blog procrastination

Semester Status as of 1916 hrs, 6 December 2006:

Room is hot, too hot for work. It makes me sleepy. I had to put on shorts and a t-shirt and open the window, but there is no screen and the cat could fall out, so I had to cover the open space with a curtain and shove a suitcase against the bottom, then try to create a gap further up. Too much work just to open a window. I put a pan of water on the radiator to try to alleviate the horrible dryness.

Papers in a double half-circle on the floor around my chair. Only about a quarter of them are applicable to the paper I’m writing now. Another third are applicable to the paper I want to start tomorrow if I can get this one done.

Burning a nutmeg-scented candle, which smells very nice. Playing music. Trying to get the writing mood – last night I got it just right and got up to 13 pages of my 20 page paper. If only I could focus, I could finish it tonight, except the footnotes.

I left my data key/flash drive/jump drive in a computer at school today. I had to call people until I found someone who was in that building and could rescue it. Fortunately I was smart enough last night to copy the main document onto the desktop, so I can keep working tonight.

But I’m not working. I’m writing this and thinking of how I should work. Bah.

2034 hours:

One more page is completed. I have drunk too much water to combat the horrible dryness of the radiator and now feel simultaneously parched (eyeballs feel like they’ve been baked) and overly full of water. Ate two lovely pieces of Cote d’Or Noir de Noir chocolate, the best chocolate ever (56% cacao – perfect amount). Too bad a bar costs $5.26. Can’t afford it. Back to customary international law concerning amnesties after civil conflicts {sigh}

2207 hrs:

Eyeeees! Pain!

8 December 2006
1526 hrs

The paper is almost done, but I have a mental block about finishing it. So close! 19 of the 20 pages are written. I just need to go back through about four articles and put in a bit more information from them and then finish the footnotes. Instead, I went grocery shopping. And okay, I needed groceries. When there is no food in the house I end up spending more on food outside the house or eating cereal eight meals in a row, which, although I survived solely on Lucky Charms in college, doesn’t seem so appealing now, even if the cereal is oat bran flakes instead of sugar, inc.

Then I made pumpkin spice muffins. I halved the sugar in them, because one of my biggest aversions (other than pig meat) is sweet cooked fruit or vegetables. I think jam is disgusting, similarly pie, except chocolate. And banana bread is near the top of the disgusting list. Pumpkin muffins only became acceptable last year when the mom of the kids that I babysat for made them with half the sugar. She thought the result was not sweet enough, but the kids and I did not seem to notice, as we ate a whole tray or something similar in one morning.

Also my roommate is vegan, so we used egg replacer. They turned out quite nice, although not as moist as I would have liked. So I put a little good-for-you omega-3-filled butter-substitute on them as I eat them. I’ve been gorging myself on them since I took them out of the oven. Who needs lunch? These things are positively healthy, full of ginger and cinnamon and pumpkin.

Mental block.

1620 hrs

So I’m working now, on this silly paper. It’s about Liberia, of course, because every paper I write is at least tangentially about Liberia or Rwanda (although I’m writing another paper after this one that might have to be more about DR Congo), and as I edited the background section, I remembered the day in 1997, at church, when we heard that Charles Taylor had been elected president of Liberia.

I write about this Liberia – the Liberia of 1989 and the Liberia of 1997 and the Liberia of 2003 – and I wonder if the Liberia I saw this summer was the Liberia my parents knew in the 1980s. I don’t know – I was ten when we left and as long as Liberia still speaks Liberian English and the ferns with the leaves that curl up still curl up and our house is still there, it’s going to seem about the same to me. Okay, fine, WAR, yes. I know. Phil, I was there. Things clearly aren’t the same when there are bullet holes in things and people I worked with and ate with and chatted with about nothing suddenly started telling me stories about violence and fear that I can’t imagine – or deliberately don’t want to imagine.

I was in that Liberia – the Charles Taylor halfway-at-war Liberia, as opposed to the bullets-flying-middle-of-war Liberia – for about two and a half weeks in 2000. And let me tell you something: it terrified me. The teenaged boys with the dead eyes terrified me. I slept in the same room as my dad and brother because the doors to the bedrooms opened to the outside and I couldn’t bear to be alone in a room open to the outside. Part of it was that as badly as I wanted it to feel instantly like home, it just didn’t. I had been away for ten very formative years and I had gotten used to a neighborhood in Michigan where my sister’s friends were not allowed to visit, where a gun got thrown into the backyard by someone fleeing the police, where a girl who had been beaten by drug dealers knocked on the door at 4 a.m. I could stand outside in that neighborhood at 3 a.m. throwing rocks at my parent’s windows when I got locked out (pre-cellphone), but walking through the market alone in Buchanan, Liberia in broad daylight made me panic and look about wildly if my dad and brother disappeared around a corner.

I have Rwanda to thank for getting me over that. When I first got to Rwanda, I was the same way. I didn’t want to walk around alone. I built up slowly – walking a little further alone every day, exploring a little more, meeting more people – until I felt safer in rural Rwanda than I have felt anywhere else in the world. (I still don’t like cities. Don’t feel as safe.) I have to do the same thing every time I go somewhere new – I did it in Honduras (although that was before and always with people), I did it in Tanzania, I did it in New York, I did it in Monrovia last summer.

I don’t understand the students from the US or Europe who go to Africa for the first time and immediately start walking about every street alone. I’m not sure if I envy them their lack of fear or fear for their naïveté. Every where, I remember the one of the first things J. and E. told me in Rwanda, passing on the wisdom they got from another of our regional coworkers: If there are people walking about and doing what people do, carrying things and talking and selling, it’s probably okay. If the streets are empty or the market abandoned, worry. So I live by that, which is why I never felt unsafe on the Back Road in Congotown, where I would stop and chat with a boy on a bike and people would call out greetings to me, or on the beach over by ELWA, where ditto the greetings, but with the fishermen. Also why I did feel unsafe on the beach just off the Back Road, especially the time when C and I were back there and these two guys appeared out of nowhere and started asking to talk to us.

I’ve come to depend pretty heavily on that feeling safe/unsafe sensor, and so far it’s done okay for me. So far. I was okay driving in Rwanda in areas that the State Department cautioned might have “unsavory elements” roaming about. I was okay in Arusha, where everyone told us we were about to get robbed every single minute. I was okay in Liberia, where things were dicey a good bit of the time.

Do you ever wonder how brave you really are?

I do. All the time.