merlinhawk

Going Ape

2009-06-09T04:15:59Z

So, the Ape Cave trip this last weekend didn't work out. Cancelled it was, yes.

So! We're giving it another go this Saturday. 9 AM start time; should return in the early to mid evening. Holly and I can comfortably transport two in addition to ourselves, so any additional interested parties may have to find their own way down. Further specifics, such as where we're gathering, to be declared once we have an idea of who's coming.

The Ape Cave (for any of you who, by some strange chance, don't follow SharkCowSheep's LJ) is an old lava tube near Mt. St. Helens. It hasn't had anything much molten in it for a good, long time, so no need to worry about getting cooked / plaster casted / boiled away into vapor. You do, however, need to worry about harsh rocks, chilly temperatures, rigorous climbing, and the utter inky blackness of the lightless underworld, so bring gloves, warm, sturdy clothes (layers FTW), good shoes (hiking boots strongly preferred), and two flashlights, three if you're feeling paranoid.

Coleman lanterns also work well, and are a boon to your companions, so bring 'em if you've got 'em.

Charitable Appeal Alert

2008-11-13T01:22:35Z

One of the more disconcerting thing about travelling in a seriously troubled country is that it will tend to be chock-a-block with genuinely worthy causes of one sort or another.

Uganda is absolutely no exception. The country's been ravaged by civil war, AIDS, and its own government, a state of affairs made all the more dismal by the fact that it should by rights be a fantastic place to live. I guess that's more or less what "third world" means.

In the course of my own travels, I got really rather a lot of attention from people looking for help for one worthy cause or another (most frequently AIDS orphans, of which there are a terrifying number). In general, these are looking for financial patronage-- someone to contribute the (for us) relatively moderate sum that will put them through school.'

Of course, being a law student a couple tens of thousands of dollars in debt, I wasn't able to help much-- but I did promise help to a couple of particularly worthy causes, and therefore repeat their appeals here. Anyone interested in aiding them can reach me at kaltonm@gmail.com for contact info.

Bridget Kiriza

I described Bridget in a previous post-- small, round-faced, irrepressible, and bright, the "crazy sister" who showed me around Kamuli. It turns out she's got an opportunity to go to nursing school (God knows Kamuli could use some additional medical staff), and, of course, her family (while she's not an AIDS orphan as I understand it, her father is several years dead) is short of cash.

In honesty, I'm not sure of the status on this; the tuition was apparently due in mid-October, but the opportunity may still remain open.

As a note, sponsoring a student isn't, perhaps, a big deal to us, but it's huge to the Ugandans. The words "eternal gratitude" spring to mind. Bridget's not the only student who asked me for help finding a sponsor, but she's the only one who seems this clear on what she wants to do with that help-- and whose chosen career would be such a boon to her community.

The Eldercare Initiative

One little-remarked problem in Uganda is that of the elderly, the aging parents of AIDS victims who are growing increasingly old and decreasingly able to hoe a garden, much less a field, with neither surviving children nor grandchildren (nor, indeed, dedicated international aid workers) to look after them.

The Eldercare Initiative is a home-grown Ugandan aid organization dedicated to helping out aging Ugandan peasants, and they've got a really pretty innovative way to go about it: propagating chicken coops.

The members of the Initiative (a circle of young, college-educated Ugandans who seem to be struggling to make ends meet, themselves; Ronald, who introduced me to his cohorts, was working as the manager at the guest house I stayed at) visit elderly, rural Ugandan peasants in need, bringing with them the materials to build a chicken coop and a goodly starter-clutch of fertilized chicken eggs. The idea is to provide everything necessary to start up a chicken-raising project, which is a kind of agriculture virtually anyone with the strength to walk can maintain. This costs, basically, a few dollars, and the Initiative actually recoups a large percentage of the cost by asking the contribution of a certain number of fertilized eggs from each operation, which are then provided to the next elder down the line. It's sort of a pyramid scheme in reverse.

Plans, diagrams, and detailed cost-lists are all available, as is an endless parade of photos of smiling elders who, all of a sudden, have a livelihood. Frankly, if these guys were a little larger I'd be referring them to the Gates Foundation, but as it stood Holly and I contributed a digital camera. The aforementioned pictures are a testiment to the use they've been making of that.

Lawyerly Ethics

2008-09-08T17:58:01Z

I'm starting to wonder who it is that has a problem with ethics: lawyers, people who want to be lawyers, or just people in general.

One of the classes I'm taking this year is a course on professional ethics. Many of the ethical guidelines set out for lawyers to follow are actually pretty strict-- but, like most rule sets, there are certainly those who will act in facially unethical ways while remaining solidly (proudly, even) within the domain of lawyerly ethics.

What I'm finding a little surprising is that the rules seem, for many of my peers (perhaps even myself) to be a step up. I have, in the past year, encountered instances of lawyers-in-training withholding damaging information during class exercises, despite being asked about it, and proposing blatant misrepresentation of our client's motives.

I wonder whether this is based in some sense that this is a large game of poker we're playing-- that bluffing is not only allowed, but essential, and that we can and should do whatever is in our power to win, including withholding vital information from the other side.

Whatever its cause, I hope this class can get my peers (and me?) straightened out a bit. As things stand, I'm wondering who's to blame: popular portrayals of lawyers as sharks, human nature for programming us this way, our legal training for focusing us on representing one side or another to exclusion (though this has ALWAYS been within the rules of play), or my peers for buying into the image of lawyers as mendacious schemers and nevertheless wanting to be lawyers (hence, liars).

Incidentally, fun fact: as a default (not sure yet how this works in Washington), it is misconduct for a lawyer to fail to report misconduct. This career path gets more interesting by the day.

International Black Solidarity

2008-07-18T07:16:19Z

... is alive and well, at least from over here.

This is, if not exactly a surprise, at least notable and interesting, coming from Seattle where one hears regularly of tensions between African Americans and Nigerian immigrants.

It's Nelson Mandela's 90th birthday today. This is a significant event for the whole continent as far as I can tell; my Botswanan colleagues are just as enthusiastic about this as the South Africans, and the Ugandans were likewise big Mandela fans. Now, it may tell you something that the back page of the newspaper section dedicated to this august event features a 2/3 page image of the great man arm in arm with Oprah Winfrey.

Admittedly, Oprah has international stature (apparently she's extremely popular in Iraq) and has recently built a school here in South Africa, but she's also not the only one. One of the fastest and most reliable ways to get into an African's good graces I've found is to mention that I'm an Obama supporter. While the novelty of his nomination has worn off a little in the last few weeks, I was in Uganda when he clinched the nomination, and the whole country was jubilant. Everyone who learned I was an American wanted to talk about him, and identifying myself as a Democrat became the fastest imaginable route from "stranger" to "well-liked companion" whether I was in a bar or on a bus.

The sentiment seems to be that, historically, or at least for the last few centuries, black people have been stepped on all over the world: if you were black and in the U.S., you were a slave or, later, subjected Jim Crow laws and the KKK; if you were in Africa, you were a colonial subject, a victim first of a foreign regime and, later, of your own. To be black most anywhere in the world was to be a stranger or second class citizen, subjected continuously to racist attitudes and institutions.

Therefore, any black anywhere getting ahead in anything (other than, say, the current activities of Robert Mugabe) is to be applauded. That Oprah can become an international celebrity, that Obama can become the Democratic nominee for the most powerful job in the world, these are genuine signs that blacks are not going to remain permanently relegated to the bottom of the international heap.

It's a sentiment I find ... warming, actually. And I don't think they're wrong. I observed a pan-African moot court competition a couple weeks ago after which several speakers suggested that, with a growing body of astute, vocal, legally-educated young people, Africa is now seeing its last generation of dictators.

Perhaps we'll see Africa's nations coming into their own in the coming decades.

