Uploading pictures right now. Uganda Pictures. Actually spending the afternoon doing it - sacrificing time at the Botannical Gardens so you all can see some of Ddegeya! (Actually I will have plenty of time tomorrow). Pictures are confusing, because the first ones are from the early part of stay and these ones are the most recent (the next set will be somewhere in the middle). Probably doesn't matter too much since the weather looks exactly the same and you all probably don't care if the picture was taken in August or December. So enjoy.
Also changed the graph in my population post. Embarassing. Downright, goddamn embarassing...
Becky has successfully met up with her family - it was nice to see them all, so I imagine she was ecstatic last night. I got a text from her at 3AM and hypothesized that it was Family Board Game Night in the Boma Guest House in Entebbe. FUN TIMES. (Actually I think the rents went to bed early and Becky and her brother exchanged stories). Hudson met up with them, so I got to see him, too, which made me smile too much. Seeing Dave on Tuesday. Camera broke so I sent an e-mail to my technical support team in the US (Bilal) soliciting advice. I actually thought I should probably pay Bilal an annual fee - maybe $10 - for all the times I've called him lost while driving (he mapquests for me) or with a technical physics/computer question seeking his advice. He is a great service - way better than OnStar...
Bob, nor Matt, nor Bilal, nor Adam, nor Emma has answered the riddle. It has been like 3.5 months. So I will repose it for everyone: I have 12 coins. One of the coins weighs slightly more or less than the other 11. Using a balance (the one with two sides) just three times, tell me which coin is different and whether it weighs more or less.
Sunday, December 21, 2008
Saturday, December 20, 2008
December Pointers
Dean McEvoy visited the last couple weeks and I am anxiously awaiting his comments, which I will post on the blog sometime in the next couple weeks. He had a pretty incredible stay getting to see a lot more of the village than Becky and I saw in our first month.
This week we have been building chicken coops and giving out chickens to kids to help them get enough protein and, perhaps, generate some income for their family. Also weeding the peanut field, again, as we have been told it will help keep away the squirrel that has been attacking our peanuts. I know - squirrels in Africa, who would have thought. I think the blood pressure stuff will have to be put on hold because the nursing assistant has been sick and John had to take care of a lot of other stuff, so we will look at blood pressure and water later. Richard and I fixed the inverter, giving us power and reliable, bright lights for the first time since we left the United States. There may even be enough power for us to charge computers and inundate you with more blogs. After pouring through two manuals as nighttime reading and re-learning circuits, I realized that there is a switch missing in the old inverter. Single, tiny switch that kept us from power is back, which makes us all very happy (the other inverter could run a couple cell phone chargers or a couple 15 W light bulbs.
So blogs. The next blog (Christmas Eve - Happy Birthday Evan) will hopefully talk about some of my thoughts about culture and the west and scrape the surface of a question Professor Pease asked a couple months ago. The following blog (New Year's Eve) will be "A Day in the Life" blog in my attempt to give you a little more detailed picture about a typical day (I think Becky's blog is mostly daily matters as she describes it, but I lack in this department). I think I will try to give a better picture of Ddegeya in blogs to come...
I will be visiting Dave Shulman, another Minerva Fellow, working in Malawi for Partners in Health next week (December 23 - January 4). There Dave will show me a little bit of Africa Malawi style and I will get to help him out in some of his work for PIH if all goes well. Really looking forward to spending birthday, Christmas, and the New Year with Dave. Won't be bringing the computer so I have posted blogs already.
One last thing. I would love to hear what you all want to hear about on the blog - more rants like the Christmas Eve blog? More about Ddegeya? More about the Physics Department? Something else? Coffe production in Ddegeya? Anything - just name it. At the very least I'll reply with a comment, but perhaps it will make a good blog.
Merry Christmas, Happy Festivus, Happy New Year, etc. Talk to you all in a couple weeks.
This week we have been building chicken coops and giving out chickens to kids to help them get enough protein and, perhaps, generate some income for their family. Also weeding the peanut field, again, as we have been told it will help keep away the squirrel that has been attacking our peanuts. I know - squirrels in Africa, who would have thought. I think the blood pressure stuff will have to be put on hold because the nursing assistant has been sick and John had to take care of a lot of other stuff, so we will look at blood pressure and water later. Richard and I fixed the inverter, giving us power and reliable, bright lights for the first time since we left the United States. There may even be enough power for us to charge computers and inundate you with more blogs. After pouring through two manuals as nighttime reading and re-learning circuits, I realized that there is a switch missing in the old inverter. Single, tiny switch that kept us from power is back, which makes us all very happy (the other inverter could run a couple cell phone chargers or a couple 15 W light bulbs.
So blogs. The next blog (Christmas Eve - Happy Birthday Evan) will hopefully talk about some of my thoughts about culture and the west and scrape the surface of a question Professor Pease asked a couple months ago. The following blog (New Year's Eve) will be "A Day in the Life" blog in my attempt to give you a little more detailed picture about a typical day (I think Becky's blog is mostly daily matters as she describes it, but I lack in this department). I think I will try to give a better picture of Ddegeya in blogs to come...
I will be visiting Dave Shulman, another Minerva Fellow, working in Malawi for Partners in Health next week (December 23 - January 4). There Dave will show me a little bit of Africa Malawi style and I will get to help him out in some of his work for PIH if all goes well. Really looking forward to spending birthday, Christmas, and the New Year with Dave. Won't be bringing the computer so I have posted blogs already.
One last thing. I would love to hear what you all want to hear about on the blog - more rants like the Christmas Eve blog? More about Ddegeya? More about the Physics Department? Something else? Coffe production in Ddegeya? Anything - just name it. At the very least I'll reply with a comment, but perhaps it will make a good blog.
Merry Christmas, Happy Festivus, Happy New Year, etc. Talk to you all in a couple weeks.
Saturday, December 13, 2008
Reflecting
Now is a pretty good point to stop, take a couple breaths, and reflect after a little over four months in Uganda.
Coming to Uganda was a tough decision for me. I was at a point where I was hearing back from graduate schools in Physics, Atmospheric Sciences, and Geosciences. I had contemplated applying to the Peace Corps and started an application for Teach For America, but decided that two years from graduate school would be too long - I have already forgotten what an indefinite integral is. Minerva Fellows came at the perfect moment to give me a tough time in making my decision. It is a great program. It is nine months, nothing to sneeze at, but short enough where I felt I would be comfortable coming back to hard math and physics. Its goal is to help students innovate and help those in need, something that I think we would all jump at if given the opportunity. It is all paid for - from food to flights. But I have had a long-term goal of working in policy, research, and in academia as a teacher. I wanted to help those in power navigate us out of the climate crisis or at least help salvage what is left of the Earth. These are immediate crises. I decided that this was my only opportunity for a long time to do something like this and I needed to to take advantage of the fellowship; a PhD is somewhere around 5 - 7 years and I think taking a break in the middle might be frowned on in some places.
Some of the chief negatives to this program, pointed out to me by one of my mentors at Union, my family, and others were that I have no professional skills that stand out in the face of the problems these people face (a B.S. in Physics); I don't speak their language; I could potentially make a bigger impact in academia or environmental policy; I might get malaria or some other unpleasant ailment; there are people suffering in America; and if I went to Uganda, I may never come back to graduate studies. I think at one point Bilal and I, in a late night study session, drew the pluses and minus on a dry-erase board in the Physics Department. Some people told me a year off from school helped them get as far as they have others told me that they couldn't imagine a year off.
I came. In the end, I needed a "breakdown" from the life I lived and loved back at Union College.
Upon arriving at the backpackers on July 30 I remember asking myself what I had gotten myself into. It really was only a fleeting doubt, but my return to Kampala was so different from those second thoughts. Returning to Kampala and retracing my journey with Dean McEvoy, I see how beautiful parts of the city are. On arriving I just saw shacks, dirt, and poorly lit streets with well-dressed pedestrians as we rolled into Uganda that first night. Kampala is a city unlike any I have seen in America. It was intimidating. Upon arriving in the village concerns mounted. People spoke less English than I expected; there was no power to charge my computer, a tool which fueled and assisted my every move at Union; internet was fleeting and slow; I had no boss and no 9 to 5 job which I could complete and immediately gather a feeling of accomplishment; I had few resources to work with - no seed money, no books, and no real understanding of health needs in Africa; and it was true - I had few skills that were vital to these people's lives.
The first month and a half Becky and I puttered around finding odd projects to help little by little. We did a lot of work on the road, we dug a lot of dirt to help in constructing the new laboratory, we worked at the primary school before they went on "spring break," we planted a garden of peanuts and vegetables, and we stacked bricks. Small things that were important to Engeye, but not all that revolutionary.
When John came back, he helped us implement a program working with kids in the morning (we refer to i to people, without any real introduction, as "the morning program"). We had seen many kids who didn't go to school - they couldn't afford school fees, it was too long away from a younger sibling, or they were too young to warrant first grade (parents want to make sure the kid will get the most out of school). We worked with these kids on the patio of the clinic first, then in the incomplete laboratory, and on the lawn when construction was in progress. The first day was hard, the second day was easier. It got less difficult as we became okay teachers, little by little. Our days were filled nearly from sunrise to sunset between the primary school, working with kids at the clinic, maintaining the garden (no small task we found), and tutoring kids. We were content - we had the satisfaction of being busy, at least.
After a few weeks, some of the criticisms of this program haunted me. There are few metrics in how effective you are - I was a fairly major component of the P6 class, but I felt uncomfortable asking to give exams - homework was tough to give because they usually did assignments in their notebooks (I did give homework once, though, hopefully more next term). The kids in the morning were tougher to evaluate - have I achieved nothing if the two year olds do not know 1 - 10 in Luganda? I did some hard calculations: John estimates there are 10,000 people, ~50 percent of people are 0 - 14 years old, I interact with 350 kids if you count the Physical Education classes the headmistress has me teaching: I effect only 7 percent of kids in the village at best. And what is the long term value of my interactions? I wasn't getting the struggling students to grasp the material much better if at all, the kids in the morning might come out of the week mastering a puzzle, a song, or 1 - 10, and the vegetables weren't exactly thriving (weeds, which thrive under the same conditions we try to create for cabbages - water, sunlight, and fertile soil - are a constant enemy).
I started feeling somewhat useless - I teach kids things that, on a daily basis, are largely useless or at least negligible. Do they really need to know that sound is a type of energy? Or that the "I run" but "he runs"? Maybe my mentor was right - I'm not a nurse, this is a waste of money - a $2000 plane ticket could have paid two Ugandans (and pay them relatively well) to do a much better job of what I was trying to achieve.
I got a letter from a former boss reminding me to look at the daily successes - Taye counts to ten in English, Akosum doesn't play with rusty nails because he is listening intently to a story, Waswa learns to love school when we mix writing with pictures, Nabuma gets a little bit better at phonetics because of a silly story I have her recopy in her blue book, Joan learns to wrap her stubborn little fingers around a blue pen (her stubborn fingers refused a black pen). Reading Three Cups of Tea helped me see that, even if I am not the best teacher, education is the key to these children's future. I realized that we were interacting with these kids in ways that they are never normally interacted with and that we might be inspiring the next village nurse, doctor, or perhaps, at least, teaching the next store owner how to add, subtract, and multiply. It is too easy to think about Joan, two years old, sitting in front of herself by herself, patiently waiting for her siblings to finish school or her parents to finish work.
My plane ticket may have been better spent on two Ugandans, but I think I will certainly inject the expenses of my stay into Ddegeya by April - my major quantitative goal (I have a slew of qualitative goals). I wanted this fellowship to at least be a zero sum game. I think I will come out ahead.
