Nile-Side View of Egypt

I have been (and continue to be) ferociously busy with my current class- Curricular Design for Peace and Conflict Studies. I'm currently working on designing a course for high school seniors called Non-Violence: Practices and Processes. I love this class! (Both the one I'm taking and the one I'm making.) It has been an amazing experience bonding with all the GLP scholars from the Great Lakes region of Africa who design not one but 2 Masters levels courses as their final requirement for graduation. They will then go home and teach the classes they designed at their home universities. I don't have time to gush on and on about all the different reasons this is an incredible program. Really, I just hopped on the blog to say something about what's happening in Egypt.

Our Vice Rector, Amr Abdalla is Egyptian and it so happens he's in Egypt right now, having gone to visit family more than a week ago. We just got an email from him, which you can read online at The Peace and Conflict Monitor. He has a unique perspective to offer and we were also really glad to hear that he's well and hopeful.

I want to encourage everyone to watch the coverage at AlJazeera in English, which Amr points out (and I completely agree) is far superior to the CNN coverage. I've been checking in with AJE pretty regularly since Friday morning and it's both great and somewhat disorienting to get straight, spinless reporting from the streets. Just people telling us what they see and hear. Very few talking heads and the ones they do have are actually Egyptian, not pundits speculating from a thousand miles away. That's the badge of honor I want my news outlets to wear- Pundit Free!

Now back to my curriculum. It's a good thing I can actually use the Egyptian example as a discussion point for one of my lesson plans. I can be distracted and working at the same time.

¡Feliz Cumpleaños!

Yesterday when I got home, a birthday party for José Pablo (turning 2) was in full swing. His brother & sister, cousins, neighbor kids and some of their parents were sitting on our newly (mostly) finished back patio, listening to music, eating arroz con pollo, and watching the toddler of the hour dance. He was kind enough to dance with me when I arrived until a plate of food was prepared for me. Once everyone had eaten, it was time for the piñata. Starting with José Pablo and then passing on from younger to older kids an effigy of Sponge Bob Squarepants was beaten with a broomstick. As the kids got older and the beating more brutal and the shouts of "¡Dura! ¡Dura!" got louder and louder, SBSp's giant smile seemed more and more inappropriate and the exercise verged on the macabre. Finally, José Pablo's dad decided the frenzy had gone on long enough and ripped open the back of the piñata, spilling from its guts a shower of hard candies and peanuts in the shell. The kids scooped goodies into little sacks with impressive speed and when they were finished, it was time for cake. A fine time was had by all and I even got a few candies to take home.

Much love and gratitude to my landfamily for including me in the celebration and once again filling me with food.

Worst Sentence Ever (so far)

"Challenges to development are multiplying, often in dialectical relation to the fragmentary attempts at control inherent in post-Fordist regimes of representation and accumulation." Arturo Escobar, from Encountering Development: The Making and Unmaking of the Third World.

A semester later and Escobar still stands out to me as the worst perpetrator of offenses against clarity in academia. This particular sentence was where I drew the line and chose to stop enabling bad writing. Why on earth do I need to hack my way through the obfuscations of a writer who clearly doesn't care about being understood? This is what I love about being a student as a grown up- having a sense of perspective that allows me to choose not to finish a reading assignment. If you can't hold the attention of a willing and gifted reader such as myself, you clearly don't deserve that attention.

This post in honor of my return to reading assignments. I'm halfway through the reading for tomorrow's first day of class (Curricular Design for Peace and Conflict Studies) and Escobar remains the man to beat.

Dogs

The thing is, I'm a cat person. I'm so much a cat person I probably have that cat parasite disease that some suspect is the cause of people really, really liking cats.

Costa Rica, however, is for dog people. People who like small, constantly barking, entirely undisciplined dogs. Most of the dogs I see have no collars and apart from having a tendency to sleep in the same patch of the middle of road don't necessarily seem to belong somewhere. I've been told that my street is somewhat of an anomaly but I've seen plenty of dogs wandering the other streets of CC too. There are also many strays(?), wanderers(?), out for a stroll(?) dogs up at school. They mostly like to hang out on the cafeteria patio, for obvious reasons but there's one in particular (we're told his name is Jorge) who also enjoys attempting to come to class. I think Victor Valle's is my favorite professor response so far. He looks at Jorge, gestures to the door and says, "It is not time yet for dogs to go to school."