The Last Days (and some prior ones)

2008-07-15T16:39:00Z

Well, the program is drawing to a close. I've got a take-home final to do tonight, mercilessly doled out with a 24 hour timeline by my South African Constitutional Law professors. Before I settle down for this slog (and slog it shall be; concise writing is not among the Constitutional Court's merits and telling us to extract individual points of doctrine from these things is therefore a bit like asking us to sift individual grains of sand out of the Sahara. I already spent two hours figuring out that my initial choice of which case to analyze was a very bad one), however, I have a bit more to write.

South Africa continues to be a pleasant enough place to live and work, though the security situation continues to be a constant concern, as the high-voltage electric wires topping the wall outside my room can atest. We were told during the security briefing after our first day of class that we ought to maintain a prickly demeanor while walking on the street, that criminals would be more than happy to take advantage of a kindly-seeming person. While I accept this as true, it's wearing on me a little. I've been striding briskly along, keeping my eyes on my path and surroundings and not making eye contact much, but this really seems like a hell of a way to live, treating everybody as 1) dangerous and 2) invisible.

The interesting thing I've found about Johannesburg by night (and I have had occasion to move around a little after hours, though not more than necessary) is that it's quiet, unnervingly so. This is presumably partly because of the security situation, but it also seems to exacerbate that security problem: anyone who's actually out at particularly late hours seems likely to be either predator or prey. A few more people on the streets might bring the crime rate down a bit, but I'm not actually sure that Johannesburg has the population density to support the "city that never sleeps" approach. Actually, this low population density seems to be a significant problem: there are few enough people, police included, per square kilometer that there's unlikely to be anyone close enough to help a crime victim in the event of an incident. The odds of crooks getting seen and caught are just not that high.

Ah, well. It's not as though Seattle is exactly safe, but it'll still be good to get back to a town where I can stroll briefly outside without first checking my surroundings with a paranoid eye.

I am, of course, missing home as much as ever. I've been out of contact with Holly for a few days; presumably she's in the deepest throes of a project of some sort or another, as opposed to (as per my worst imaginings) drowned in the bathtub. The few days before my return seem like a poetically appropriate time for some disaster to befall, but, happily, while reality often seems to have a nasty sense of humor, its timing is rarely so cliche'.

Well, tomorrow's Wednesday. I don't particularly like to think about what I'm going to be doing for the next couple of days (work, work, eat, work, sleep less than I'd like, work, etc.), but procrastination isn't getting me anywhere fast. Time to buckle down.

First thing: that goddamn take-home. Three hundred pages to sift, sort, and analyze, and basically an evening to do it in.

Go.

Dinner with Hoffmeyer

2008-07-10T17:56:08Z

One of these days, I'm going to figure out that drinking most of a glass of red wine while ravenously hungry is not a good idea. I mean, really.

In case you wonder, I'm currently typing inebriated after a dinner at the local Portuguese place. This is a lovely little establishment near the bed and breakfast my colleagues and I are inhabiting after those inconsiderate so-and-sos at Wits decided they wanted their dorm rooms back so that they could resume attending classes.

Wits is much busier when class is in session. Duh, really.

My current abode is called the Wedgewood, and it's a lovely little B&B in close proximity to a number of Melville's finer eateries. This is a pleasant thing for those who have been long beset with institutional grub, the similarities of which to Ugandan meat-and-starch are quite distinct, though I've finally been getting some veggies. Generally speaking, though, it's all pretty much the same.

Except ...

Fine dining in South Africa, as distinct from the institutional not-so-fine, is a true delight. And an inexpensive one, at that. I have just finished two oysters on the half shell (try to find THAT at a buck fifty a pop in Seattle!), two glasses of wine (hence the inebriation; yes, I'm a lightweight), a lovely cheese-and-spinach ravioli, a single espresso, and an order of crepes suzette for roughly sixteen dollars.

This is typical of Melville, a district I recommend highly for all your Johannesburg dining-out needs. I do have a question, though. I mentioned that this was at a Portuguese place. I've eaten at this same establishment a couple of times before and had hake and chips and a very nice pizza on my two previous visits. These are representative of the menu, but raise this question:

Is there really any such thing as Portuguese cuisine?

Anyhow ...

At Wits, there are two excellent places for acquiring what South Africa considers good food. The first of these is the Wits Club, which is connected (somehow) to the university golf course and serves (only) lunch. It's an all-you-can-eat buffet run by an elderly Afrikaaner couple with (all too predictably) a good deal of black help.

One of these days, I'm going to find a Johannesburg establishment that isn't white-owned. Ah, well; it's only been 14 years or so since apartheid died a much-deserved death.

The usual cuisine at the Wits Club is more or less high-grade European, with a shifting menu (no, you don't actually get one) that is served in courses (soup, followed by main course and salad, followed by dessert) of exquisite deliciousness. Entrees have included fried chicken with mushroom sauce, roast chicken, and a salmon quiche. This is not, however, the height of edibility at Wits.

Hoffmeyer House, much like the Wits Club, is a mostly-European buffet, but in a much more formal sense. I have no idea what the price tag is, by the way; the program is paying for it, so it's covered by my financial aid-- once a week, with guest speaker to follow. Appetizers and soup are served beforehand, and by waiter, as is the salad. Dinner and desert are the buffet bits, and they are fabulous.

Have YOU ever tried beetroot and butternut flan? I have.

Salmon seems to be pretty routine.

There's also been the most utterly succulent, melt-in-your-mouth beef stew (contradiction in terms? Turns out not) I've ever tasted.

The real star of this place's work, though, is the malva pudding, which sadly has only been present on the dessert menu the first time I was there. This stuff is basically a moist, yellow (sorta) cake drenched in a much more unambiguously yellow custard. I'm not sure how to describe the flavor, because it tastes like little else on this Earth. Imagine yellow cake soaked in honey, and you're getting somewhere close, but much stickier and less appetizing.

I'll have to see whether I can get Ron Slye, whose project this study abroad program chiefly seems to be, can put in a request for this stuff to be served again before we go.

Icons

2008-07-04T16:04:55Z

The Voortreker Monument is the sort of place Pac Med (you know, the imposing mostly-no-longer-a-hospital that rises above I-5 on Beacon Hill) would be if it were a symbolic rather than a practical structure. Standing on (one of) the highest hills for miles around, it imposes its presence on the landscape.

This is fitting enough: it's an Afrikaaner symbol, dedicated to the struggle of white settlers moving into inland South Africa, and was a favorite site of the old National Party. Its solidity could, depending on whom you ask, stand for the indomitable will of the heroic voortreker pioneers or the domination of the surrounding countryside. The sign outside describes it as having been constructed in the early 1930's in the "art deco" style, but looking at its fortified blockishness I'm immediately reminded of the fact that many Afrikaaners found Adolf Hitler's views appealing.

Inside, you'll find an elaborate frieze wrapped around the ground level, displaying the, ahem, glorious history of the Afrikaaner settlers, including their various battles with the natives. There's a (empty) coffin inside symbolic of the lives lost in the struggle, with a lens in the domed roof far above that focuses a ray of sunlight onto the coffin lid at noon on December 16, the day of the Battle of Blood River. I wish I could say I thought it was for the dead of both sides.

Now, admittedly the Afrikaaners had a hard time of it, and frankly their works are an overly easy target for scorn, but it has to be said that they made themselves so. There's even a lamp lit (an eternal flame) on the lower level-- the light of Civilization! (no, I'm not joking)-- which they brought to this dark land.

The view from the top, both inside and outside the structure itself, is lovely.

Views from the top usually are.

The Voortreker Monument can be seen for many miles, and is easily accessed, right off the highway. You can do horseback riding or take a wagon ride nearby. On an adjacent hilltop, and ironically much more difficult to access (it requires an appointment for a tour, which I hope will change) stands the Freedom Park.

The Freedom Park, as I understand it, was commissioned by Nelson Mandela, and he really couldn't have picked a better spot for it, with a view of (and from! Apparently it's quite the beacon at night) Pretoria, the Voortreker Monument, and, on the other hand, the UNISA campus. Apparently the latter is the largest university in S. Africa and the largest correspondence university in the world.

