Alright, let’s look at when was the last time I posted on here… wow. Okay, it’s been a while. I apologize for that. It’s a bit like Armageddon here right now (and not the movie… though I do keep remembering random Aerosmith songs…) and this has been the first chance I’ve had to exhale in a long time. Unfortunately it will also probably be the last time for another week or two because they really just keep piling it on. For example, I turned in my major paper for my DS 615 class yesterday after sitting through the two hours of lecture and then left to walk across campus for my last class of the day, an easy class where we just hang out and listen to this old guy talk for an hour. I could finally just relax… or so I thought. Turns out he decided to give us an unannounced quiz (worth 12.5% of our grade) which was horrible timing for a few reasons including that I was about to pass out from exhaustion, half of the class wasn’t even there, and the reason they weren’t there probably was because we just had another quiz worth just as much during the previous session last Thursday. No rest for the weary.
I wish I was done sharing all of my school woes with you but it’s just not so. On Monday, I found out I now have a test for one class this Saturday and then a paper for the same class due on the Thursday after. In total, I have something like three or four essays, at least two presentations, and a few tests ending Friday of next week. I’m not a special circumstance though and I’m sure the rest of the UDSM students have this happen to them every year when their teachers decide to wait until the last two weeks of the term to do everything. I’ll get everything done though. That much I know. The only problem now is that my rock n’ roll lifestyle has finally caught up to me and now I’m sick with some sort of cold and/or a fever. I’m not really worried about this either and it will come to pass if I can actually find some time to get rest but I realized yesterday that if I would have been sick like this earlier in the term when we were still kind of new here, I would have been freaked out. Sometimes I forget just where I am because I’m living so much in my own head, thinking about other things, and it just dawns on me again and again that this really is a third world country. I saw a lawnmower on campus yesterday – usually they just use machetes – and seeing it just about stopped me in my tracks. I’ve seen only one other lawnmower in this entire country but it was at this really nice beach resort place and even then it had about the same effect on me. This inspired me to write down some things when I got to class and sat down at a desk that I think I’ll type here now.
“I’ve been living in the third world too long…”
- it never used to be this fascinating to see a lawnmower
- I didn’t used to find it kind of entertaining to chase cockroaches around the hallway
- I was never impressed by a straight, paved road that didn’t have any potholes for about a mile before I came here
- I’ve stopped assuming that every little sickness or bug is life-threatening
- I’m too comfortable with people living and studying in buildings that look condemned/abandoned or that 8 people live in one dorm room (I have to get photos of this but a lot of things you have to see first hand to understand)
- I’ve forgotten what it’s like for things (like roads/buildings) to be maintained
- I no longer wonder how people can wear the same clothes everyday, dirtied so purely in a way that only that can do
- it is still fun, however, to see all of the donated shirts from the U.S. and Canada
- I’m too used to having to share a seat and desk in class
- I understand the perks of standing outside the window to listen to a lecture when the classroom is beyond standing room only
- I can’t remember what a classroom with all functional seats and desks looks like (Lillis will probably cause some culture shock)
- I’m hardly even inconvenienced (and never surprised) by power and water outages
- I’m starting to believe in the power of radio
- I can still count the number of warm showers I’ve had since I arrived on one hand
- New, nice, name brand electronics or appliances just look out of place
- I’ve started speaking broken, awkwardly phrased English because that’s how the people here speak it and understand it
- it is still funny though to see it in writing on posters and other public things
- I’m uncomfortable seeing white people
The list could go on; this is just where I stopped it at the time. I mean, it’s weird to talk to other foreign students here who go off to places like Nairobi, Addis Ababa, or even Bangkok and when I ask how it was, there answer is usually “it’s so developed compared to here”. I have been here for a while though, that’s true. Actually I wrote a while back how I was hoping to get on and type up a reflection sort of thing on my first 100 days here but I just got too busy. That day was marked last week I think on Wednesday. I couldn’t do any celebrating though because I had a test and a presentation for class the next day (I think I did fine on both, though) but it is a bit of a landmark thing. For one, I’m done with counting the days and the weeks now. The next time I start counting days or anything will be counting down instead. I’m also pretty sure that I surpassed my record for time spent out of country as well as away from home which I set at UBC a couple years ago. It was definitely different back then though and this has been a lot more challenging. Still, it feels good to have reached triple digits and it’ll be a lot better for me to stop anxiously and impatiently doing the math to calculate how long it’s been since we first got here. I was doing that for a while and it just made everything slow way down but even the last week has gone by so much faster since I stopped and I’m surprised it’s already the 20th of January.
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