I planted trees in October, I think sometime around when Re-Tree Schenectady is in action. I realized that was the best way to look at it. The Cassuarinas I planted will fix nitrogen into the soil, act as windbreakers, perhaps provide a shady hide away on the edge of the property, but their value - who knows? I think John told me they cost 2000 shillings or roughly a dollar. I will never know the value of my interaction with Sumayiya and her freakishly long fingers, or the hourly value that could be assigned to tutoring Pross as we frustrate each other with English or Math problem after math problem, or the gains made by Joan as she glued popsicle sticks together in between running away from my strict, glaring eyes. I planted seeds and I am hoping that a handful germinate.
I am content with my work now - I am definitely making a positive difference, no doubt. I've realized that the value of my work is not easily assessed and I cannot compare the critical educational work here in Uganda with the acute needs of assessing and addressing climate change. I have realized that education will need to be a part of whatever I do and wherever I go. Teaching is probably among the most important and undervalued professions.
The doubt I had, I believe, was important and healthy. I see other volunteers who work in private schools teaching English or doing largely menial tasks for NGOs with little reflection on what could be of "higher value." I don't in any way mean to demean these people - I have done my fair share of menial work here and elsewhere and it ends up that even menial work is important, but it is important to try to find the work that is of greater value. I am still looking for that higher value work and I am constantly working to improve. That's the best I can do: try to make what seems like insignificant work significant to one or two and keep improving. So Dean McEvoy (who visited last week) probably came away thinking that I only have criticisms, but I am so critical because this is a program that I believe in and I want it get better and better.
As Jon Hill says:
Good works are achieved through persistence and understanding. Understanding will come with time but without persistence I will never understand what needs to be done because it is through success and failure that I will learn. My good intentions will not always produce good results. I’m fine with that. Hopefully I will do more good than bad while continuing to increase the probability of good works by gaining a greater understanding of the people, history, language and culture of Cambodia.
Breakdown
Jack Johnson
I hope this whole train breaks down.
Then I could take a walk around, see what there is to see.
Time is just a melody with all the people in the street walking fast as their feet can take them, I might just roll through the town.
And though my windows got a view where the frame I'm looking through seem to have no concern for now.
So I need this whole train to break down.
Oh please, just let me please break down.
I need this whole train to break down.
Oh please, just let me please break down.
I want to break on down, but I can't stop now.
Let me break on down. [Chorus]
Well this engine screams out loud. Centipede gonna crawl westbound.
So I don't even make a sound 'cause it's gonna sting me when I leave this town.
And all the people in the street that I'll never get to meet if these tracks don't bend somehow.
And I got no time that I got to get where I don't need to be.
[Chorus]
But you can't stop nothing if you've got no control of the thoughts in your mind that you kept and you know.
You don't know nothing, but you don't need to know the wisdoms in the trees not the glass windows.
You can't stop wishing if you don't let go the things that you find that you lose and you know.
You keep on rolling, put the moment on hold, the frame's too bright so pull the blind down low.
[Chorus]
Coming to Uganda was a tough decision for me. I was at a point where I was hearing back from graduate schools in Physics, Atmospheric Sciences, and Geosciences. I had contemplated applying to the Peace Corps and started an application for Teach For America, but decided that two years from graduate school would be too long - I have already forgotten what an indefinite integral is. Minerva Fellows came at the perfect moment to give me a tough time in making my decision. It is a great program. It is nine months, nothing to sneeze at, but short enough where I felt I would be comfortable coming back to hard math and physics. Its goal is to help students innovate and help those in need, something that I think we would all jump at if given the opportunity. It is all paid for - from food to flights. But I have had a long-term goal of working in policy, research, and in academia as a teacher. I wanted to help those in power navigate us out of the climate crisis or at least help salvage what is left of the Earth. These are immediate crises. I decided that this was my only opportunity for a long time to do something like this and I needed to to take advantage of the fellowship; a PhD is somewhere around 5 - 7 years and I think taking a break in the middle might be frowned on in some places.
Some of the chief negatives to this program, pointed out to me by one of my mentors at Union, my family, and others were that I have no professional skills that stand out in the face of the problems these people face (a B.S. in Physics); I don't speak their language; I could potentially make a bigger impact in academia or environmental policy; I might get malaria or some other unpleasant ailment; there are people suffering in America; and if I went to Uganda, I may never come back to graduate studies. I think at one point Bilal and I, in a late night study session, drew the pluses and minus on a dry-erase board in the Physics Department. Some people told me a year off from school helped them get as far as they have others told me that they couldn't imagine a year off.
I came. In the end, I needed a "breakdown" from the life I lived and loved back at Union College.
Upon arriving at the backpackers on July 30 I remember asking myself what I had gotten myself into. It really was only a fleeting doubt, but my return to Kampala was so different from those second thoughts. Returning to Kampala and retracing my journey with Dean McEvoy, I see how beautiful parts of the city are. On arriving I just saw shacks, dirt, and poorly lit streets with well-dressed pedestrians as we rolled into Uganda that first night. Kampala is a city unlike any I have seen in America. It was intimidating. Upon arriving in the village concerns mounted. People spoke less English than I expected; there was no power to charge my computer, a tool which fueled and assisted my every move at Union; internet was fleeting and slow; I had no boss and no 9 to 5 job which I could complete and immediately gather a feeling of accomplishment; I had few resources to work with - no seed money, no books, and no real understanding of health needs in Africa; and it was true - I had few skills that were vital to these people's lives.
The first month and a half Becky and I puttered around finding odd projects to help little by little. We did a lot of work on the road, we dug a lot of dirt to help in constructing the new laboratory, we worked at the primary school before they went on "spring break," we planted a garden of peanuts and vegetables, and we stacked bricks. Small things that were important to Engeye, but not all that revolutionary.
When John came back, he helped us implement a program working with kids in the morning (we refer to i to people, without any real introduction, as "the morning program"). We had seen many kids who didn't go to school - they couldn't afford school fees, it was too long away from a younger sibling, or they were too young to warrant first grade (parents want to make sure the kid will get the most out of school). We worked with these kids on the patio of the clinic first, then in the incomplete laboratory, and on the lawn when construction was in progress. The first day was hard, the second day was easier. It got less difficult as we became okay teachers, little by little. Our days were filled nearly from sunrise to sunset between the primary school, working with kids at the clinic, maintaining the garden (no small task we found), and tutoring kids. We were content - we had the satisfaction of being busy, at least.
After a few weeks, some of the criticisms of this program haunted me. There are few metrics in how effective you are - I was a fairly major component of the P6 class, but I felt uncomfortable asking to give exams - homework was tough to give because they usually did assignments in their notebooks (I did give homework once, though, hopefully more next term). The kids in the morning were tougher to evaluate - have I achieved nothing if the two year olds do not know 1 - 10 in Luganda? I did some hard calculations: John estimates there are 10,000 people, ~50 percent of people are 0 - 14 years old, I interact with 350 kids if you count the Physical Education classes the headmistress has me teaching: I effect only 7 percent of kids in the village at best. And what is the long term value of my interactions? I wasn't getting the struggling students to grasp the material much better if at all, the kids in the morning might come out of the week mastering a puzzle, a song, or 1 - 10, and the vegetables weren't exactly thriving (weeds, which thrive under the same conditions we try to create for cabbages - water, sunlight, and fertile soil - are a constant enemy).
I started feeling somewhat useless - I teach kids things that, on a daily basis, are largely useless or at least negligible. Do they really need to know that sound is a type of energy? Or that the "I run" but "he runs"? Maybe my mentor was right - I'm not a nurse, this is a waste of money - a $2000 plane ticket could have paid two Ugandans (and pay them relatively well) to do a much better job of what I was trying to achieve.
I got a letter from a former boss reminding me to look at the daily successes - Taye counts to ten in English, Akosum doesn't play with rusty nails because he is listening intently to a story, Waswa learns to love school when we mix writing with pictures, Nabuma gets a little bit better at phonetics because of a silly story I have her recopy in her blue book, Joan learns to wrap her stubborn little fingers around a blue pen (her stubborn fingers refused a black pen). Reading Three Cups of Tea helped me see that, even if I am not the best teacher, education is the key to these children's future. I realized that we were interacting with these kids in ways that they are never normally interacted with and that we might be inspiring the next village nurse, doctor, or perhaps, at least, teaching the next store owner how to add, subtract, and multiply. It is too easy to think about Joan, two years old, sitting in front of herself by herself, patiently waiting for her siblings to finish school or her parents to finish work.
My plane ticket may have been better spent on two Ugandans, but I think I will certainly inject the expenses of my stay into Ddegeya by April - my major quantitative goal (I have a slew of qualitative goals). I wanted this fellowship to at least be a zero sum game. I think I will come out ahead.
I planted trees in October, I think sometime around when Re-Tree Schenectady is in action. I realized that was the best way to look at it. The Cassuarinas I planted will fix nitrogen into the soil, act as windbreakers, perhaps provide a shady hide away on the edge of the property, but their value - who knows? I think John told me they cost 2000 shillings or roughly a dollar. I will never know the value of my interaction with Sumayiya and her freakishly long fingers, or the hourly value that could be assigned to tutoring Pross as we frustrate each other with English or Math problem after math problem, or the gains made by Joan as she glued popsicle sticks together in between running away from my strict, glaring eyes. I planted seeds and I am hoping that a handful germinate.
I am content with my work now - I am definitely making a positive difference, no doubt. I've realized that the value of my work is not easily assessed and I cannot compare the critical educational work here in Uganda with the acute needs of assessing and addressing climate change. I have realized that education will need to be a part of whatever I do and wherever I go. Teaching is probably among the most important and undervalued professions.
The doubt I had, I believe, was important and healthy. I see other volunteers who work in private schools teaching English or doing largely menial tasks for NGOs with little reflection on what could be of "higher value." I don't in any way mean to demean these people - I have done my fair share of menial work here and elsewhere and it ends up that even menial work is important, but it is important to try to find the work that is of greater value. I am still looking for that higher value work and I am constantly working to improve. That's the best I can do: try to make what seems like insignificant work significant to one or two and keep improving. So Dean McEvoy (who visited last week) probably came away thinking that I only have criticisms, but I am so critical because this is a program that I believe in and I want it get better and better.
As Jon Hill says:
Good works are achieved through persistence and understanding. Understanding will come with time but without persistence I will never understand what needs to be done because it is through success and failure that I will learn. My good intentions will not always produce good results. I’m fine with that. Hopefully I will do more good than bad while continuing to increase the probability of good works by gaining a greater understanding of the people, history, language and culture of Cambodia.
Breakdown
Jack Johnson
I hope this whole train breaks down.
Then I could take a walk around, see what there is to see.
Time is just a melody with all the people in the street walking fast as their feet can take them, I might just roll through the town.
And though my windows got a view where the frame I'm looking through seem to have no concern for now.
So I need this whole train to break down.
Oh please, just let me please break down.
I need this whole train to break down.
Oh please, just let me please break down.
I want to break on down, but I can't stop now.
Let me break on down. [Chorus]
Well this engine screams out loud. Centipede gonna crawl westbound.
So I don't even make a sound 'cause it's gonna sting me when I leave this town.
And all the people in the street that I'll never get to meet if these tracks don't bend somehow.
And I got no time that I got to get where I don't need to be.
[Chorus]
But you can't stop nothing if you've got no control of the thoughts in your mind that you kept and you know.
You don't know nothing, but you don't need to know the wisdoms in the trees not the glass windows.
You can't stop wishing if you don't let go the things that you find that you lose and you know.
You keep on rolling, put the moment on hold, the frame's too bright so pull the blind down low.
[Chorus]
Thursday, December 04, 2008
All About Kids
Wow, four months. More. By the time this posts in the next couple weeks we will have eclipsed the 50 percent point. A lot to talk about.
The Draft and Other Football Analogies
So the past few weeks have been exhausting. Kids have been absolutely nuts. It's like they get together in the morning and select six kids who will lose their minds for the day and constantly test my patience. The next day another mix of kids will try creative ways of messing with our heads. It's sort of a game, like football, if they can get in our heads and make us "drop the ball" they get an extra seven points.