Anyhow-- the Freedom Park is a work in progress in some degree, which might be why access is controlled. There still seems to be at least one area under construction. What they'd finished, however, is a succession of dreamscapes: organically curving galleries of yellow stone slabs, open to the sky; tall poles rising, each taller than the last, in interlocking semi-circles; an amphitheater of open grass fringed with garden, with stones standing out on the hillside and the concrete bleachers standing only below, and, in the center, a many-spouted fountain pool surrounding the alcove of another eternal flame, one dedicated to freedom.

There's a stone circle, constructed from boulders from every province (plus an international boulder, which I don't know the origins of; the S. Africans are quite aware of international involvement in the ending of apartheid) with the aid of traditional tribal shamans, to provide a gathering place, a beacon, for the spirits of the heroes of the struggle for liberation. Steam hisses in plumes from among the stones every two minutes, to guide the spirits home. You have to take off your shoes to approach, and wash your hands, leaving; it's a matter of respect, evidently.

Above, on the hillside, stand the walls containing the names of those who participated (on either side!) in the various national struggles, starting from the pre-colonial days and extending to the end of apartheid. There's apparently some controversy over these; there are some some who believe the walls should be all-inclusive (there are people being added all the time, since you don't have to have been a martyr, just a participant), and others who want to limit them to members of the three major political parties.

*sigh*

It would, I think, blunt the message of the place severely to restrict it so, but the site is, regardless, amazing. Maybe Nelson Mandela can weigh in on the subject; it IS functionally his legacy that's being built there, after all.

There's a much greater emotional charge to the monuments, here, than there is to most I've seen in the United States, with the exception, perhaps, of the Vietnam War memorial (other more recent ones, before someone climbs on me, I haven't seen). I think the reason must be the relative immediacy of what they represent: the seeds of South Africa's democracy are not entombed in a blast-proof box intended to survive World War III; in fact, they've barely germinated. The country as it now exists is young enough that I couldn't legally date it, so probably a sizeable percentage of the people who fought for what the Freedom Park symbolizes are still alive.

Perhaps, in time, the Freedom Park will lose its vibrancy, become another dusty, well-trod place of photo-ops and bored civics students, revitalized, perhaps, now and then by a particularly stirring speech delivered for this or that great cause, but otherwise standing mostly for the memories of the long dead.

May South Africa's fledgling democracy live so long as to see such a day.

GET OFF MY LAWN!

2008-07-02T13:22:43Z

Apparently my metamorphosis into a crochety old fogey with a taste for five-dollar words proceeds apace. Increasingly, as time goes on, I look at younger people (which now includes anyone under about the age of 26) and wonder whether I could possibly have been that much of an arrogant fool (a sentiment that makes me wonder how much of an arrogant fool I am now).

My current colleagues are all significantly younger than I am, and I am quickly growing sick of listening to them whining about how much work we have to do, the method by which the classes are taught, the nature of the material, and the relative quality of the professors. Now, I'll admit that not everything has been perfect; the profs themselves admit as much. However, it takes a lot of gall to dismiss the entire contents of a full hour and fifteen minute class as "bullshit." It also takes a good deal to suggest that one of your profs is going senile because you didn't understand the reason she taught you what she just taught.

The fact that you can't understand what relevance mind mapping has to legal writing doesn't mean that it's not relevant. The simple fact that the person who just taught it to you is a well-respected law professor at a major university should, at minimum, give you pause before you start passing judgment on the validity of the lesson or the sanity, much less the intelligence, of the prof.

Of course, this view may be colored by the fact that, as a former English major and someone who spent about seven years trying to write books, I know EXACTLY what a mind map is for and that it's relevant to writing of virtually any sort, legal or not.

These people are not interested in the social considerations or history behind law; they're not interested in its origins or its context. They're only interested in the concrete, unambiguous Law, and seem to have no sensitivity at all to the fact that, without context, the Law isn't going to make any sense.

"This isn't a law class; it's more like social science." Direct goddamn quote.

I can only think that if this pack of proto-lawyers doesn't broaden its thinking, it's going to end up as a crop of thoughtless, myopic, self-indulgent lawyers with a tendency to demonize entire categories of their peers because they can't see past their own professional stories of the way the world works-- prosecutors who think defense attorneys are a pack of cynics and anarchists; international corporate attorneys who think human rights lawyers are a pack of hypocritical meddlers; environmental advocates who think any corporate attorney is a soulless mercenary.

Hell, maybe most of us end up writing our own stories that way, but I've got neither use for nor interest in that kind of self-indulgence. The fact that I don't understand something just means that I don't goddamn understand it. I just need to keep my mind open and keep absorbing.

Admittedly, I find myself closing off my mind to this merry lot and its merry lot of ill-founded judgments, but I'm not at all sure that my feelings on the matter oblige me to keep my mind open to ill-considered conclusions and ill-founded grievances.

Unsurprisingly, not one of these colleagues rises above the level of "acquaintance" in my list of social relationships. At least I got to see (meet in person for the first time, actually) one good friend this last weekend. The rest of you, I'll have to wait to see when I get home.

Nothing like a little social isolation for ol' introverted me to start hearing the plaintive cries of the extrovert within. In Korea, I had Holly; that was much better. A year of this? I don't think I could stand it.

Constitutional Court Justices Get Great Snacks

2008-06-27T15:30:27Z

The South African Constitutional Court is the sort of place ours might have been ... well, never, actually. It's a peculiar sort of place by the usual Anglo-American notion of a "court." It's short on cloistered spaces, for one thing, as most spaces other than the courtroom itself can be viewed with good clarity from multiple angles, so, for example, the approaches to the justices' offices are generally along a raised wooden walkway with a lot of glass around it rather than down a marble-floored corridor or somesuch. The front entrance has pillars, but they're irregularly arrayed around the room and placed at various angles, with tile mosaics scattered along their lengths, the idea being to give the whole place an organic look. Symbolically, the idea is that everyone is, as is traditional, evidently, from Uganda to South Africa, standing together under a tree for the administration of justice.

In fact, the emblem of the court is exactly that-- a tree with a crowd gathered beneath its boughs.

The most elaborate and colorful wooden mobile I've ever seen hangs above the very organic-looking wooden table at which the court clerks spend many a late night checking over and editing court decisions (and groaning over every dissent; apparently each one adds about three hours to the process). No such mobile hangs over the similar table at which the justices mull over cases; that room is simply comfortably, though not formally, appointed, and well-equipped with reference materials.

And snacks, Claire, the court clerk (and classmate of mine) who was playing tour guide, reported. Great snacks.

The long, formal desk at which the justices sit when court is in session is decorated with cow hides, each identical in kind, each differing in pattern.

The idea of all this is to discard any and all notion of being lorded over by European masters, including in architectural traditions. That's not to say that it's supposed to be a poke in the eye to the Afrikaaners, exactly, so much as to break with European convention and to reinforce the nation's identity as an African country. It stands amid the remains of a prison complex that housed (or, at least, "contained"), among other worthies, Winnie Mandela and Mahatma Gandhi, and is accordingly one part court house and one part museum, with art inside and lots of uncomfortable history out. It's perched on the highest hill in Johannesburg, between a couple of the richer and poorer of the city's burgs and just below an old fort, which now houses a nice coffee shop.

Children from the surrounding neighborhoods are actively encouraged to come and play amid the statues and the remnants of apartheid-era oppression.

If this is what a liberal "political elite" builds when it comes into power (and the South African constitution is a masterwork of liberal thought-- thought, for better or worse, a good deal to the left of the South African voters), I have to say I could do with more of it.

Rugby is NOT American Football Without the Padding

2008-06-23T19:25:03Z

If it were, I'm not sure how many of the players would survive a given game without concussions and the like.

As you might have guessed from the above comment, I got to see a rugby game here on Saturday, the Lions versus the Bulls. I have no idea which team was from where, but each clearly had its own clan of barba-- er, fans-- in attendance.

Those of you who like rugby will just have to forgive me for my impression of the fan base if it is in any way untrue. We had four Lions fans sitting behind us drunkenly belting rugby chants in mixed English and Afrikaans, helpfully translated by one of my S. African colleagues:

[We are here!]
[We are here!]
Here's a lion for your deer!

