thought): "I'll give you the Ford car."

Now, mind you, the South African final 'r' is much, much softer than your average American final 'r' (except perhaps in Boston). What the man actually said was: "I'll give you the Ford Ka."

Earlier this week, a South African friend pointed out (correctly) that I had begun modifying my spoken English to adhere to local pronunciations. It appears, however, that my listening skills still need some work...

Microharder-than-it-needs-to-be

Yesterday my computer got hit over the head and developed amnesia.

In something like those strange scenarios wherein someone goes in for a root canal and walks out of the office missing a leg, when my computer re-started after installing a set of Microsoft updates, it didn't remember who I was.

Sigh. Have I mentioned I'm on holiday?

At first, my sweetie and I thought this might be something viral that had attacked my system via the unsecured wireless network we have found floating around our 7th floor apartment. But my sweetie thinks this was actually a bad reaction between my computer's security system and good ol' MS.

After some serious panic, I found that all my user files were still on the hard drive. The only problem seemed to be that my system wasn't seeing them, and was no longer connecting my log-on to them. Instead, it had reverted to all the factory settings as far as user interface was concerned.

I spent a bit of yesterday sorting this out. I don't mind doing a bit of grunt work as far as sorting files goes, but there are elements of the Windows factory settings that drive me a bit crazy. The devil, as it goes, is in the details, and the devilish details for me are all the stupid noises that the computer is set to make when one does any number of minute tasks. I had largely turned off all the bells and whistles and whatnot, but found myself without a Windows key. In my pre-grad-school incarnation, I had become versed in keystrokes that involved a Windows-key. My computer lacks one, so I had assigned the right Control key as the Windows key. And I found myself unable to remember how I had done this and desperate to fix this one last setting at (naturally) about 12:07am last night.

The only recommendations I could find online involved editing the Windows registry (the part of Windows that tells Windows how it works). Registry editing is never fun -- prone to mistakes, and done entirely (and rather blindingly) in something akin to WordPad. I was warned thus:

Making careless changes to the Registry can cause serious problems, up to and including the inability to start Windows. If you decide to sacrifice one of your Ctrl or Alt keys to get a Windows key and if you typically use Ctrl-Alt-Delete to see the Windows log-on screen (as in Windows 2000), a mistake in executing this tip could make it difficult for you to guess what keys to press to return to Windows.

The strangest this was that I had no memory of having done anything this complex in order to set up my Windows key when I took this computer out of the box a year and a half ago. Editing my registry by hand is a rather stressful activity, and thus I tend to remember having done it (generally with my teeth clenched). Of course, it's past midnight: Do I grit my teeth and get it done? Do it in the morning? And how has this become so difficult anyway?

Then I found this.

Seems someone with a similar problem hacked into his registry to assign a Windows key. He warns readers that "applying this hack can cause certain keys to stop functioning." Then a reader responds:

"[P]rovided you have a "standard" IBM install of the OS, they provided a tool called "Keyboard Customizer Utility" to do this and more. Check in your Start->Programs->Access IBM folder."

And there it was. For those of us for whom hacking the registry is not a good time, there's an easier way... and an earlier bedtime.

upping the ante on the dating game format...

TV kidney competition was a hoax

A Dutch TV contest that purported to show a dying woman choose a patient to receive her kidneys was a hoax.

news flash

I am on holiday. I am so on holiday. And I really needed and derserved this holiday. The last month has been too hectic to even blog. But I thought I would provide you with a little reading material in my absence which will give you sense of the stuff that tends to pile up in my inbox. What piles up in the inbox of a social science researcher who works around HIV/AIDS in Africa? Here are a few examples:

Uganda: High Income Causing HIV/Aids Spread - Onek

Yes, forget that link between AIDS and poverty. It's disposable income that's the problem! The point I draw from this is that one really can't think about HIV outside regimes of exchange (monetary and otherwise), but really, this kind of reporting makes me want to bang my head against the wall.

Flash-Heating Milk to Stop HIV Infection

Those wily Americans can fix anything with their fabulous technology! Heat n' serve breastmilk will solve the problem of maternal-to-child transmission! Nevermind that breastfeeding (and being seen to be breastfeeding) is a social activity. No, no... we don't care about the social! There's nothing in this article about the acceptability of heating your breastmilk, let alone the availability of clean glass jars and cooking fuel, or about the fact that being seen to be dumping your breastmilk in jars and heating could be just about as strange (and as stigmatizing) to the people around you as feeding your child formula. Maybe this is kind of harsh... I mean, these people aren't idiots, but I feel like they're barking up the wrong tree.