Maybe I'm exaggerating (it is still too close to the infamous last Friday to tell). We did have to implement a fourth quarter strategy (we worked with the kids 12 weeks and implemented this in the last three weeks). We broke the kids into three more manageable groups (we actually have tried variations of this "west coast offense" before) - myself, Becky, and another mystery volunteer (we have a volunteer who is afraid of blogs, but we will refer to him/her as Hagar!) taking 8 - 9 kids.
Of course, we had to draft squads, which ended up being a project. I was prepared to draft an all-star group of angel children but Hagar! threw a wrench in the plan; for moral reasons I suppose, she refused to draft a squad. As the chief proponent of the draft, I was left to draft a squad for myself and Hagar!
Anyone who has played backyard/corner field/playground football knows that this is an unfair burden. Hagar! and Becky had obviously missed the ever-important childhood milestone of backyard football. I frantically tried to glance at the piece of paper with all the kids names (we decided it would lead to crying if we lined the kids up and picked them one by one, at least, Becky and Hagar! decided this), remind myself of each kids qualities and assets, and explain the draft method to Becky. There was also the mental barrier - I didn't want to be accused of drafting poorly for Hagar!, but if I made her squad better, it would eventually haunt all of us (the kids rotate). Unfortunately I succumbed to the pressure of the moment and heard complaints for days that I put too many of the youngins on one squad (youngins, 2-3 year olds, could not be grouped on one squad, because they would have employed the "run in 9 different directions strategy and, like kamikazees, destroyed other groups as quickly as possible).
Anyways, despite all my sob stories of the last week, it actually went pretty well. We stayed up late one night and made the kids chapattis (basically fried wheat flour, but Where there is No Doctor says oil is good for kids who likely do not get enough energy from matooke, we rationalized, at least). The kids loved it and told just about everyone and I think it was one of the first times that we heard webale (thank you) echo from all their mouths (you would think the two year olds would thank us for sitting them down and making them repeat "emu, biiri, saatu, ..., one, two, three, ...). We also worked, for four days, on popsicle stick picture frames. A constant mind battle, I tell you. We did one picture frame for each family - families are different sizes, ranging from one to four kids, but each kid wants to decorate more popsicle sticks than every other kid (not the same number, more) and the kids might be content decorating the same number of sticks as the other kids. After the bigger kids threw elbows and stole the other kids popsicle sticks, crayons, food, and, when necessary, pride (taunting knows no cultural boundaries - yes, the boy who wears pink Osh Kosh B'Gosh and cries all the time gets beat on here, too) we let the dust settle and redistributed and punished the heathens when necessary. After several long days the kids had some beautiful picture frames and after a lot of work Becky managed to get a pictures printed for each family. Likely the only picture "mama," "tata," and "jaja" have of the little ones.
Again, I am being too harsh. The kids are disease vectors constantly attacking my hobbled immune system (vitamin C does wonders) and they have been a handful, especially the last couple weeks, but every one of them is a good kid. Some learned more than others (Taye, age two, learned ABCs and 1-20 in both Luganda and English perfectly, but some of the seven year olds can't do it in Luganda), but they each got some positive educational interaction at a time when they really need it. Parents or older sisters got a break for part of the day (sometimes older sisters are kept out of school to care for the younger siblings). The kids got a lot of play time and judging by their insatiable need to run after me, jump on me, punch me, have me chase them, throw or kick balls, help with puzzles, etc. they really needed some playtime with a caring adult. I'm not saying their parent(s) or grandparent(s) don't pay attention to them, but often family sizes are 8+ so the younger kids may not get a lot of attention.
Legends from Primary Six
Teaching primary six was always something that I looked forward to. The kids are generally as well behaved as a classroom of 70 ten to fourteen year olds can be. It was always a struggle, but I think a worthwhile struggle in English and Math. After exhausting full days, kids would drop by the clinic for extra homework and revision. Some of the kids really wanted to learn and do well, even if I speak Russian to them. Part of the reason the last couple weeks were so exhausting was because Becky and I were grading exams during lunch and after school until 11 or 12 at night (we are usually in bed at 9 or 10).
The exams were abysmal. If any external authority looked at them they would judge the kids as terrible failures and the teachers as incompetent (the latter might be true...) and at first I was pretty depressed. One night while grading I finished off the bottom of a bottle of "wine" that had been lingering around from a weekend trip to the Ssese Islands. It didn't help the grades. The kids averaged 33 percent on the first part of a math exam and I would guess the total for the English exam was about the same (the median was slightly lower, which I think means that a couple kids did super bad and most did a little better than average). I concluded that the kids did just as well on the section of the test that I taught and sometimes better (compared to the native teacher), although sometimes I was simply reviewing material.
Looking at the answer keys of the regular teachers I realized that these kids should max out at around 80 percent, the score their instructor usually receives on answer keys. As I've said, some teachers are miraculous, some are not. One teacher insisted that the plural of "broken" is "brokes" (another asked if I studied English in secondary school) and that someone from Rwanda is Rwandanese. How confusing - two teachers telling you two different things in two different languages using different grammatical styles (to put it kindly). Anyways, the results were abysmal by any measure, but given the circumstances of the rural school system here, I was not defeated by the result, but I will try to help some of the kids do better in P7 (they are now on "holiday" for two months).
In all, both P6 and the little kids we work with in the morning are done until February, which is nice. It was a little weird/nostalgic seeing the pre-kindergartners march off with their popsicle stick picture frames (I wondered what Mrs. McDonald's thoughts were on seeing me march off with my twin, Evan 17 years ago) and the P6 kids clean out their desks (I reminisced on my year with Mr. Koshua), but I was happy for a break. I will see them all again soon - April will likely be tougher.
The Future?
Today (December 4) is the much anticipated arrival of Dean McEvoy (I told the kids a man named Tom is coming - they would have trouble with Dean McEvoy and would probably just laugh, "Den Back aba? hahaha"). We are waiting in Kampala Backpackers, which has decided not to offer wireless internet anymore, which means that e-mails to Kent, Dave, etc. will go unanswered for a little longer. We had pizza with a mzungu we met at a restaurant in Kampala, which was really nice and the next few days we will be touring Dean McEvoy around our workplace and the neighboring villages.
After that, we will spend a couple weeks finding candidates for a blood pressure study looking at the possibility that Africans suffer from high blood pressure as a result of insufficient water intake (if you had to climb a hill with 44 - 220 pounds of water and then boil it over a wood coal stove, you would think twice about "8 glasses a day" too). [Becky and I buy water from Masaka, although we have been hiking water up the hill again, lately, as the rainy season abruptly ended]. After we identify people with high blood pressure and if they agree to drink a liter of boiled water per day, we will use them in a four week study (probably too short, so we may extend it).
We will also be starting to distribute chickens with the goal of protein and income generation for families. The way we envision this working is that we will build a coop for a kid in the family (age ~8 and up) and have them take charge of the chicken and report back to us on how the chicken is doing. We will provide vaccines or advice when necessary (with Richard and John's help) and visit the family from time to time. Within one year, we will stipulate that the family needs to pass on the same number of chickens it received to another family. It sounds flawless, but so did the Cane Toad in Australia.
I'm also hoping to work with some of the better sixth graders, the ones who will be in seventh grade (P6 seems to be a cut off point for most kids) and have a shot at doing well enough to get into secondary school (these are also the kids that can understand me when I tutor them). I think that they could potentially get 90+ percent on tests with a lot of work. If not in December, I'd like to do this in January.
Then fun. I will be meeting Dave Shulman, another Minerva Fellow, in Malawi. There I will get to see and assist his work at Partners for Health (an incredible health NGO that has changed the way people think about treating impoverished people). I will also tour around Malawi and Zambia for a week and hopefully see a fair bit of territory, culture, and many exotic creatures.
January will be much the same and February we will be back in schools (likely with a much different approach) and working with the little ones, again.
The Draft and Other Football Analogies
So the past few weeks have been exhausting. Kids have been absolutely nuts. It's like they get together in the morning and select six kids who will lose their minds for the day and constantly test my patience. The next day another mix of kids will try creative ways of messing with our heads. It's sort of a game, like football, if they can get in our heads and make us "drop the ball" they get an extra seven points.
Maybe I'm exaggerating (it is still too close to the infamous last Friday to tell). We did have to implement a fourth quarter strategy (we worked with the kids 12 weeks and implemented this in the last three weeks). We broke the kids into three more manageable groups (we actually have tried variations of this "west coast offense" before) - myself, Becky, and another mystery volunteer (we have a volunteer who is afraid of blogs, but we will refer to him/her as Hagar!) taking 8 - 9 kids.
Of course, we had to draft squads, which ended up being a project. I was prepared to draft an all-star group of angel children but Hagar! threw a wrench in the plan; for moral reasons I suppose, she refused to draft a squad. As the chief proponent of the draft, I was left to draft a squad for myself and Hagar!
Anyone who has played backyard/corner field/playground football knows that this is an unfair burden. Hagar! and Becky had obviously missed the ever-important childhood milestone of backyard football. I frantically tried to glance at the piece of paper with all the kids names (we decided it would lead to crying if we lined the kids up and picked them one by one, at least, Becky and Hagar! decided this), remind myself of each kids qualities and assets, and explain the draft method to Becky. There was also the mental barrier - I didn't want to be accused of drafting poorly for Hagar!, but if I made her squad better, it would eventually haunt all of us (the kids rotate). Unfortunately I succumbed to the pressure of the moment and heard complaints for days that I put too many of the youngins on one squad (youngins, 2-3 year olds, could not be grouped on one squad, because they would have employed the "run in 9 different directions strategy and, like kamikazees, destroyed other groups as quickly as possible).
Anyways, despite all my sob stories of the last week, it actually went pretty well. We stayed up late one night and made the kids chapattis (basically fried wheat flour, but Where there is No Doctor says oil is good for kids who likely do not get enough energy from matooke, we rationalized, at least). The kids loved it and told just about everyone and I think it was one of the first times that we heard webale (thank you) echo from all their mouths (you would think the two year olds would thank us for sitting them down and making them repeat "emu, biiri, saatu, ..., one, two, three, ...). We also worked, for four days, on popsicle stick picture frames. A constant mind battle, I tell you. We did one picture frame for each family - families are different sizes, ranging from one to four kids, but each kid wants to decorate more popsicle sticks than every other kid (not the same number, more) and the kids might be content decorating the same number of sticks as the other kids. After the bigger kids threw elbows and stole the other kids popsicle sticks, crayons, food, and, when necessary, pride (taunting knows no cultural boundaries - yes, the boy who wears pink Osh Kosh B'Gosh and cries all the time gets beat on here, too) we let the dust settle and redistributed and punished the heathens when necessary. After several long days the kids had some beautiful picture frames and after a lot of work Becky managed to get a pictures printed for each family. Likely the only picture "mama," "tata," and "jaja" have of the little ones.
Again, I am being too harsh. The kids are disease vectors constantly attacking my hobbled immune system (vitamin C does wonders) and they have been a handful, especially the last couple weeks, but every one of them is a good kid. Some learned more than others (Taye, age two, learned ABCs and 1-20 in both Luganda and English perfectly, but some of the seven year olds can't do it in Luganda), but they each got some positive educational interaction at a time when they really need it. Parents or older sisters got a break for part of the day (sometimes older sisters are kept out of school to care for the younger siblings). The kids got a lot of play time and judging by their insatiable need to run after me, jump on me, punch me, have me chase them, throw or kick balls, help with puzzles, etc. they really needed some playtime with a caring adult. I'm not saying their parent(s) or grandparent(s) don't pay attention to them, but often family sizes are 8+ so the younger kids may not get a lot of attention.