And,

All that you've seen (We've seen? You'll see? This bit was indistinct)
Is a roaring machine!

They kept it up the whole match, even when their team was losing badly. To be fair, they seemed to be annoying their fellow rugby fans, as well, and a group of Bulls fans belted a few of their own taunts back at them at the close of the match. The Lions had lost badly.

The game itself resembled a running skirmish in which the sides took turns in full retreat. The rules I can only describe as a cross between our football and everybody else's football: the goal, ball, and field are a lot like ours. The rules for when you stop the game are more like everyone else's. There are no "downs" or particular significance to a distance of ten yards, the ball will be thrown in if it goes out, "offsides" is one of the more common reasons for stopping play, and kickoffs happen free-form any time it's to your team's advantage for the other team to have possession, but at the other end of the field. They often happen serially, and it can be to your advantage to kick almost straight up if you want your own team to have a chance to catch it.

Going down under a pile of sweaty guys, by the way, doesn't stop play. I'd never before imagined that there could be a strategic way to dogpile someone. Well, there is-- the way that shields the spot where the ball's going to come out with your own body. Going around the side to grab the ball from the other team is how "offsides" usually happens, BTW; you have to pile onto your own team's side and hope you can either get the ball away from the poor sap at the bottom or keep it from ever getting out (in which case possession will be decided in a rugby "scrum," which is the closest thing to the collision of offensive and defensive lines in American football that rugby seems to allow).

I was a little surprised to find rugby a mildly guilty pleasure. It's very much an Afrikaaner sport, and outside of our smallish group the only Africans to be seen were staff of one sort or another: concession providers, security, camera crews. I had a distinct and unpleasant impression that under Apartheid, the game would have looked almost exactly the same.

Except there were three black players. So that was okay.

A good time was also had by the swallows, which were diving at any insect foolish enough to allow the stadium lights to illuminate it. Considering that 1) bugs aren't all that smart and 2) are frequently attracted to light, the birds were kept well-fed. It's not often that I've been able to see not only what the swallows were doing, but what they were doing it to; turns out stadium lights illuminate doomed moths just as well as they illuminate players.

African swallows can indeed probably, as per Monty Python, carry more than a European swallow. They're not small.

More later; there's air conditioning on in here for some bizarre reason (it IS winter), and my hands are going numb.

[Insert Title Here]

2008-06-23T18:26:50Z

Titles are important in Uganda, or, at least, they seem to be. This may be because I was getting buried up to my ears in them up until the day before I left, mostly "Your Worship" and "Your Lordship" or "My Lord." The former is the proper means of addressing a magistrate; the latter, a judge or justice.

This is par for the course, considering that judges and justices generally get fancy titles ("Your Honor"), even in the U.S. It gives them an aura of gravitas, to the degree that to this day I have difficulty introducing myself to judges even though my rate of getting to meet them has spiked about 800% in the last twelve months. The title serves the same function as the robes, gavel, and "all rise." It's about legitimacy, giving the station the kind of ceremonial weight that demands respect.

My two magistrates also addressed each other, without a trace of humor, as "Your Worship." This is kinda neat-- so the respect-due-your-fellow-being-o-meter's jacked up a couple notches. Nor did being "Mr. Max" (this WAS with some humor, or at least a mischievous grin) to the guest house staff bother me much.

I got kinda tired of "sir," though.

I was a guest, yes. One honors a guest, yes. But I find "student" to sort of push the margin on "guest," and I certainly didn't deserve any more regard than the nearly-a-lawyer in residence.

Let's get this straight. I was nobody important at the court, less important to Her Worship than Her Worship's clerk, Davied. Yet I knew EVERYBODY by their given names except the magistrates, and Davied, like almost everybody who wasn't a lawyer, addressed me as "sir."

Yes, in the courtroom I sat at the lawyers' bench. Yes, I was working directly under Magistrate Nabafu. Yes, I was advising her on her writing technique. Yes, I know how to use a computer with a proficiency they found dizzying. But I was a student.

I know, I know, I know. Guest of the country and all that, but it made me pretty uncomfortable getting more respect than my Ugandan counterpart, Joshua, who frankly struck me as more deserving, what with being about a month away from being a full-fledged advocate.

Meh. American egalitarian social programming reareth its head once more, right or wrong.

"Master," however, was really unacceptable. This did happen, though always in the mouth of someone who wanted something from me. That "something" was always money, a handout from the wealthy foreigner. This one actually made me angry, not because of the respect it showed, but the lack of it-- the implication that I would want to be called by such a name, that I would desire to be thought of as a "master" to these people. I don't know for sure whether it meant something different to them than it does to me, but the fact that it was always used by a wheedling, self-debasing Ugandan looking for money who knew nothing of me at all, and never, ever by anyone who'd spoken to me for even five minutes, no matter how much respect that person may have been trying to show, tells me all that I need to know.

I can do without having people try to appeal to my inner colonial overlord, thank you very much.

So Close, So Far

2008-06-19T13:39:41Z

South Africa isn’t quite Africa, at least in the way we usually think of it, and it isn’t quite Europe, either. It’s very definitely not Uganda, though bits of it seem to have some things in common. In a way, it’s much closer to India or China than to any of the more obvious points of comparison: a domain of fantastic wealth and crushing poverty standing within miles (kilometers, sorry) of each other.

Johannesburg, or Jo-burg, for short, is one seriously fortified city. The crime rate is sky-high, so I suppose you can think of it as a sort of what Gotham City, ala “Batman,” might look like if the residents had sufficiently low population density to respond practically to living in one of the crime capitals of the world instead of continuing to dwell in a sort of pseudo-New York. That is to say, this place makes U.S.-based gated communities look like a bunch of amateurs.

Anyhow, Jo-burg is the sort of city that encourages private car ownership, but not for the usual reasons. There are places where it’s perfectly safe to stroll about in the daytime. It’s just that there’s no reason at all to do so because everything, and I mean that quite literally, other than the street will be on the other side of a high wall that, if it is not actually unclimbable, will be topped with something nasty. I’m sure the insides are quite pretty, though I can’t claim to have seen the inside of any such secured area aside from Wits.

Wits, pronounced “Vits” (the Afrikaners are of Dutch descent, remember) is short for “University of the Witwatersrand.” It’s maybe the size of the University of Washington, and apparently attracts students from all over Africa, Europe, and the closer bits of Asia, though so far the only long-term American import we’ve met is a professor (who’s teaching me South African constitutional law, at that). The campus, like the communities around it, takes security seriously: rotating doors (one in, one out) requiring key cards to activate stand at the front of the dorm I’m staying in, the dining hall I eat dinner at, and the law library I study in. In brief:

Food: bland, European-influenced, institutional, bleh. At least they serve veggies, and I now know why porridge is not commonly served in the United States. It’s got more in common with “poscho” than with the mashed potatoes it resembles. That is to say, it tasts and feels like cold “Cream of Wheat,” only without being cold.

Campus: every large college campus you’ve ever been on, with different birds. An ibis, by the way, sounds like a crow would with a frog in its throat. I suppose it’s an appropriate bird to have hanging around a college campus, but we’re a long way from Egypt.

Services: notable only in that they’re what we’d expect from an American or European institution, only with less efficiency. For instance, there’s high-speed internet, but I’ve now been waiting three days for my password and my keycard only works on half of the doors it’s supposed to. It’s as though some card readers didn’t get the memo. This odd cultural malaise is apparently a reflection of the rest of Africa, where you’ll find the same thing happening, only more pronounced and without the high-speed internet or the key cards. Those of my colleagues who were in Uganda seem to understand the situation better than the new arrivals, who are getting testy.