Why, why, why are there so many dogs and why does no one seem to care how much or how loudly or how long they bark? My theory is that they are meant to be cheap burglar alarms and that their owners, if they have them, are willing to put up with a lot of crying wolf! (or person! or car! or thing in the street!) on the off chance that one day they'll cry burglar! But I still don't understand how they stand it, especially when it's that small dog, yippy kind of barking. Many times as I've sat trying to study or lain in bed trying to sleep I've had extremely unQuakerly thoughts of smacking some dog on the snout.

And someone must be doing something like that because I've noticed if some well intentioned (usually American- and yes I mean Canadian too) person sees a dog on campus, picks up and throws a stick for him, instead of falling over itself with rapture and running after the stick the dog will instead run away with its tail between its legs and a submissive look over its shoulder that says, "I'm going, I'm going, you don't have to throw that stick at me."

There are cats here too, and on campus. I just don't see them as often or as many of them, probably because of all the stupid yappy dogs.

I get asked this a lot

Here's what's funny to me- when I was a stage manager I met a lot of people who didn't know what a stage manager is, what they do, or that such a job even exists. And now when I say I'm studying peace education, a lot of people tell me they don't know what that means or what a peace educator does.

Here's a video from the Teachers Without Borders website (a UPEACE Ed alum works there) that gives a brief overview:

I Got Mail Today!

Ian & Mele, a thousand thanks for your Christmas wishes and the addition to my room decor. I super swear I'm going to stop being a postal hypocrite and send out the postcards I've been accumulating. I just need to learn the word for stamp.

I was able to pick up my mail because I was back on campus for the first time (while it was open) since classes ended. I was meeting w/some folks from DAA to help out with the Orientation for the new students from American University. All of which means I've reached that crucial turning point in a long break when my perception of said break shifts from, "What a long break stretching out before me. There will be time to do everything I want to do in a relaxed and leisurely fashion" to "I can see the end of this break coming at me like a freight train! I have accomplished nothing! Time to buckle down."

Buckling down has commenced. To Do List spreadsheets have been made. The alarm clock has been reinstated. Helpful Post-it note flags have been purchased (Here's what I asked for at the office supply store- a shy person's nightmare where virtually everything is behind the counter and must be requested, in Spanish- "the small things with many colors, like a 'Post-it', (gesture showing putting a flag in the margin of a book)"). I apologize for that punctuation.

In further news on the learning Spanish front, traveling w/Rebecca to Monteverde and La Fortuna provided great opportunities to practice. Before I've always traveled with someone who spoke Spanish much better than I do. This time, I was the go-to Spanish speaker. I think we did all right. In the four days we were traveling, only twice did a Spanish speaker give up on me and switch to English. I still struggle mightily, a lot because I want to have my vocabulary, to say things the way I would say them but instead am trapped in the vocabulary of a 5 year old. A five year old with pronoun agreement problems. (Sigh, I just said, "They want to walk" when I meant "We want to walk.")

RIP, Canon Coolpix 2000

(Christmas 2002-December 2010)

I would like to say a few words.

Coolpix 2K was my first digital camera. If memory serves, the first picture I took with it was of my dad, sitting at the desk in my apartment on Glenwood, loading the drivers for my new camera onto my computer. It traveled with me across the US- Maine, NYC, MN, Colorado, Joshua Tree, San Francisco and Seattle to name just a few. It has been to England, Scotland, Burundi and Costa Rica. With it, I have taken photos I deemed worthy of color printing and taping to the walls of tour apartments.

Subject to an indifferent owner, its full potential was never realized; many of its settings including Party Favor and Snowman, were never used and it was often forgotten, left hanging in its case on the closet door handle while Meaningful Events went unrecorded except by memory.

In its final months it suffered the indignity of taunts from other photographers, because in our ever slendering Age of Planned Obsolescence, it was more than 3 years old and did not fit in my pocket. We may never know if the humid climate here in Costa Rica hastened its end or if its time had simply come. Over the last two months there were a few warning signs that all was not well- the occasional striped, pixelated view screen, an error message, a few photos unable to be read after importation. Finally, in the middle of a hanging bridge in the cloud forests of Monteverde, it was used to take it's last photo.

It is survived by a carrying case, four batteries and two memory cards, which may or may not contain retrievable data.

To honor its passing, I post a few of my favorite photos, not previously published on this blog.