Legends from Primary Six
Teaching primary six was always something that I looked forward to. The kids are generally as well behaved as a classroom of 70 ten to fourteen year olds can be. It was always a struggle, but I think a worthwhile struggle in English and Math. After exhausting full days, kids would drop by the clinic for extra homework and revision. Some of the kids really wanted to learn and do well, even if I speak Russian to them. Part of the reason the last couple weeks were so exhausting was because Becky and I were grading exams during lunch and after school until 11 or 12 at night (we are usually in bed at 9 or 10).
The exams were abysmal. If any external authority looked at them they would judge the kids as terrible failures and the teachers as incompetent (the latter might be true...) and at first I was pretty depressed. One night while grading I finished off the bottom of a bottle of "wine" that had been lingering around from a weekend trip to the Ssese Islands. It didn't help the grades. The kids averaged 33 percent on the first part of a math exam and I would guess the total for the English exam was about the same (the median was slightly lower, which I think means that a couple kids did super bad and most did a little better than average). I concluded that the kids did just as well on the section of the test that I taught and sometimes better (compared to the native teacher), although sometimes I was simply reviewing material.
Looking at the answer keys of the regular teachers I realized that these kids should max out at around 80 percent, the score their instructor usually receives on answer keys. As I've said, some teachers are miraculous, some are not. One teacher insisted that the plural of "broken" is "brokes" (another asked if I studied English in secondary school) and that someone from Rwanda is Rwandanese. How confusing - two teachers telling you two different things in two different languages using different grammatical styles (to put it kindly). Anyways, the results were abysmal by any measure, but given the circumstances of the rural school system here, I was not defeated by the result, but I will try to help some of the kids do better in P7 (they are now on "holiday" for two months).
In all, both P6 and the little kids we work with in the morning are done until February, which is nice. It was a little weird/nostalgic seeing the pre-kindergartners march off with their popsicle stick picture frames (I wondered what Mrs. McDonald's thoughts were on seeing me march off with my twin, Evan 17 years ago) and the P6 kids clean out their desks (I reminisced on my year with Mr. Koshua), but I was happy for a break. I will see them all again soon - April will likely be tougher.
The Future?
Today (December 4) is the much anticipated arrival of Dean McEvoy (I told the kids a man named Tom is coming - they would have trouble with Dean McEvoy and would probably just laugh, "Den Back aba? hahaha"). We are waiting in Kampala Backpackers, which has decided not to offer wireless internet anymore, which means that e-mails to Kent, Dave, etc. will go unanswered for a little longer. We had pizza with a mzungu we met at a restaurant in Kampala, which was really nice and the next few days we will be touring Dean McEvoy around our workplace and the neighboring villages.
After that, we will spend a couple weeks finding candidates for a blood pressure study looking at the possibility that Africans suffer from high blood pressure as a result of insufficient water intake (if you had to climb a hill with 44 - 220 pounds of water and then boil it over a wood coal stove, you would think twice about "8 glasses a day" too). [Becky and I buy water from Masaka, although we have been hiking water up the hill again, lately, as the rainy season abruptly ended]. After we identify people with high blood pressure and if they agree to drink a liter of boiled water per day, we will use them in a four week study (probably too short, so we may extend it).
We will also be starting to distribute chickens with the goal of protein and income generation for families. The way we envision this working is that we will build a coop for a kid in the family (age ~8 and up) and have them take charge of the chicken and report back to us on how the chicken is doing. We will provide vaccines or advice when necessary (with Richard and John's help) and visit the family from time to time. Within one year, we will stipulate that the family needs to pass on the same number of chickens it received to another family. It sounds flawless, but so did the Cane Toad in Australia.
I'm also hoping to work with some of the better sixth graders, the ones who will be in seventh grade (P6 seems to be a cut off point for most kids) and have a shot at doing well enough to get into secondary school (these are also the kids that can understand me when I tutor them). I think that they could potentially get 90+ percent on tests with a lot of work. If not in December, I'd like to do this in January.
Then fun. I will be meeting Dave Shulman, another Minerva Fellow, in Malawi. There I will get to see and assist his work at Partners for Health (an incredible health NGO that has changed the way people think about treating impoverished people). I will also tour around Malawi and Zambia for a week and hopefully see a fair bit of territory, culture, and many exotic creatures.
January will be much the same and February we will be back in schools (likely with a much different approach) and working with the little ones, again.
Saturday, November 29, 2008
Population
Uganda's Population Problems
So there is one graph that clearly illustrates Uganda's population woes and that is the population as a function of time graph. So, before Professor Orzel chimes in with questions (see the last section of this blog), the last two data points were projections that I found in the Primary 5 Uganda Social Studies book and the fit, as labeled, is an exponential fit using Microsoft Excel. I apologize in advance. (I am giving him a hard time, he is really a good guy with a book coming out that you should all buy. He has a very good blog - just google Chad Orzel and it pops up. He is that popular).
So what this graph says is that the population is rising very, very fast and should roughly double before 2050. According to a recent Monitor article, "High Birth Rates Fail UPE Says Minister Lokeris" states that the birth rate is 3.6 percent, which according to my macintosh calculator means the population will double in 19 years. I stated in a blog a couple months ago that a poll with my primary 6 class in Bunyere Village showed that the families in this area have 7.1 kids (n=198). One person had 18 siblings and just one student had only one sibling. A man from Uganda Bureau of Statistics (UBOS) stopped by the health clinic on one of his surveys and I excitedly peppered him with questions - he must be more accurate than CIA Factbook! He couldn't tell me the average children per family, but he did tell me that he was confident it was greater than five and that a lot of people walk several miles to receive basic medical treatment.
Population Pressures
The population pressures Uganda in all kinds of ways. The article "High Birth Rates Fail UPE Says Minister Lokeris" discusses the pressure on underfunded schools with too many kids (and that the Millennium Goal for universal primary education, UPE, is impossible with the joint pressure of inadequate funding and growing population). On the opposite page a newspaper article declares "Pupils learn from tree shades in Pader." It starts, "At least 50 primary schools in Pader operate under trees due to inadequate classrooms" (Monitor, Friday October 10, 2008). The class I work with has 70 students; it may be me, but I don't think it is the most conducive environment for learning. Some people I've spoken to believe that one out of five kids attend school in this area.
From our perch at the top of the hill I see problems. As the sun was nearly set I saw three siblings from a nearby family (of six) carrying firewood from the dwindling set of trees. 55,000 hectares of forest cover is lost every year according to another Monitor Article "Uganda should join the global tree planting campaign" (October 2, 2008). The great apes in the southwest corner of Uganda (there are 700 remaining in the world) are threatened by Congo rebels smuggling charcoal (if the villagers don't use scavenged wood, they use coal).
An Eagle and No Apparent Solution
The clinic lends some of its land to families to plant crops (and Becky, John, and I have been working in the garden for over a month now, trying to get some nutritious crops ready by December), but it is not enough. The house closest to the clinic eats one solid meal per day and the kids are pretty clearly malnourished. It killed me today when I saw an eagle swoop down and steal one of the families chicks. The father had been standing, guarding the chicks from the eagle, but he was ignored. He looked defeated and I really felt for him. Six kids helps a family gather enough water and firewood and maintain their land, but after a couple generations in a village of 8 person families the land per person is severely depleted. I sense that this region is at critical point in its development and from here on out it can't continue to develop in the same way without drastically increasing hardships. I try to mentally cut a slice of land for each of the kids, but the math just won't work out. In some mathematics or physics courses, you can sometimes tell when a solution isn't right - maybe the units aren't right or the order of magnitude is suspicious, or, perhaps, the physical constraints are exceeded (I remember an intro chem problem where we needed a value for the speed of light greater than 3 x 109. For this mental math, the solution just doesn't work out appropriately.
The Beginnings of Absolute Desperation
Of course, The Monitor bolsters my nightmares regularly. In one paper I read that "The pastoralists accused the Police of siding with the cultivators, participating in the burning of houses and attempted to shoot those who tried to defend their property" ("One killed in fresh Kasese land clash") and, in the same paper, an article titled "Encroachers urged to leave church land" (October 10). I distinctly remember an influential high school teacher reminding us that governments can be repressive and ignore its people with little retribution, but when families don't have bread (in this case bananas or Ankole cattle) there will be violence. So these land clashes that started a year ago may be the beginnings of absolute desperation. But maybe, hopefully, I am being overly dramatic.
Climate Change and Bananas
Climate change has made its mark and is illustrated in conversations I've had with villagers as well as in climate projections. I've been told again and again, that the rainy season is starting later. Becky and I spend roughly 1-2 hours per day irrigating 150 cabbages, 27 tomato plants, and a nursery bed of eggplant, green pepper, leafy greens, and carrots (we don't water the peanuts we planted). Small scale. It would not be possible for a family to carry enough water to irrigate all of its bananas every day that it didn't rain - there isn't enough water in the bore-hole and there aren't enough hours in the day. Remember that at the bare minimum, a family must grow plantains to fill their stomachs; peanuts, tomatoes, greens, and other nutritious crops are an afterthought. So this is a major development in the last decade, decreasing crop yields from decreased rainfall and increasing the pressure on a country scraping by.
The villagers also tell me that the wetland in the valley has all but disappeared. John Kalule explains that, when he was a kid, the valley was like a lake, but you can now walk through it easily even in the rainy season. Regionally and nationally, it is the same story. "Global warming and Greenhouse gases have caused temperatures to rise, with south-western Uganda being the most affected. This is evidenced by the reduction of the water table in Mbarara, the declining of water levels in Katonga wetland system, Lake Mburo, River Rwizi, Kitagata hot springs, Lake Nakivale, the persistent droughts since 1990 and the decline in food production...The FAO representative in Uganda, Percy Misika, says temperatures are still rising and over 80% of the country could turn into a desert soon" (Monitor, "Uganda should join global tree planting campaign," Ebenezer Bifubyeka). Bifuyeka goes on to point out that "Climate change in Karamoja, where plants are confined in forest reserves has escalated to seven droughts that hit the region between 1991 and 2000 as opposed to one drought every 10 years. This is not to mention the 40% drop in the ice caps on Mountain Rwenzori, which has resulted into decreasing river flows and freshwater."
President Yoweri Museveni recently declared that nine million Ugandans and 213 million sub-Saharan Africans are starving. Museveni blames falling food production on climate change, while the World Food Program points out that food exports to Kenya are a large part of the problem (Monitor, "9 million Ugandans starving - Museveni," John Emojong).
Think about that. The article was not dramatic and emphasized Uganda's poor meteorological resources. Nine million might have been high - starving or malnourished? In either case it is nine million people on the brink. Uganda is the size of Oregon and has 32 million people. Nine million people is 28 percent of the population. That is like getting up one morning to pick up the newspaper, looking side to side at your neighbors and realizing that the neighbors to the right of you don't have enough to eat. At Engeye, we have neighbors like that. A family with five kids 100 feet north of the clinic is not properly nourished and fights to scrape by.
Uganda and Population
There are more people every day, which puts more pressure on drastically underfunded schools. The schools fail to teach. I just finished grading a Primary Seven mathematics examination: the teacher's answer key (I scored it, too) deserved a 72% (lower than three students). The mean score (49 kids) was a 40%; the median was a 37%. These privileged few are charged with the future of their village. Their generation will have to persevere on less land, with less rain, less water resources, and more mouths to feed. The UN receives less than half of pledged funding to address universal primary education, malnutrition, extreme poverty, etc. Something has to give.