Weather: I’ve been finding the local notion of winter amusing, only, to be fair, Jo-burg is probably more like Arizona, climate-wise, than Washington State. The air is dry, and while it warms up pretty nicely during the day, nights get chilly. Just chilly, though; in Seattle, most of this would only just cross the line into “cool.” I have yet to see a properly cold day, and the palm trees outside tell me cold days aren’t common. Apparently it snowed once. It hasn’t chosen to repeat its performance so far this year, though. Even so, the flu is apparently making the rounds. I suppose it has to spend June through August somewhere.

I’m actually struggling with a bit of depression, here. Classes aren’t bad, of course, but I can’t really claim to be close with any of my colleagues (ALL of whom are younger than I am). The place is similar enough to the States to induce culture shock without actually BEING home and having Holly in it, and I can’t even talk to people properly online because the third-world traits keep interfering with the first-world ones. What’s more, a girl got attacked just off campus last night (she beat her assailants off with her laptop’s AC converter. Good for her); all this security isn’t here just to make us feel safe.

Mostly, I’m just missing having anyone to talk to. This is the longest since spring of ’97 that Holly and I have been apart, and I hope it’s the longest for many years to come. The two of us operate so much as a single entity that not having her here is like losing my sense of taste—something I don’t notice all the time, but which I miss acutely several times a day. From time to time, I notice something Holly would have noticed first, or something we’d have spent several minutes speculating on, or just some curious point at which South Africa differs from any other place we’ve ever been, and I want to say something, and maybe I do—and nobody’s interested.

... nobody at all.

Sometimes Email just doesn’t hack it.

Wait, What Are You—Oh, No, You Really Don’t Have T—Er, Uh, Okay, Thanks....

2008-06-19T12:23:39Z

Anyone who thinks women’s liberation has a long way to go in Korea (to say nothing of the United States) has never been to Uganda. Let’s not deal here with “female circumcision” (read as, “horrid, twitch-inducing-by-description-alone genital mutilation”), which is still practiced by one tribe. Let’s also not discuss the rape statistics, which are silly-high, or the fact that most rapists are never prosecuted because coming forward and admitting she was raped will destroy a woman’s marriage. No, let’s discuss day to day manners.

For starters, the appropriate way for a woman to greet her husband is on her knees. No, this isn’t the punch line to a horrible joke. It’s the standard, here. What’s more, it seems to be an appropriate way for a hostess (in the sense of restaurant proprietor or server) to greet guests, and certainly to present a bowl for the washing of hands, at least in the rural villages. We had a sort of evening snack in Kidera, the village I mentioned in my last post, and a middle aged woman was somehow managing to move quite dexterously around the porch we were seated on (in chairs, to add to the violent symbolic power imbalance) carrying a jug of water and a washing bowl, bringing the whole assembly around to each of us in turn, while on her knees.

Her Worship Nabafu, by the way, asserts with great firmness that she will only perform with such womanly modesty in private. In public, she’s a magistrate and has to uphold the dignity of the title. Her Worship is unusually liberated.

The above is only the most extreme example of habitual female subservience I’ve observed since being in Uganda, and the subservience seems to increase in direct proportion to how much they wish to honor a person. For instance, I started out at the Kyemba Sande guest house in Kamuli feeling like, well, a guest in a fairly tradition-oriented place. In general, I actually found the women significantly more prickly and unapproachable than the men. I met two female magistrates, and thought it only moderately ominous that there are slots in parliament specifically reserved for women.

Then I met Matthias and his “crazy sister,” as he fondly referred to her, Brigit. I helped Matthias unknot a serious point of cultural clash, thus apparently winning a place of high regard in the eyes of the entire family. Because....

Brigit and her nephew Ismael giving me a guided tour of Kamuli was fantastic. I was disconcerted, however, the following night to find Brigit and her charming, intelligent, passionately religious business school graduate sister Winnie waiting to serve me dinner at the guest house, although they were not part of the staff. Nor would they join in the repast.

Admittedly, they did not actually cook the buffet-style meal themselves, and I was just their particular favorite of a much larger group they (might have) volunteered to help serve. However, they not only served me specifically but proceeded to watch over me in very demure and modest fashion while I ate. My every effort to equalize the situation had the opposite effect: my concern for the inequality of our positions in the situation raised me to still higher regard and thus made them all the more determined to do me honor.

*sigh*

What’s more, this wasn’t limited to this one family. After the group of aid worker-cum-missionaries (“Links International”) the buffet mentioned above had been prepared to feed departed, the guest house staff had apparently acquired a new appreciation of me. I gather their very British guests had been some trouble, in the sense of objecting to loud Ugandan music and pool being played late into the night one wall away from four of their rooms, and this in addition to said guests’ reluctance to leave the safety and comfort of their own culture (by trying Ugandan food, for instance) led to an intense fondness among the staff for the quieter, more interested, less inconsiderate mazungu in their midst.

Woot! ... Yeah. Anyhow, nice as this was, this did result in me finding myself with two additional pairs of hands of the dainty and smooth variety assisting me in cracking boiled peanuts, which the hands’ owners flatly refused to eat any of, themselves.

Now, these are splendid people, every one of them that I’ve mentioned, and they’ve meant nothing bad by any of this—quite the opposite. It’s just that the feelings I experience upon having two aesthetically pleasing women cracking peanuts for me are decidedly mixed, what with every socially-concerned fiber in my soul curling up and sobbing. As much as these women don’t seem to mind and seem largely to have done these things of their own accord, they’ve been trained by their society to do them.

I can’t help feeling that any woman anywhere deserves better. Watching an unfortunate bar ornament sitting placidly and uninterestedly while the drunken social worker on her lap paws at her breast and presumably slurs sweet nothings in her ear (yes, this happened; no, she wasn’t his lover: he was bothering a different one next night) is more than I can walk away from without the foulest of tastes in my mouth, and having a friend who insists regularly on becoming a servant makes me cringe. Obviously enough, I’m not going to be the one to start the revolution, being 1) an outsider and 2) male (having a guy start a feminist revolution would seem to undermine the point), but I have to say that Uganda needs one in the worst way.

In, out, outer

2008-06-12T14:18:16Z

Yesterday, Her Worship Nabafu, a prosecutor named Simon, and I accompanied His Worship Kataswa on his rounds.

In order to understand what this means, you have to know that Kamuli's is a minor court beneath the chief magistrate at Jinja (who's still not high enough to be called a judge). What might not be obvious is that, although the idea of courts like the ones at Kamuli is to provide easily accessible, low-level services so that you don't have to travel three days by bicycle to bail out your chicken-thief nephew, this isn't sufficient: there's a large stretch of Kamuli's jurisdiction that it is far from convenient to get here from. The truth of this I saw reflected in the odometer of the speeding Toyota I spent an hour in to get to this teeny village court.

By the way, "sixty" is a terrifying number for the speedometer needle to be touching on a one-and-a-half lane, poorly kept-up dirt road, even if it is measuring kilometers in place of miles-per-hour.

His Worship's court for the afternoon was a ten foot by ten foot (if that), mostly darkened room. It did not contain a treasure chest. Apparently the local court (community/tribal, not judicial) usually meets under the tree outside, though they're getting a nice building set up nearby. There was a prison close at hand, with one cell, about twelve by twelve, maybe a little more, containing eight men, one pot to piss in, a few papyrus mats, no chairs, and no beds. Three had been convicted and were serving their sentences; the rest were awaiting trial (which can be a long wait in Uganda, where witnesses not turning up is pretty routine).

They had some complaints.

Dinner was had at a bar, sorta, which mostly seemed to be somebody's two-room house. The placemats were nice, with an embroidered floral pattern. Dinner was a variation on the usual, involving a savory rice and beef dish as a focal point for fish, matoke, a little broth, and a round of beers and sodas. Still not an honest-to-God vegetable in sight (though I have managed to acquire collard greens in recent days. Praise be!). This was sitting at about "above average" fare in my head (the rice and beef dish wasn't something I'd tasted before) until it registered on the way out the door that the entire repast had been prepared over an open fire. And by that, I mean a little wood fire tucked between a trio of rocks with a pot on it. I can give you this description with confidence because the way this factor in figuring the meal's quality registered was through my visual cortex.

Anyone who's ever tried really old-fashioned camp cooking knows the implications.

Electricity, you see, has not reached the more remote villages in Uganda, and apparently neither has propane. There's a project under way to get the lines set up, but at the moment it's not slated for completion until 2011, which, by some wild coincidence, is the year of the next Ugandan presidential election. Funny how that works.

The reason this is blowing me away is that at this time last week I was in Kampala, land of uninterrupted electrical power, easy internet access, high rises, and SUV's. Yes, SUV's. They're not actually used in the backcountry much more than they were in the States. From this, you move out to Jinja, with its dirt roads and low buildings, then to Kamuli, where the power is on about 3/4 of the time, the average home size is maybe two rooms, cows freely roam the streets, and almost everyone who turns up in court self-describes as a "peasant". Then you get out to the villages, and your dinner's being cooked over a fire pit.

Wow.

As a closing note, I've finally solved the mystery of the massive portions: they don't really expect you to eat all of that, as a rule (though the ones in the restaurants try not to overdo it and waste food, while continuing to appear generous, hence my confusion). Uganda truly is a land of plenty in many ways, and wasting food is not the mortal sin here you might have expected if your mom ever told you to "clean your plate; children are starving in Africa."

Well, it's not like this all over the continent, to be sure, but at least I'll no longer feel like I have to stuff myself til my eyeballs burst from my skull.

More later.

Starch for breakfast, starch for lunch, good old starch for teeeeeea....

2008-06-09T07:55:45Z

The days I'm feeling like I have much in common with a laundered dress shirt. Most Ugandan meals come with a starchy vegetable of some kind, whether it be a mound of rice, a mass of matoke, or a slab of "pohsho," which resembles cornmeal-based tofu in concept, looks like a wedge of fresh mozerella, and tastes like cold cream of wheat (even when hot. I think it's a matter of texture). These are made much more edible by the presence, generally, of a sort of sauce or gravy. I'm at a loss as to which to call this. It's primary traits seem to be that it is vegetable based, quite pleasant, and not quite as plentiful as one might wish. Except....

It's always the same. At least in Kamuli. I've visited three different restaurants, and I can't seem to escape it. And the portions are huge. The United States is internationally famous for its portion size, but it's not the king of the gut-busting meal. Oh, hell, no. I can take lunch at two PM here, and I won't be hungry until the next morning. And most of that is the goddamn STARCH.

When I first got here, I was more or less fine with this. Getting a dinner plate covered to half an inch's depth in mashed matoke, topped with half a tilapia? No problem! Now, though, I feel like I'm in foodie hell, trapped and smothering beneath an ocean of starch differentiated only by texture.

The only time this changes is when someone's trying to feed me "what mazungu like to eat," which invariably means [fill in the blank] and chips, in the English sense. Yep, more starch, only with oil, ketchup, and chili sauce instead of that gravy/sauce/whatever it is.

I'm losing my mind.

I need vegetables in just the worst way-- not the unchanging broth that accompanies every lunch or dinner I eat, but real, solid, actual, factual vegetables. I've been getting headaches the last few days, and they've gotten progressively worse. I'm almost dead certain the lack of vegies is to blame.

Happily, I think I've discovered the key to this mysterious lack of all things green and leafy, courtesy of my conversations with a kid named Ismael who's been killing time hanging out with me while recovering from malaria: the Ugandans regard vegetables as a full meal, rather than an accompaniment to one. I've accordingly requested same for lunch today, and I'm praying to whatever deity will listen that it doesn't involve potatoes.

Going Viral

2008-06-07T08:25:19Z

The internet is not a widely available commodity in Uganda. In fact, relatively few homes, and even major institutions, have access to it. Most access comes through Internet Cafes, such as the one I'm currently sitting in (with Christian music continually doing its best to lodge itself permanently between my ears as I type). While these people's business is, in principle, to provide capable computer expertise and ensure access for the shilling-shelling-out masses, I've been finding that there's a wide range of competence in these places, the evidence being in my flash drive, which is now out of action until I can be sure the next computer I plug it into has a fully functional, updated virus scanner.

This is the second time in less than a week, and I'm not quite willing to put Kamuli's sole functioning internet cafe (yes, there is a non-functional one, which has been offline for three weeks and counting courtesy of its ISP) to the test by plugging my infected portable storage into contact with one of its USB ports. After all, if it's not protected, I might be infecting my way straight out of any internet access at all.

The Order of Saint Jeff

2008-06-03T08:44:16Z

One of the more common (and unhappily necessary) modes of short-range transportation are bodabodas, which are the short-range bicycle, moped, or motorcycle equivalent of taxis. These (I’m sorry, Mom) are not only ubiquitous, but absolutely necessary for travel within communities, since taxis here stick to set routes with set destinations in the manner of short to mid-range buses.

Buses proper are for long-distance travel. Taxis are for community-hopping. Bodabodas are for movement within the community, and are inescapable in this role unless you 1) want to walk your feet off and 2) know exactly where you’re going; the usual method of finding an unfamiliar place is to ask a bodaboda, who will have extensive knowledge of local geography, and get a lift.

The bodaboda you ask will not, as a rule, give you directions. It can be 50 yards, and he’ll still generally insist on taking you there and receiving a fee, typically in units of 500 shillings a kilometer.

I am of two minds as to the safety of this mode of transportation. The bodabodas in Kamuli rarely go faster than a briskly-pedaled bicycle would, and are the standard method of traveling to and from the courthouse. The bodabodas in Kampala are another matter. They frequently wear helmets, which are almost unheard of in Kamuli. They wear them for a reason: they travel much faster along major, big-city roads, and, between its density and, ah, vigor, traffic in Kampala is deadly. Passengers, however, do not get helmets, and I’ve kept having to remind myself that the guy I’m riding behind does what he’s doing all day, every day, and has somehow managed to keep himself un-busted despite the aggressive drivers, sharply winding roads, potholes, and kids (in the U.S., this would have been a child chasing a ball. Here, it was a baby goat bleating as it raced under our wheels).

The thing is, I’m not certain, considering the lack of sidewalks in most places and the aggressiveness of the drivers, that this is any more dangerous than walking—and a bodaboda will get you to your destination, and thus off the goddamn road, one hell of a lot sooner than strolling along and trying not to become the least-damaging of two or three possible collisions.

Someone should do a study.

For now, I’ll whisper a prayer to Saint Jeff (the patron saint of dangerous driving—see Eddie Izzard) and climb onto assorted conveyances of dubious safety in the hopes that I can make it through the next two weeks without becoming a pile of organs a la carte (or moped?) with a side of ground round. With a little luck (if it’s skill, it sure as hell won’t be mine), I can get back home and into the habit of not boarding a motorcycle again as long as I live. Until then, leave a candle burning for us poor souls who must travel the steep and treacherous path of two-wheeled conveyances.

P.S.

Less than twelve hours after tapping the above into my laptop, I found a newspaper article declaring bodabodas to be involved in 40% of fatal accidents. I'm not sure how to read this, as they seem to comprise around 40% of the traffic, but apparently the death rates have less to do with the lack of helmets than with the fact that apparently these guys' bikes are about two steps short of being black market, as they're imported in pieces and assembled by mechanics of highly variable skill without government testing or oversight.

Joy.

I'm still going to have to use these buggers from time to time, but I think I'll be trusting my own two feet more and doubtfully-assembled put-put less, given the choice.

Attack of the Banana Thief and other stories

2008-06-03T08:29:39Z

So it seems the penalty for stealing a dollar fifty worth of matoke (the starchy, plantain-like bananas so beloved in Uganda) is eight hours really hard community service for the first offense if you plead guilty to Magistrate Nabafu. I say “really hard” because it consists (or consisted, in this particular case) of cutting the grass of the judicial compound by hand with an implement that resembles a crowbar with pretenses of scythe-dom in eighty-plus degree heat. After the first few hours, I started wondering how the guy still had the energy to swing.

Presumably, the penalties get higher if you’re convicted of assaulting your brother when he discovers that you have stolen his matoke. This case is still pending, so I can’t actually report on the penalties.