The Teacher Learns
I remember going into the primary six class and drawing a flat, horizontal line across 20 feet of blackboard followed by a swift vertical line up to the top of the blackboard, representing the world population in the last 5,000 years or so. I think the world hit its first billion in the last 150 years. We are now approaching seven billion. I explained to the kids how fossil fuels helped us achieve such a high population. I tried to impress upon them how incredible the population growth was. I vaguely remember standing on a desk and pointing to the top of the chalk line I had drawn as if to say, "look how many people there are in the world right now!" I then gravely discussed what increased population means for per capita land and how vital fossil fuels, mineral resources, and water were disappearing. I drew two stick figures and gave them 6 kids. I gave half of those stick figures six kids and so on until I had 54 sticks (four generations) on the board. I grunted as I drew them to emphasize how many kids these stick figures were having. They must have been busy! For each generation of stick figures I divided a mock village into smaller and smaller, proportional plots of land to illustrate what population increases meant on the local level. Most of these kids in my class won't be able to leave the village. This was somewhere in my first full week in Ddegeya, Uganda. I think this was the point that I realized the kids had no idea what I was saying. The lecture would have only been slightly less clear if delivered in Portugese. One girl in the front row blatantly fell asleep. I am now at the point where I can communicate ideas effectively to the students and capture their attention long enough to make sure that at least a few kids get something out of my presence. At some point I will redo the population talk, especially after re-reflecting on what population means for this village.
Physics Department at Union and Professor Orzel
This section is probably only interesting to Bilal and Mike and is a very long detour to my population graph in the next section. It has nothing to do with Uganda. This section was originally at the beginning, but I moved it to the end where it might be less noticeable (it is a not so serious section of a serious blog post).
I love the Department of Physics and Astronomy at Union College. It is a tight-knit group and I'm pretty sure that the only person who has the combination of know-how and want to put my blog on RSS feed is a recent graduate of the department. One of the trials the department puts you through between leisurely summer research, horrendous, time consuming lab courses, department luncheons organized by the department problem fixer, Colleen Palleschi, and weekly department talks that the faculty can't stay awake in is "student talks." They will do anything in their power to have you talk in front of people and we are all the better for it.
But we all feared them for one reason. A seven foot giant in the department named Chad Orzel usually attends these talks and occasionally raises his hand. He has been known to use single words in the place of long sentences, which left Bilal and I to pretend to understand his explanations far too many times. "Man, this secretary was giving me such a hard time about our grant proposal." "So, umm, so, Ogothemetric proshabadasher," he would reply and giggle to himself (All physics professors begin sentences with the word "so"). Bilal and I would then back away slowly faking a chuckle.
Despite his own scary vocabulary, he detests when you use fancy words like "ascertain" instead of something like "determine" or "find out." Occasionally, after he destroyed our morale on a particularly horrible homework assignment or laboratory, one of the best and the brightest in the department would use Word's synonym do-hicky as much as possible, just to irritate him and, perhaps, to highlight the hypocritical pet-peeve.
Anyways, his vocabulary is not what we feared. We feared the questions he would ask in our "student talks." He had a different set of questions for each discipline. When students throw out 18 new, mystifying terms (proteatric neoplasyogelic acid goo) in their presentations he would slowly have them flip back to a particular slide - this is always how it started, "So, umm, could you go back seven slides to the one with the picture of the double helix?" - and he would pick the perfect question to make you stumble. Students with graphs always had it worst. I used to feel bad for the kids with two points, a line, and an R2 value of one; I think he eventually stopped bothering to explain that you can't conclude a trend from two data points. He could always sense your ability and what you didn't know. He would come in with that question, let you struggle, and, thankfully, allow you to leave it answered incorrectly or unanswered.
He left me untouched until Steinmetz Day my senior year, when, with five other people in the crowd, he asked me about a complicated graph that I had stupidly made in Excel instead of Sigma Plot. At first I blatantly turned to the audience and explained that I would not answer Professor Orzel's question and asked if there were any other questions. Professor Koopmann, the student's ally, kept her hand down. Professor Orzel spoke up, without acknowledgment, "So, can you turn to that one over r-squared plot?" "No," I replied. After a minute I was forced to turn to the slide - "That is labeled as one over r-squared, but clearly, it is not one over r-squared." If I had learned one thing as a Physics student at Union it is that the Physics faculty likes to work with non-mainstream technology - they nearly rioted when they couldn't use a dos-like e-mail program called "pine" as ITS switched to a Microsoft server. Many use linux or macs and most gripe about Microsoft while using it. "Oh, yeah, I made the graph in Microsoft - you know how bad Microsoft can be..." I explained. "You know I have a copy of Sigma Plot and it can make some really professional looking one over r-squared plots," he retorted. I saw Professors Vineyard, Koopmann, and LaBrake simultaneously nod their head yes, silently wondering why Steve didn't think of that. So I am always very cautious of graphs within Professor Orzel's long reach, this blog with graphs is no different.
So there is one graph that clearly illustrates Uganda's population woes and that is the population as a function of time graph. So, before Professor Orzel chimes in with questions (see the last section of this blog), the last two data points were projections that I found in the Primary 5 Uganda Social Studies book and the fit, as labeled, is an exponential fit using Microsoft Excel. I apologize in advance. (I am giving him a hard time, he is really a good guy with a book coming out that you should all buy. He has a very good blog - just google Chad Orzel and it pops up. He is that popular).
So what this graph says is that the population is rising very, very fast and should roughly double before 2050. According to a recent Monitor article, "High Birth Rates Fail UPE Says Minister Lokeris" states that the birth rate is 3.6 percent, which according to my macintosh calculator means the population will double in 19 years. I stated in a blog a couple months ago that a poll with my primary 6 class in Bunyere Village showed that the families in this area have 7.1 kids (n=198). One person had 18 siblings and just one student had only one sibling. A man from Uganda Bureau of Statistics (UBOS) stopped by the health clinic on one of his surveys and I excitedly peppered him with questions - he must be more accurate than CIA Factbook! He couldn't tell me the average children per family, but he did tell me that he was confident it was greater than five and that a lot of people walk several miles to receive basic medical treatment.
Population Pressures
The population pressures Uganda in all kinds of ways. The article "High Birth Rates Fail UPE Says Minister Lokeris" discusses the pressure on underfunded schools with too many kids (and that the Millennium Goal for universal primary education, UPE, is impossible with the joint pressure of inadequate funding and growing population). On the opposite page a newspaper article declares "Pupils learn from tree shades in Pader." It starts, "At least 50 primary schools in Pader operate under trees due to inadequate classrooms" (Monitor, Friday October 10, 2008). The class I work with has 70 students; it may be me, but I don't think it is the most conducive environment for learning. Some people I've spoken to believe that one out of five kids attend school in this area.
From our perch at the top of the hill I see problems. As the sun was nearly set I saw three siblings from a nearby family (of six) carrying firewood from the dwindling set of trees. 55,000 hectares of forest cover is lost every year according to another Monitor Article "Uganda should join the global tree planting campaign" (October 2, 2008). The great apes in the southwest corner of Uganda (there are 700 remaining in the world) are threatened by Congo rebels smuggling charcoal (if the villagers don't use scavenged wood, they use coal).
An Eagle and No Apparent Solution
The clinic lends some of its land to families to plant crops (and Becky, John, and I have been working in the garden for over a month now, trying to get some nutritious crops ready by December), but it is not enough. The house closest to the clinic eats one solid meal per day and the kids are pretty clearly malnourished. It killed me today when I saw an eagle swoop down and steal one of the families chicks. The father had been standing, guarding the chicks from the eagle, but he was ignored. He looked defeated and I really felt for him. Six kids helps a family gather enough water and firewood and maintain their land, but after a couple generations in a village of 8 person families the land per person is severely depleted. I sense that this region is at critical point in its development and from here on out it can't continue to develop in the same way without drastically increasing hardships. I try to mentally cut a slice of land for each of the kids, but the math just won't work out. In some mathematics or physics courses, you can sometimes tell when a solution isn't right - maybe the units aren't right or the order of magnitude is suspicious, or, perhaps, the physical constraints are exceeded (I remember an intro chem problem where we needed a value for the speed of light greater than 3 x 109. For this mental math, the solution just doesn't work out appropriately.
The Beginnings of Absolute Desperation
Of course, The Monitor bolsters my nightmares regularly. In one paper I read that "The pastoralists accused the Police of siding with the cultivators, participating in the burning of houses and attempted to shoot those who tried to defend their property" ("One killed in fresh Kasese land clash") and, in the same paper, an article titled "Encroachers urged to leave church land" (October 10). I distinctly remember an influential high school teacher reminding us that governments can be repressive and ignore its people with little retribution, but when families don't have bread (in this case bananas or Ankole cattle) there will be violence. So these land clashes that started a year ago may be the beginnings of absolute desperation. But maybe, hopefully, I am being overly dramatic.
Climate Change and Bananas
Climate change has made its mark and is illustrated in conversations I've had with villagers as well as in climate projections. I've been told again and again, that the rainy season is starting later. Becky and I spend roughly 1-2 hours per day irrigating 150 cabbages, 27 tomato plants, and a nursery bed of eggplant, green pepper, leafy greens, and carrots (we don't water the peanuts we planted). Small scale. It would not be possible for a family to carry enough water to irrigate all of its bananas every day that it didn't rain - there isn't enough water in the bore-hole and there aren't enough hours in the day. Remember that at the bare minimum, a family must grow plantains to fill their stomachs; peanuts, tomatoes, greens, and other nutritious crops are an afterthought. So this is a major development in the last decade, decreasing crop yields from decreased rainfall and increasing the pressure on a country scraping by.
The villagers also tell me that the wetland in the valley has all but disappeared. John Kalule explains that, when he was a kid, the valley was like a lake, but you can now walk through it easily even in the rainy season. Regionally and nationally, it is the same story. "Global warming and Greenhouse gases have caused temperatures to rise, with south-western Uganda being the most affected. This is evidenced by the reduction of the water table in Mbarara, the declining of water levels in Katonga wetland system, Lake Mburo, River Rwizi, Kitagata hot springs, Lake Nakivale, the persistent droughts since 1990 and the decline in food production...The FAO representative in Uganda, Percy Misika, says temperatures are still rising and over 80% of the country could turn into a desert soon" (Monitor, "Uganda should join global tree planting campaign," Ebenezer Bifubyeka). Bifuyeka goes on to point out that "Climate change in Karamoja, where plants are confined in forest reserves has escalated to seven droughts that hit the region between 1991 and 2000 as opposed to one drought every 10 years. This is not to mention the 40% drop in the ice caps on Mountain Rwenzori, which has resulted into decreasing river flows and freshwater."
President Yoweri Museveni recently declared that nine million Ugandans and 213 million sub-Saharan Africans are starving. Museveni blames falling food production on climate change, while the World Food Program points out that food exports to Kenya are a large part of the problem (Monitor, "9 million Ugandans starving - Museveni," John Emojong).
Think about that. The article was not dramatic and emphasized Uganda's poor meteorological resources. Nine million might have been high - starving or malnourished? In either case it is nine million people on the brink. Uganda is the size of Oregon and has 32 million people. Nine million people is 28 percent of the population. That is like getting up one morning to pick up the newspaper, looking side to side at your neighbors and realizing that the neighbors to the right of you don't have enough to eat. At Engeye, we have neighbors like that. A family with five kids 100 feet north of the clinic is not properly nourished and fights to scrape by.
Uganda and Population
There are more people every day, which puts more pressure on drastically underfunded schools. The schools fail to teach. I just finished grading a Primary Seven mathematics examination: the teacher's answer key (I scored it, too) deserved a 72% (lower than three students). The mean score (49 kids) was a 40%; the median was a 37%. These privileged few are charged with the future of their village. Their generation will have to persevere on less land, with less rain, less water resources, and more mouths to feed. The UN receives less than half of pledged funding to address universal primary education, malnutrition, extreme poverty, etc. Something has to give.