As a food item, matoke tastes, to take a page from Douglas Adams, almost, but not quite, entirely unlike banana. I’ve seen it so far served roasted whole, sliced in large chunks into a stew, and mashed into a thick mass with a slightly heavier atomic weight than depleted uranium. Said mass is served on a plate, hopefully with something involving gravy. In its raw, bunched form it looks like an odd cross between our usual notion of a bunch of bananas and a small Christmas tree—it’s invariably green at market, and the six-inch bananas form tiered rings around the central stalk.

Maybe Holly and I can hang ornaments on one this year.

Anyhow—so this student comes home to find his matoke missing, and is just on his way over to tell the police about this when he happens to glance into his brother’s home (if you’ve seen Ugandan rural dwellings, you’ll understand why this is a realistic scenario) and spots what? His matoke!

(See the above line for a very Ugandan manner of speech. These people are kings of the rhetorical, immediately answered question.)

... So apparently his brother is home, and the student demands to know why his brother has stolen his matoke. And does his brother apologize? Does he dissemble? Does he try to explain himself? Does he return the stolen starchy fruit? Does he invite his kinsman to dinner? No, he apparently decides that the better part of valor is repeatedly punching your student-brother-accuser in the chest.

I can really only chalk that reaction up to panic, assuming it actually happened, and there seems to be a good deal of indication it did. The studious brother, by the way, has not turned the other cheek and is pressing charges; in point of fact, he turned up well ahead of time to make sure that another case, in which the victim forgave his assailant and charges were dismissed, was not confused with his own.

It should be obvious by this point that I’ve spent a little time observing the criminal courts of Uganda in action, and I have to say that on the whole I’m impressed. Computers, large offices, and on-site running, potable water are all evidently unnecessary to the function of a court of law. Both the magistrates seem almost depressingly capable. Magistrate Nabafu, in particular (I say since she’s the one who’s writing I’ve examined) needs help not with getting her ideas written down but with making them less technical so that the local peasants will have a shot at understanding them.

Well, at least a need exists, even if it wasn’t the one I was anticipating.

His Worship Magistrate Grade 2 Kataswa, by the way, is a local prince (by another title; he’s brother to a tribal leader amounting to something between a chief and a king) and looks very much the part. He’s powerfully built, with broad shoulders, a firm handshake, and an immense grin in a nation that often seems to be composed entirely of the undernourished (hence scrawny) and the overfed (hence soft), and appears to be in his mid-forties, with an air of natural gravity and a seriously worrisome charisma. That is to say, the man could be as corrupt as the Lovecraftian horror that is onion soup left to cool and curdle on the stove for a week, and I’m pretty sure I’d never notice.

Her Worship Magistrate Grade 1 Nabafu, however, probably would. She’s Kataswa’s direct superior, younger, smallish, round-faced, and cheerful when she isn’t busy being grimly competent. This last is rather an accomplishment in Kamuli, where her competence has to contend with an irregular-yet-predictable pattern of power outages and courtroom chaos. She has anti-corruption posters on both the door and interior of her office and three on the door into her courtroom. I have an impression that she gets underestimated a lot; a few of the parties before her court have seemed to think that they were arguing to me instead of to the woman in the judge’s seat.

Admittedly, I am a novelty here, and the peasants (official, legal job title, remember) have little reason to know what the hell I’m doing in the magistrate’s courtroom. I collect stares even on the street, most of which dissolve into the customary friendly smiles when I wave. Some, however, remain stares or even glares; one disputant in Her Worship Nabafu’s courtroom stood and bored into me with his eyes the entire time his own witness was standing next to him and ripping his case to shreds. It was as though he thought my presence somehow poisoning the court against him.

I’ll have more stories to tell later, I’m sure. I’m back in Kampala right now for my belated training, and will try to get written what I can. It’s looking to be a hectic week, however, between training, my assignments from Her Worship, and the writing I have to do for the SJSJ’s write-on competition.

Wish me luck!

5-28, Kamuli

2008-05-29T15:10:12Z

Wow. Three days, and already there’s more to tell than I can write.

Kamuli is an immense relief after the pollution and garbage of Kampala. I’m not saying that the capital didn’t have its charm, but it’s infinitely easier to breathe in Kamuli.

But I’m getting ahead of myself.

Kamuli is both a town and a district (and possibly a village or six—I’m still a little unclear on how Ugandan geography is broken down) in rural Uganda some kilometers north of the Nile source city of Jinja. By the time you reach Jinja from Kampala, by the way, the aforementioned traffic shenanigans will have long-since become old hat. The human mind has only so much capacity for nail-biting horror, it seems, and eventually settles down for a nap, trusting in the experience of the driver in navigating the nightmare to successfully thread the needle between immobility and disaster.

The road to Kamuli from Jinja is of a completely different character from that between Kampala and Jinja. For one thing, it’s less traveled, which makes it marginally easier on the nerves. For another, it’s less maintained, which makes it significantly harder on the teeth, particularly at high speeds, which our bus driver maintained for long stretches at a time.

The buses (glorified vans, as opposed to the mini-van taxis) in Uganda, I have discovered, are not posh as to offer such amenities as seatbelts. Instead, what they offer is impressive ingenuity in cramming as many people aboard as possible. There are three fixed seats to a row, closely packed, with an aisle between the first and second seats, counting from left to right. At some point, someone must inevitably have noticed that you can pack more people in if you seat people in the aisle, as well, then realized that you can encourage this by making “arm rests” that can be folded out into the aisle for additional seating.

My suitcase got a proper seat. I got the aisle. (This makes sense, though it placed me in the unusual position of envying my own suitcase; I can unilaterally get up and make way for someone trying to disembark. The suitcase can’t.)

The town of Kamuli itself is a cluster of low-lying, mostly brick or cement buildings of variable size, complexity, and structural integrity. I initially mistook part of the town for a ruin: a hodgepodge of tattered brick walls with vines growing over them and families living in the nooks and crannies. Apparently, though, these “ruins” are going up, rather than coming down, despite the vines.

There seem to be some advantages to living in what amounts to a permanent, mild summer. Notably, living half out-of-doors becomes much easier and the growing season is year ‘round. Judging from the stature of most of the locals, malnutrition is an issue among the poor of Uganda, but food is at least plentiful even if not everyone can afford the more protein-laden sorts.

It’s an illustration of the pace of life in Uganda that the magistrate I’m (I think) assigned to work with can apparently show up to work two hours late, and nobody bats an eye. Despite my understanding that my arrival was expected, it was, in a word, not. I’m sort of trying to figure out what help I can possibly be in this place where few villagers speak English well enough to understand a legal decision in that language and many don’t even seem to properly comprehend what the court is, how it functions, or why it’s important.

This isn’t, by the way, any kind of exaggeration. This court sees mostly rural peasants (the court clerk’s translation of job title, not mine), who are generally accustomed to tribal custom as opposed to the legal system and often don’t even understand that the magistrate isn’t just making up the case outcomes off the top of her head. There was a bit of family drama yesterday, a dispute over the terms of a will, in which a man became so distressed at being asked to clarify who his biological mother, father, and sisters were, and who was merely an uncle, cousin, or stepsister, that her worship called a two hour recess to let him calm down and work out his family relationships on his own time so that the questioning could go more smoothly when court reconvened.

Almost no one is represented by counsel.

It’s a merry mess of epic proportions.

5-25, Kampala

2008-05-29T15:09:10Z

Most significant impression of Uganda so far?

I’m not driving here. Ever.

Take, if you will, the craziest, most infuriating drivers drivers you ever see in the States, barring the drunks (driving drunk here would be tantamount to suicide). Yes, all of them. Take the aggressive drivers, the speeders who weave in and out of traffic and start flashing their lights at you if you’re too slow, the people who cut you off on the freeway, the people who cruise along at 40 in a 60 mph zone, the people who drift randomly out of their lanes or, alternately, don’t seem to recognize that there are such things as lanes, and the people who pass on a hill, and stick them all in a country together.