The Teacher Learns
I remember going into the primary six class and drawing a flat, horizontal line across 20 feet of blackboard followed by a swift vertical line up to the top of the blackboard, representing the world population in the last 5,000 years or so. I think the world hit its first billion in the last 150 years. We are now approaching seven billion. I explained to the kids how fossil fuels helped us achieve such a high population. I tried to impress upon them how incredible the population growth was. I vaguely remember standing on a desk and pointing to the top of the chalk line I had drawn as if to say, "look how many people there are in the world right now!" I then gravely discussed what increased population means for per capita land and how vital fossil fuels, mineral resources, and water were disappearing. I drew two stick figures and gave them 6 kids. I gave half of those stick figures six kids and so on until I had 54 sticks (four generations) on the board. I grunted as I drew them to emphasize how many kids these stick figures were having. They must have been busy! For each generation of stick figures I divided a mock village into smaller and smaller, proportional plots of land to illustrate what population increases meant on the local level. Most of these kids in my class won't be able to leave the village. This was somewhere in my first full week in Ddegeya, Uganda. I think this was the point that I realized the kids had no idea what I was saying. The lecture would have only been slightly less clear if delivered in Portugese. One girl in the front row blatantly fell asleep. I am now at the point where I can communicate ideas effectively to the students and capture their attention long enough to make sure that at least a few kids get something out of my presence. At some point I will redo the population talk, especially after re-reflecting on what population means for this village.
Physics Department at Union and Professor Orzel
This section is probably only interesting to Bilal and Mike and is a very long detour to my population graph in the next section. It has nothing to do with Uganda. This section was originally at the beginning, but I moved it to the end where it might be less noticeable (it is a not so serious section of a serious blog post).
I love the Department of Physics and Astronomy at Union College. It is a tight-knit group and I'm pretty sure that the only person who has the combination of know-how and want to put my blog on RSS feed is a recent graduate of the department. One of the trials the department puts you through between leisurely summer research, horrendous, time consuming lab courses, department luncheons organized by the department problem fixer, Colleen Palleschi, and weekly department talks that the faculty can't stay awake in is "student talks." They will do anything in their power to have you talk in front of people and we are all the better for it.
But we all feared them for one reason. A seven foot giant in the department named Chad Orzel usually attends these talks and occasionally raises his hand. He has been known to use single words in the place of long sentences, which left Bilal and I to pretend to understand his explanations far too many times. "Man, this secretary was giving me such a hard time about our grant proposal." "So, umm, so, Ogothemetric proshabadasher," he would reply and giggle to himself (All physics professors begin sentences with the word "so"). Bilal and I would then back away slowly faking a chuckle.
Despite his own scary vocabulary, he detests when you use fancy words like "ascertain" instead of something like "determine" or "find out." Occasionally, after he destroyed our morale on a particularly horrible homework assignment or laboratory, one of the best and the brightest in the department would use Word's synonym do-hicky as much as possible, just to irritate him and, perhaps, to highlight the hypocritical pet-peeve.
Anyways, his vocabulary is not what we feared. We feared the questions he would ask in our "student talks." He had a different set of questions for each discipline. When students throw out 18 new, mystifying terms (proteatric neoplasyogelic acid goo) in their presentations he would slowly have them flip back to a particular slide - this is always how it started, "So, umm, could you go back seven slides to the one with the picture of the double helix?" - and he would pick the perfect question to make you stumble. Students with graphs always had it worst. I used to feel bad for the kids with two points, a line, and an R2 value of one; I think he eventually stopped bothering to explain that you can't conclude a trend from two data points. He could always sense your ability and what you didn't know. He would come in with that question, let you struggle, and, thankfully, allow you to leave it answered incorrectly or unanswered.
He left me untouched until Steinmetz Day my senior year, when, with five other people in the crowd, he asked me about a complicated graph that I had stupidly made in Excel instead of Sigma Plot. At first I blatantly turned to the audience and explained that I would not answer Professor Orzel's question and asked if there were any other questions. Professor Koopmann, the student's ally, kept her hand down. Professor Orzel spoke up, without acknowledgment, "So, can you turn to that one over r-squared plot?" "No," I replied. After a minute I was forced to turn to the slide - "That is labeled as one over r-squared, but clearly, it is not one over r-squared." If I had learned one thing as a Physics student at Union it is that the Physics faculty likes to work with non-mainstream technology - they nearly rioted when they couldn't use a dos-like e-mail program called "pine" as ITS switched to a Microsoft server. Many use linux or macs and most gripe about Microsoft while using it. "Oh, yeah, I made the graph in Microsoft - you know how bad Microsoft can be..." I explained. "You know I have a copy of Sigma Plot and it can make some really professional looking one over r-squared plots," he retorted. I saw Professors Vineyard, Koopmann, and LaBrake simultaneously nod their head yes, silently wondering why Steve didn't think of that. So I am always very cautious of graphs within Professor Orzel's long reach, this blog with graphs is no different.
Thursday, November 27, 2008
Open Letter, Happy Thanksgiving
Dear Union College and Greater Schenectady Community,
Over the past four months we have had the privilege of volunteering in a a rural African Village out of a small Uganda based health clinic. The village we are working in is called Ddegeya (Deh-gay-ya) and the NGO is Engeye Health, which was started by an Albany Medical School student three years ago. Uganda is an East African nation straddling the equator, bordering Lake Victoria, and is about the size of Oregon State. The village is typical of this region - no power, banana plantations on top of banana plantations, women strapping children to their back with a piece of fabric, villagers toiling in the fields, women carrying 45 pounds of water on their heads, and children in bright blue school uniforms fetching water at dawn and firewood at dusk before and after classes.
Within the picturesque village and behind the ever-present Ugandan smile is a country facing severe obstacles. AIDS has struck nearly all the families we are acquainted with; malaria pours through the village as easy as the October rains; malnutrition is typical as the families (70 percent of the people here are subsistence farmers) survive on the same unvaried staples everyday; climate change may convert 80 percent of Uganda to desert even though gasoline is $6 per gallon and very few people own cars; compounding these problems, families are large (typically six or more) and population is growing exponentially even though many struggle on the little land they have.
We have tried to address some of these problems, little by little: we planted a vegetable garden and a field of peanuts to alleviate kwashiokor, a type of malnutrition; we teach and review with students at a local primary school; we work with kids who are too young or cannot afford school fees so that they get positive, educational interaction in their formative years (reading, writing, singing, arts and creative activities, and basic solving problem skills); we tutor kids on an individual basis; we help repair the road; we do various tasks around the clinic (fetching water, inventory, statistics, etc.); and we try to convey what we observe, experience, and think to all of you back home, which helps link two disparate communities. We are about to embark on our next project - distributing protein and income generating chickens to local families who will then pass on chickens to two more families (who will then pass on chickens to two more families and so on, ideally making the project sustainable). [This idea was suggested by Union's own Megan Sesil and independently by Stephen's mother].
We feel extraordinarily lucky to be able to help on such a local level, to be able to see before our very eyes the impact of our work. But we realize that, in many ways, we are messengers from home. We take the books you send and help a child to read, we take the physics experiments and help a curious mind understand the world around them, we use the vitamins to help kids grow big and strong, we use the funds to innovate and create projects that assess village needs and help the village grow sustainably, we hear your encouragement and read your ideas and enthusiastically incorporate it into the seeds we sow, the students we teach, and the community we interact with.
For all this we thank you. We signed up to work here - it is our job, our "nine to five," our passion, our obsession. You all work - and work hard - at Union as students up until the "light show" in Schaffer, as faculty, administration, and staff catering to these inquisitive students, and in Schenectady as everyday people making up the fabric of an extraordinary city. But then you work more to help a people you've never met. Many of you we do not know (but would like to meet) as you've dutifully sat at tables in Reamer, discussed our blogs in Preceptorial classes or over coffee in Minervas, attended benefit concerts or benefit (organic) dinners, donated a book, a dollar, or an idea - your dollar, interest, and encouragement goes so far in a country lacking so much. We can guarantee you that.
Some at Union deserve special note. Megan Sesil and Professor Pease have selflessly donated their time and effort to this cause, our (collective) cause, raising awareness, sending ideas and updates, raising money, collecting donations, and packaging and sending much needed supplies. Megan has worked with Wells House, Ozone House, and WRUC (among others) to bring awareness to Ddegeya, Uganda and Engeye Health. Professor Pease has incorporated insights from Ddegeya into her preceptorial class, blending intellect with service and action. Catherine Davis, Devin Harrison, and WRUC worked with and brought six incredible, local bands to the stage in a Uganda benefit concert. Our interview with her reminded us that people here, buried in hills and tucked between banana plants and mud walls, are not alone. We are not alone. Catholic Student Association and Schaffer Library made helpful donations of money and supplies. Both our families have sent kind and timely donations for children. Teresa Sesil worked with Megan to set up a pen pal program that educated students in Yonkers, New York and Ddegeya, Uganda about varying cultures first hand (kids in both schools have really enjoyed corresponding). Lastly, our boss, John Kalule, makes everything we do possible, Dean McEvoy and Professor Fried dreamed of, pursued, and achieved a challenging fellowship program that is helping so many (in Cambodia, India, Malawi, South Africa, and Uganda), and Stephanie Van Dyke had the determination to see through the Engeye vision - without these people, we would simply not be here.
In short, we thank you all for letting us be the couriers of your goodwill. We couldn't possibly list all the people helping us address educational inequality, malnutrition, and health problems, but please know that we think about you everyday and appreciate your contributions.
Peace,
Becky Broadwin and Stephen Po-Chedley
Over the past four months we have had the privilege of volunteering in a a rural African Village out of a small Uganda based health clinic. The village we are working in is called Ddegeya (Deh-gay-ya) and the NGO is Engeye Health, which was started by an Albany Medical School student three years ago. Uganda is an East African nation straddling the equator, bordering Lake Victoria, and is about the size of Oregon State. The village is typical of this region - no power, banana plantations on top of banana plantations, women strapping children to their back with a piece of fabric, villagers toiling in the fields, women carrying 45 pounds of water on their heads, and children in bright blue school uniforms fetching water at dawn and firewood at dusk before and after classes.
Within the picturesque village and behind the ever-present Ugandan smile is a country facing severe obstacles. AIDS has struck nearly all the families we are acquainted with; malaria pours through the village as easy as the October rains; malnutrition is typical as the families (70 percent of the people here are subsistence farmers) survive on the same unvaried staples everyday; climate change may convert 80 percent of Uganda to desert even though gasoline is $6 per gallon and very few people own cars; compounding these problems, families are large (typically six or more) and population is growing exponentially even though many struggle on the little land they have.
We have tried to address some of these problems, little by little: we planted a vegetable garden and a field of peanuts to alleviate kwashiokor, a type of malnutrition; we teach and review with students at a local primary school; we work with kids who are too young or cannot afford school fees so that they get positive, educational interaction in their formative years (reading, writing, singing, arts and creative activities, and basic solving problem skills); we tutor kids on an individual basis; we help repair the road; we do various tasks around the clinic (fetching water, inventory, statistics, etc.); and we try to convey what we observe, experience, and think to all of you back home, which helps link two disparate communities. We are about to embark on our next project - distributing protein and income generating chickens to local families who will then pass on chickens to two more families (who will then pass on chickens to two more families and so on, ideally making the project sustainable). [This idea was suggested by Union's own Megan Sesil and independently by Stephen's mother].
We feel extraordinarily lucky to be able to help on such a local level, to be able to see before our very eyes the impact of our work. But we realize that, in many ways, we are messengers from home. We take the books you send and help a child to read, we take the physics experiments and help a curious mind understand the world around them, we use the vitamins to help kids grow big and strong, we use the funds to innovate and create projects that assess village needs and help the village grow sustainably, we hear your encouragement and read your ideas and enthusiastically incorporate it into the seeds we sow, the students we teach, and the community we interact with.
For all this we thank you. We signed up to work here - it is our job, our "nine to five," our passion, our obsession. You all work - and work hard - at Union as students up until the "light show" in Schaffer, as faculty, administration, and staff catering to these inquisitive students, and in Schenectady as everyday people making up the fabric of an extraordinary city. But then you work more to help a people you've never met. Many of you we do not know (but would like to meet) as you've dutifully sat at tables in Reamer, discussed our blogs in Preceptorial classes or over coffee in Minervas, attended benefit concerts or benefit (organic) dinners, donated a book, a dollar, or an idea - your dollar, interest, and encouragement goes so far in a country lacking so much. We can guarantee you that.
Some at Union deserve special note. Megan Sesil and Professor Pease have selflessly donated their time and effort to this cause, our (collective) cause, raising awareness, sending ideas and updates, raising money, collecting donations, and packaging and sending much needed supplies. Megan has worked with Wells House, Ozone House, and WRUC (among others) to bring awareness to Ddegeya, Uganda and Engeye Health. Professor Pease has incorporated insights from Ddegeya into her preceptorial class, blending intellect with service and action. Catherine Davis, Devin Harrison, and WRUC worked with and brought six incredible, local bands to the stage in a Uganda benefit concert. Our interview with her reminded us that people here, buried in hills and tucked between banana plants and mud walls, are not alone. We are not alone. Catholic Student Association and Schaffer Library made helpful donations of money and supplies. Both our families have sent kind and timely donations for children. Teresa Sesil worked with Megan to set up a pen pal program that educated students in Yonkers, New York and Ddegeya, Uganda about varying cultures first hand (kids in both schools have really enjoyed corresponding). Lastly, our boss, John Kalule, makes everything we do possible, Dean McEvoy and Professor Fried dreamed of, pursued, and achieved a challenging fellowship program that is helping so many (in Cambodia, India, Malawi, South Africa, and Uganda), and Stephanie Van Dyke had the determination to see through the Engeye vision - without these people, we would simply not be here.
In short, we thank you all for letting us be the couriers of your goodwill. We couldn't possibly list all the people helping us address educational inequality, malnutrition, and health problems, but please know that we think about you everyday and appreciate your contributions.
Peace,
Becky Broadwin and Stephen Po-Chedley
Saturday, November 22, 2008
Observations on Observation
A Different Flavor, Moon Theories, and Pine Trees in the Wind
The last couple months I have been able to watch a full, red moon rising over the hillside just after sunset (a picture that does it no justice should be posted soon). I realized that my experience of this sight is a little different since taking a course in optics, which explains why the sun appears red to us during sunrise and sunset. The sun and the moon are red because the blue light is scattered away (making the sky blue) while the red light travels on from the sun and moon to us, making the star and the moon seem red to us. I think this is called Rayleigh Scattering where shorter wavelengths of light are much much more likely to scatter away. I wondered if it mattered that the kids here will likely never know "why the sky is blue" (I didn't either, I think my parents made up answers when I asked such stupid questions - the sky is blue because it is a reflection of the ocean, stupid).
John and I were planting trees one weekend (November 1 - 2) and I was bragging about the Cassuarina trees I was planting, telling him that the trees work symbiotically with mychorizal fungi to fix nitrogen and are the ancestral roots to modern pine trees (I think he knew that already). When I brought up pine trees (John had two pine trees to plant, too) John told me that he loved the sound that pine trees made in the United States. I tried to think about that sound, but couldn't conjure a specific sound. I remember the sound of wind on a cool autumn day and I remember the sight of pine branches dancing in the breeze. I can even remember the sound of pines cracking in the extreme cold of winter, but I couldn't put the sights and sounds together. This may not be a particularly good example of John and Uganda's hypersensitivity to Nature, but there seem to be slight differences in how we understand and interact with nature.
One thing that I noticed pretty quickly that I hadn't noticed for 22.5 years in America was that the moon rises about an hour later each night. I think that this observation made me wonder why and pull from my experiences to figure out why the moonrise changes time. I recently wrote a letter to the Department of Physics and Astronomy at Union asking for a confirmation on my half-thought-out theory, but I think it works like this:
The moon revolves around the Earth's axis in roughly the same direction as the rotation of the Earth. The moon has a period of 28 days, so it sweeps out an angle of 12.9 degrees per day (360/28). So the Earth has spun an extra 12.9 degrees before you can spot the moon at moonrise. This works out to an extra 51 minutes and 24 seconds each day - about an hour (12.9deg.*24hr/360deg.*60min/hr). I have no idea if any of that is true, but it explains the problem until a better explanation comes along in the same way that the locals theorize about the start of a rainy season.
My background in America no doubt changes my perspective and understanding of things here. Very few people have physics or math past primary school and I don't think that diminishes their understanding of the world. I don't have clear examples from Uganda (although I think John was aware of the moon rising an hour later each night already), but I do have a couple examples from Blessed Unrest which I thought were interesting.
Indigenous Observers
The Mi'kmaq people know the world through sound. One of their tribal legends tells of three brothers, each of whom was granted a wish by a great magician named Glooksap. The first wanted to be tall so all the woman could see him. The second wanted to be secure in the beauty of the forest and never work again. The third wanted to never fall ill and live a long life. Glooksap called in Cuhkw the earthquake, who shook the land, seized the three, and planted them in the forest. The first became the tallest pine tree and could be seen for miles around; the second became the pine tree with the deepest roots and withstood the wind of any storm; and the third became the oldest pine tree and stood for centuries. To this day, the Mi'kmaq name their pine trees by the sound of the wind soughing through the branches one hour before sunset in the fall. Elders can remember the prior names of the native stands of pine, and detect how trees are changing due to environmental damage from acid rain and air pollution by comparing their names with the current sounds they make.
In 1981 marine biologist R. E. Johannes published Words of the Lagoon, a seminal book detailing his work with Ngiraklang, second chief in the village of Ngeremlengui in Palau. When Johannes first went to Palau to learn about reef fisheries from indigenous people, his mates in the Australian scientific community joked that he had gone "tropo," a term reserved for someone who has spent too much time in the tropical sun. Ngiraklang, who was born in 1894, and educated with only a half year of schooling in carpentry, turned out to be a phenomenal scientist and marine biologist. For fisherfolk the cycles of the moon chart a map of the ocean. They will tell the height, strength, and timing of the tides, and thus accessibility to lagoons and shallow inlets within reefs. They will also reveal the location of a school of fish, what kind of behavior they exhibit, and how susceptible they are to being netted or otherwise caught. Paluan fishermen know the best times to fish, and they always align with the moon. The night before the new moon on Namoluk Atoll is called Otolol, meaning "to swarm." Fish spawning during lunar cycles form large groups and are exceptionally easy to catch. Ngirakland could not only identify more than three hundred species of reef fish, but knew the lunar spawning cucles of more species of fish than were described in all the marine biology literature in the world. Villagers commented that Johannes was the first scientist who had inquired after their knowledge instead of telling them his own.
- Paul Hawken, Blessed Unrest, pg. 100 - 101
Those sort of stories could probably fill volumes. I remember listening to an Aboriginal indigenous to North Stradbroke Island in Queensland, Australia. He described, in great detail, how the dolphins, pelicans, lunar cycles, and a variety of other qualitative indicators came together to help the people hunt mullet fish on the island. I do not remember the details, but I do remember the end of his talk as he glumly concluded that the "old ways" were eroding away as the mullet fish no longer return. (The island has large silicon and titanium mining operations and the bay that is enclosed by the island has huge fishing operations). One thing that strikes me is how accurately these people can observe changes (in trees from acid rain, in fish because of the moon, or in fish abundance because of pollution and overfishing), but the understanding may be different. Ugandans do not need to know the accepted biological reasons why plantains grow so well here, they just need to know how to keep the plantains growing well here. As Emerson said, "I have confidence in laws of morals as laws of botany. I have planted maize in my field every June for seventeen years and I never knew it to come up strychnine. My parsley, beet, turnip, carrot, buck-thorn, chestnut, acorn, are as sure. I believe that justice produces justice and injustice injustice" (Blessed Unrest, Hawken, 73 - 74). Natural and social laws here are based on what works locally and that is enough.
Changing Your Perspective
This all reminds me of a Physics Professor who constantly harped on us to "change our perspective from time to time." It was never clear which perspective we were supposed to change; in the modern physics course we were taking there was a slew of math we needed to learn with a lot of different ways of understanding it. I think it worked both ways, but he talked about "one true love" by having us calculate the odds of meeting our one true love. In the same class he told us to determine how many atoms are in a sewing needle. Physicists differ in opinion about the math behind things like dark matter (is it a weird type of matter/energy or are we just not observing baryonic matter somewhere?), the universe (expanding, contracting, renewable matter, or multiverse?) and quantum physics ("God does not roll dice" or at some level physics calculations break down to probabilities). Most people would probably conclude that the pine trees were probably not placed there by an earthquake, but in the end it doesn't disqualify the observations these people made or the changes they tracked. Where there is No Doctor cites a range of local medicines (ie bark boiled as tea from a certain willow tree to treat headaches) that work as well as accepted pills - same physiology, just a little different. The medicines might have local lore attached that is very unscientific, but if the medicines work and the local stories explain when to use the medication it is really just a matter of perspective and there is no right or wrong explanation. I think most religion can be chalked up to differing perspectives.
Your Place is a Part of You
Part of an individual's understanding with Nature is rooted in place. I remember one cool morning (low 60s) Lawrence was in a sweater and exclaimed to Becky and I that "it is very, very cold this morning." Becky and I had to chuckle a little as we took morning tea in shorts and t-shirts. It had been cool the night before, but not all that cold. I told Lawrence that I liked it, that I missed the cold and the changing seasons. He replied that, "It is because it is part of you. It is your place. The cold is part of who you are." With his accent and very sure attitude it struck me as a very wise statement. He went on, "It is because you are used. You are used to cold and it is why you like it." I am used to the cold and the hot apple cider that accompanies it in the same way that John probably was used to and missed plantains and nut sauce when he travelled to the US. I am comfortable in the cold and amongst mountains of snow. In the same way that John can pick out dozens of local plants around his village - vanilla, coffee, cassava, mango, jack fruit, peanut, maize, tomato, sorghum, etc. - I can pick out dozens of makes and models of cars in the exorbitant Potter parking lot at Union College. We know our places and are comfortable there. Uganda has the advantage of being snuggled in a largely undeveloped or, to put it differently, a pristine country.
Here it is just easier to observe Nature. There is no pavement to repel the mud and dirt from the gardens, there are no stadium lights to block out the stars, and the source of their milk and produce is very transparent. Observation is often qualitative and after four years of math and physics, I would normally be skeptical of this sort of science, but what works works well here. The farmers in Ddegeya plant at different times than those in Kyetume - they know their place.
Blindness to the Obvious
But even more interesting is that one can be blind to another's place and culture.
For most people, to understand something new requires a cognitive antecedent. When members of the Me'en tribe in Ethiopia were shown a coloring book that included an illustration of a local antelope, they didn't recognize the animal. They would smell the paper, twist it in their hands, feel its texture, listen to its sound, and even taste it gingerly, but they couldn't discern any animal from the picture alone. When anthropologists transferred the drawing to cloth, a material with which the tribe was familiar, a few of the tribespeople could make out something. A twenty-year-old woman gazed at the outline as a scientist traced the animal with her finger, and although she could see a tail, leg, ear, and a horn, when asked what the illustration represented, she had no idea. Scientific experiments repeatedly show that groups of educated, urbanized people pay no attention to unfamiliar objects directly in front of them if they focus too strongly on familiar ones.
- Paul Hawken, Blessed Unrest, pg. 100 - 101
I don't know if I've blatantly missed something that was right in front of me - I hope not, but I have noticed a more keen awareness to the hillside I am living on than some of the places I've been in the United States: The way the clouds fill in certain depressions in the hills on days that will inevitably be hot, or the way the rain traces up from Kyamaganda, south of Ddegeya, before seemingly turning West to open up on the Engeye clinic, or how a red sun at sunset means good weather and a red sun in the morning means rain - just as it does in the United States. This is seemingly important because most of the kids here don't ever get enough education to understand the basic biology and soil chemistry in their gardens and will likely never even address the climate change that will hit their country hard.