To get an idea of the drive from Entebbe to Kampala, take a typical county road from exurban Seattle, two to three lanes in width. Give it a nice shoulder on either side, and people it with various cars, pineapple trucks, mopeds, and lots and lots of minivans (the standard form of the “taxi” around here). Line it with legions of exceptionally heedless pedestrians in brightly-colored clothing.

Make all the drivers completely insane....

Multiple-car passes into the teeth of oncoming traffic is par for the course. Admittedly, I’ve not traveled widely outside of the United States, and I understand traffic is very bad in a lot of places, but ... Christ on a pogo stick. The only way this system works is that everybody plays by the same rules, and the rules seem to go like this:

Thou shalt flash thy lights to alert others to thy presence. This shall be the one nod in this direction required of you.

Thou shalt pass thy sluggish neighbor at first opportunity.

Thou shalt regard an opportunity to exist whenever an oncoming driver in the other lane either 1) is absent or 2) can probably see you.

Thou shalt consider the shoulder to be an extension of the road, and use it routinely for the avoidance of head-on collisions.

Thou shalt take little or no notice of pedestrians.

If thou hast something to say to thy neighbor, thou shalt pause in the midst of passing and open thy window to shout it. Thou mayest await a reply, or not, as thou dost see fit.

The white line is a fnord. Do not see the fnords.

Thou shalt disregard the yellow line at convenience.

... yeah. This strikes me as social darwinism in its purest and most spirituality-inspiring form. I’ll be staying off the roads as much as possible, thanks. Good thing I brought good footwear. Puff adders and cape buffalo ain’t got nothin’ on the traffic.

Amsterdam, May 24

2008-05-29T15:07:29Z

I have to say that, while the world is shrinking, no event has done so much to reduce the perception of distance in at least my mind as the advent of the in-flight entertainment system. I well remember the crowded, uncomfortable, unpleasant hours between pre-scheduled in-flight films on the flight to Korea in 1988, but now the distance from Seattle to Europe can be measured in movies.

However, I do wish that the films being shown were a little better and that they didn’t insist on doing special “in-flight” edits that sometimes cut out important bits.

Viewed so far this trip:

Jumper: entertaining candy with some fun concepts. As a note, what you say when tangled in live high-tension power lines is probably not “Get me down!” I’m pretty sure it’s a sort of voiceless “person frying” sound.

Solaris: slow, thoughtful (the music’s downright meditative), much different from the “Event Horizon”-style thriller I was expecting. I’m not sure I’d call it “hard sci-fi,” but it’s probably about as realistic as some of the monolithic doings from ...

2001: A Space Odyssey: ya know, I’d completely forgotten how maddeningly slow this movie is. Maybe I’ve been spoiled by thrill-a-minute cinema, but this isn’t even slow in the same sense as Dreams or even Solaris—about ¾ of the movie’s length seems to be taken up in “Yes, we will be doing this in the future!” footage—most of which we are, of course, not doing. For someone for whom hard sci-fi is a genre rather than a showcase, this gets old in a hurry.

Phone Booth: successes: entertaining and well acted, with a moral. Failure: to instill a fear of telephones, which it tries really hard to do at the end (in sort of the same vein as Ju-On’s last few shots of random places around Tokyo, intimating that the cursed house could be pretty much anywhere). Kiefer Sutherland does a lovely job, otherwise, considering that he gets about 20 seconds of screen time.

I’m wondering whether I’ll be able to finish The Negotiator on the next flight; I’ve seen it before, but it’s still a lovely movie. I was about halfway through when we started our landing sequence.

It’s a gray day in Amsterdam, and raining in a most Seattle-like manner (only Seattle doesn’t usually look like this by late May), and I’m sitting in a waiting area with a lot of very African-looking folks and a sparse crop of Europeans. Nobody’s saying much, and the intercom is threatening to offload the luggage of people delaying flights every few minutes.

More later, though I probably won’t be able to actually write about Uganda until we’ve landed in Uganda. It’s going to be a long flight, but I mustn’t sleep, lest I keep my sleep schedule well and truly screwed up. It’s morning, here; we were served lunch, a snack, and then ... breakfast on the way over. With luck, I’ll be able to crash out in about 12 hours.

First Day Blues

2007-06-18T08:55:14Z

The good news: tomorrow (well, later today, technically) I start classes at Seattle University School of Law.

The bad news: this involves an after-class meet-and-greet event, attendance at which is only -practically- compulsory. This means Monday game is cancelled this week.

I'm sorry about the late notice, and don't plan to make a habit of this.

Ohgodohgodohgodohgodohgod

2007-03-30T21:24:40Z

I.

Have just been admitted.

To the Seattle University School of Law.

With a $12,500 Presidential Law Scholarship.

EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!!

Project: Nocturne (resumed)

2007-01-23T20:03:36Z

I've been asked to provide a few details on my proposed replacement for Sean's Sunday game, a resurrection, so to speak, of the earlier "Cannon Comics" game that died before its time. I'm seeking an absolute maximum of nine players, and a preferred limit of eight. It will take place, as Sean's did, every two weeks, on Sunday, at or about 4 PM, and run until 9 or so.

In the game I hope to run, years have passed since the last "episode," and the world has changed. I intend, for various reasons, to depart from standing "Cannon" canon, and to follow my own alternate timeline, not entirely unlike that of the "Watchmen" story. The setting I am currently considering is, in some ways, closer to our own, a world in which America's success in Iraq has fueled ongoing wars in Iran and Syria, in which American hegemony is gradually spreading, and in which the power of the president continues, gradually, to grow.

Despite the setting, this will not be an overtly political game: the characters, not the political forces at work, are the centerpiece, and their choices and actions make up the core of the story. Project: Nocturne, for those who don't already know, is a covert operations squad operating, now, under the auspices of the Department of Homeland Security and formally tasked with metahuman control, a job to which it usually sticks, headed by the enigmatic man (?) known as Chill. The game is one part Rainbow Six, one part X-Com, two parts X-Files, and one part "Planetary," and would verge on cyberpunk if the main characters weren't (against almost every cyberpunk theme) working for The Man. It might even take a turn in that direction.

The proposed game will be lower-powered than most super(anti)hero games, D8 in the Tri-Stat system, with tighter controls on PC power levels than in the first iteration in order to emphasize the strategic aspects of the game. While I am perfectly willing (as in most games I can actually relax with) to casually blow up cities, countries, or the world, my intent is to go "over the top" as rarely as possible.

Like its predecessor, it will be dark, focusing on characters who start their careers as antiheroes and may very well be straight-up villains by the end of the day. They are a team of soldiers serving following orders for, presumably, the common good, at best; at worst, they're a death squad, a band of murderous thugs, doing the bidding of a being straight out of a conspiracy theorist's fever-dream. Anyone not comfortable with shades of gray that turn blacker with every passing week should probably give this one a miss.

Most old characters will return, though I reserve right to retire any character whose abilities interfere too heavily with the tactical nature of the game, and selection of powers and weaknesses will be tightly controlled so that I will not, this time, have to arrange for someone to catch a full autofire burst of particle beams in the chest to make the point that staying under cover is a good idea.

This is not a game that I intend to take overly seriously, despite its themes. Weird humor, improbable plot twists, and so on are all very much welcome, along with a fair deal of action and the occasional moment of "Oh my god, we're evil." If this sounds like fun, I'm more than willing to run it.

Mountain, anyone?

2006-07-01T19:03:50Z

So ...

In keeping with the notion of monthly excursions, Holly and I have been thinking of setting up a hike for next Saturday (the 8th) on Mt. Rainier. It's a bit of a drive, around three hours to reach Paradise, but at this time of year the mountain should be nothing short of gorgeous, and a hike up to Windy Ridge seems like just the thing.

Anyone who's interested, please feel free to express such interest along with preferable times, provisos, etc.

Fair warning: hiking the mountain is not that difficult, but that doesn't mean that there won't be things like the odd snow field along the route (nothing you'll fall into a cravasse on; don't worry). Bring good boots!