In all, I've felt that I've been more attuned to my surroundings here than the the pavement of Schenectady. Part of it is that it is tougher to see Nature in America - we tuck it away in sanctuaries whereas Nature is along all the footpaths here and the shooting stars that streak the sky every few nights give a great incentive to watch. Part might be that I'm slowly being acclimatized to the culture and area - I can see past the acres and acres of banana plants and finally make out the details. It may also be that, without weather.com, the qualitative signs of weather come alive for a daily forecast, rather than the daily high, low, and chance of precipitation.
But in all, this is important because local people have a different understanding of place that, as Hawken points out, can be more precise than modern western understanding. I worry that Ddegeya will one day have a Mando's on the corner with a Kobil along the road (fast food and their version of Mobil). As varied cultures of people slowly westernize we lose local understandings and practices that interact sustainably with their individual environments. The world becomes more bland and we lose a lot of information and perspective - even if it isn't the scientific "correct" perspective of the west.
The last couple months I have been able to watch a full, red moon rising over the hillside just after sunset (a picture that does it no justice should be posted soon). I realized that my experience of this sight is a little different since taking a course in optics, which explains why the sun appears red to us during sunrise and sunset. The sun and the moon are red because the blue light is scattered away (making the sky blue) while the red light travels on from the sun and moon to us, making the star and the moon seem red to us. I think this is called Rayleigh Scattering where shorter wavelengths of light are much much more likely to scatter away. I wondered if it mattered that the kids here will likely never know "why the sky is blue" (I didn't either, I think my parents made up answers when I asked such stupid questions - the sky is blue because it is a reflection of the ocean, stupid).
John and I were planting trees one weekend (November 1 - 2) and I was bragging about the Cassuarina trees I was planting, telling him that the trees work symbiotically with mychorizal fungi to fix nitrogen and are the ancestral roots to modern pine trees (I think he knew that already). When I brought up pine trees (John had two pine trees to plant, too) John told me that he loved the sound that pine trees made in the United States. I tried to think about that sound, but couldn't conjure a specific sound. I remember the sound of wind on a cool autumn day and I remember the sight of pine branches dancing in the breeze. I can even remember the sound of pines cracking in the extreme cold of winter, but I couldn't put the sights and sounds together. This may not be a particularly good example of John and Uganda's hypersensitivity to Nature, but there seem to be slight differences in how we understand and interact with nature.
One thing that I noticed pretty quickly that I hadn't noticed for 22.5 years in America was that the moon rises about an hour later each night. I think that this observation made me wonder why and pull from my experiences to figure out why the moonrise changes time. I recently wrote a letter to the Department of Physics and Astronomy at Union asking for a confirmation on my half-thought-out theory, but I think it works like this:
The moon revolves around the Earth's axis in roughly the same direction as the rotation of the Earth. The moon has a period of 28 days, so it sweeps out an angle of 12.9 degrees per day (360/28). So the Earth has spun an extra 12.9 degrees before you can spot the moon at moonrise. This works out to an extra 51 minutes and 24 seconds each day - about an hour (12.9deg.*24hr/360deg.*60min/hr). I have no idea if any of that is true, but it explains the problem until a better explanation comes along in the same way that the locals theorize about the start of a rainy season.
My background in America no doubt changes my perspective and understanding of things here. Very few people have physics or math past primary school and I don't think that diminishes their understanding of the world. I don't have clear examples from Uganda (although I think John was aware of the moon rising an hour later each night already), but I do have a couple examples from Blessed Unrest which I thought were interesting.
Indigenous Observers
The Mi'kmaq people know the world through sound. One of their tribal legends tells of three brothers, each of whom was granted a wish by a great magician named Glooksap. The first wanted to be tall so all the woman could see him. The second wanted to be secure in the beauty of the forest and never work again. The third wanted to never fall ill and live a long life. Glooksap called in Cuhkw the earthquake, who shook the land, seized the three, and planted them in the forest. The first became the tallest pine tree and could be seen for miles around; the second became the pine tree with the deepest roots and withstood the wind of any storm; and the third became the oldest pine tree and stood for centuries. To this day, the Mi'kmaq name their pine trees by the sound of the wind soughing through the branches one hour before sunset in the fall. Elders can remember the prior names of the native stands of pine, and detect how trees are changing due to environmental damage from acid rain and air pollution by comparing their names with the current sounds they make.
In 1981 marine biologist R. E. Johannes published Words of the Lagoon, a seminal book detailing his work with Ngiraklang, second chief in the village of Ngeremlengui in Palau. When Johannes first went to Palau to learn about reef fisheries from indigenous people, his mates in the Australian scientific community joked that he had gone "tropo," a term reserved for someone who has spent too much time in the tropical sun. Ngiraklang, who was born in 1894, and educated with only a half year of schooling in carpentry, turned out to be a phenomenal scientist and marine biologist. For fisherfolk the cycles of the moon chart a map of the ocean. They will tell the height, strength, and timing of the tides, and thus accessibility to lagoons and shallow inlets within reefs. They will also reveal the location of a school of fish, what kind of behavior they exhibit, and how susceptible they are to being netted or otherwise caught. Paluan fishermen know the best times to fish, and they always align with the moon. The night before the new moon on Namoluk Atoll is called Otolol, meaning "to swarm." Fish spawning during lunar cycles form large groups and are exceptionally easy to catch. Ngirakland could not only identify more than three hundred species of reef fish, but knew the lunar spawning cucles of more species of fish than were described in all the marine biology literature in the world. Villagers commented that Johannes was the first scientist who had inquired after their knowledge instead of telling them his own.
- Paul Hawken, Blessed Unrest, pg. 100 - 101
Those sort of stories could probably fill volumes. I remember listening to an Aboriginal indigenous to North Stradbroke Island in Queensland, Australia. He described, in great detail, how the dolphins, pelicans, lunar cycles, and a variety of other qualitative indicators came together to help the people hunt mullet fish on the island. I do not remember the details, but I do remember the end of his talk as he glumly concluded that the "old ways" were eroding away as the mullet fish no longer return. (The island has large silicon and titanium mining operations and the bay that is enclosed by the island has huge fishing operations). One thing that strikes me is how accurately these people can observe changes (in trees from acid rain, in fish because of the moon, or in fish abundance because of pollution and overfishing), but the understanding may be different. Ugandans do not need to know the accepted biological reasons why plantains grow so well here, they just need to know how to keep the plantains growing well here. As Emerson said, "I have confidence in laws of morals as laws of botany. I have planted maize in my field every June for seventeen years and I never knew it to come up strychnine. My parsley, beet, turnip, carrot, buck-thorn, chestnut, acorn, are as sure. I believe that justice produces justice and injustice injustice" (Blessed Unrest, Hawken, 73 - 74). Natural and social laws here are based on what works locally and that is enough.
Changing Your Perspective
This all reminds me of a Physics Professor who constantly harped on us to "change our perspective from time to time." It was never clear which perspective we were supposed to change; in the modern physics course we were taking there was a slew of math we needed to learn with a lot of different ways of understanding it. I think it worked both ways, but he talked about "one true love" by having us calculate the odds of meeting our one true love. In the same class he told us to determine how many atoms are in a sewing needle. Physicists differ in opinion about the math behind things like dark matter (is it a weird type of matter/energy or are we just not observing baryonic matter somewhere?), the universe (expanding, contracting, renewable matter, or multiverse?) and quantum physics ("God does not roll dice" or at some level physics calculations break down to probabilities). Most people would probably conclude that the pine trees were probably not placed there by an earthquake, but in the end it doesn't disqualify the observations these people made or the changes they tracked. Where there is No Doctor cites a range of local medicines (ie bark boiled as tea from a certain willow tree to treat headaches) that work as well as accepted pills - same physiology, just a little different. The medicines might have local lore attached that is very unscientific, but if the medicines work and the local stories explain when to use the medication it is really just a matter of perspective and there is no right or wrong explanation. I think most religion can be chalked up to differing perspectives.
Your Place is a Part of You
Part of an individual's understanding with Nature is rooted in place. I remember one cool morning (low 60s) Lawrence was in a sweater and exclaimed to Becky and I that "it is very, very cold this morning." Becky and I had to chuckle a little as we took morning tea in shorts and t-shirts. It had been cool the night before, but not all that cold. I told Lawrence that I liked it, that I missed the cold and the changing seasons. He replied that, "It is because it is part of you. It is your place. The cold is part of who you are." With his accent and very sure attitude it struck me as a very wise statement. He went on, "It is because you are used. You are used to cold and it is why you like it." I am used to the cold and the hot apple cider that accompanies it in the same way that John probably was used to and missed plantains and nut sauce when he travelled to the US. I am comfortable in the cold and amongst mountains of snow. In the same way that John can pick out dozens of local plants around his village - vanilla, coffee, cassava, mango, jack fruit, peanut, maize, tomato, sorghum, etc. - I can pick out dozens of makes and models of cars in the exorbitant Potter parking lot at Union College. We know our places and are comfortable there. Uganda has the advantage of being snuggled in a largely undeveloped or, to put it differently, a pristine country.
Here it is just easier to observe Nature. There is no pavement to repel the mud and dirt from the gardens, there are no stadium lights to block out the stars, and the source of their milk and produce is very transparent. Observation is often qualitative and after four years of math and physics, I would normally be skeptical of this sort of science, but what works works well here. The farmers in Ddegeya plant at different times than those in Kyetume - they know their place.
Blindness to the Obvious
But even more interesting is that one can be blind to another's place and culture.
For most people, to understand something new requires a cognitive antecedent. When members of the Me'en tribe in Ethiopia were shown a coloring book that included an illustration of a local antelope, they didn't recognize the animal. They would smell the paper, twist it in their hands, feel its texture, listen to its sound, and even taste it gingerly, but they couldn't discern any animal from the picture alone. When anthropologists transferred the drawing to cloth, a material with which the tribe was familiar, a few of the tribespeople could make out something. A twenty-year-old woman gazed at the outline as a scientist traced the animal with her finger, and although she could see a tail, leg, ear, and a horn, when asked what the illustration represented, she had no idea. Scientific experiments repeatedly show that groups of educated, urbanized people pay no attention to unfamiliar objects directly in front of them if they focus too strongly on familiar ones.
- Paul Hawken, Blessed Unrest, pg. 100 - 101
I don't know if I've blatantly missed something that was right in front of me - I hope not, but I have noticed a more keen awareness to the hillside I am living on than some of the places I've been in the United States: The way the clouds fill in certain depressions in the hills on days that will inevitably be hot, or the way the rain traces up from Kyamaganda, south of Ddegeya, before seemingly turning West to open up on the Engeye clinic, or how a red sun at sunset means good weather and a red sun in the morning means rain - just as it does in the United States. This is seemingly important because most of the kids here don't ever get enough education to understand the basic biology and soil chemistry in their gardens and will likely never even address the climate change that will hit their country hard.
In all, I've felt that I've been more attuned to my surroundings here than the the pavement of Schenectady. Part of it is that it is tougher to see Nature in America - we tuck it away in sanctuaries whereas Nature is along all the footpaths here and the shooting stars that streak the sky every few nights give a great incentive to watch. Part might be that I'm slowly being acclimatized to the culture and area - I can see past the acres and acres of banana plants and finally make out the details. It may also be that, without weather.com, the qualitative signs of weather come alive for a daily forecast, rather than the daily high, low, and chance of precipitation.
But in all, this is important because local people have a different understanding of place that, as Hawken points out, can be more precise than modern western understanding. I worry that Ddegeya will one day have a Mando's on the corner with a Kobil along the road (fast food and their version of Mobil). As varied cultures of people slowly westernize we lose local understandings and practices that interact sustainably with their individual environments. The world becomes more bland and we lose a lot of information and perspective - even if it isn't the scientific "correct" perspective of the west.
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