"It is difficult to believe in the dreadful but quiet war of organic beings, going on in the peaceful woods, & the smiling fields."
- Charles Darwin
I am fighting a fever.
For the 2nd time in the last 20 minutes, Yves is going over what data they have, and how they want to display it. I try not to cough, and hold a clammy hand to my mouth to muffle the sound. I need a coffee, I need a thermos of Neo Citron, I need to be wearing my jammies and huddled next to a Book of Grave Consequence - something by Rohinton Mistry perhaps, or some other newly discovered, immensely talented, award-winning Asian Writer of Grave Consequence. Why is it that these types of Asian writers are so prized? Why can't there be an Asian Tom Robbins, or David Sedaris? Why is it always some mildly concealed identity political tract about the "asian" experience of living in another country, living in our own country, or moving from our country to another one and learning all the important life lessons along the way? Why do we take ourselves so seriously?
"So you want a spatial database of where people died, who killed them, when
and with what weapon? And you want all this cross-referenced to the video, audio
and written testimonies of the survivors and the pictures of the deceased? And
you want to display this on a 42" widescreen TV in the lobby and on the
Internet?"
"Exactly"
I look out the car window at the green hills of Rwanda -- they act as excellent visual scales of the landscape, telling you more acutely than a map how far you are from where you are going, and how close you are to where you are. My nose being clogged, I can't smell much, but I image the wind to carry a whiff of something earthy, something dusty, something brown. At the side of the road there is a woman selling those clay candle-holding pots that C wants for our patio. She looks up and sees me staring. She straightens up and stares right back, and I can read in her eyes either "How much do you think this is worth? I'll give you a good price." or equally probable "Why are you in my country?" I can't tell. And even if I could, I don't know.
I imagine men with hatred in their eyes stomping up and down these hills, their rusty machetes scraping the tall grasses. I imagine one of them holding a radio, letting the words of distant men with hatred on their tongues drone out the sounds of laughter, then horror, then silence. I imagine the boot prints on the blood-stained ground, and of the cold finality of that one location, that one set of co-ordinates for a person -- for 800,000 people -- and the ribbon of data connecting them all, made visible.
I am fighting a fever.
We were playing around with our photographer's new Canon EOS 5D, and he took this pic:
And because Wordpress is supported by Windows Live Writer and because the internet connection here is too slow to stay online composing Vox posts, I've been doing most of my updates on our wedding website [for those in the know, you already know where it is].
In abundance in Kigali, are the motorcycle taxi's or "motos" as they are called. Cheaper than a taxi, less crowded than the bus and fun. Now I'm considering of getting my own moto once a few paycheques have rolled in.
Of the strangest things that have happened to me my first week in Kigali, Rwanda, the strangest is realizing that men hold hands when they are friends.
During the week of waking up late and dealing with jetlag, one lazy afternoon I went outside to have a chat with Karangwa, one of our rotating security guards. Initially thrown off by his soft spoken manner, I talked with him about life in Kigali: his family perished in the genocide, he studied computer management in school and is surviving with his security job. I showed him pictures of Canada and Barbados, and he tried to tell me in broken English, French and Kinyarwanda about his life here, his girlfriend and work. He also put us in contact with a real estate agent, and accompanied us one day when we were looking at houses. As we were walking, he tried to hold my hand. I immediately shrank away from this, and only realized later when I saw men holding hands in the street that to do so was a big reproach: “I don’t want to be your friend, you’re just our security guard, so back off.” I felt bad, but don’t know how to get over this cultural barrier. A week later, we hardly talk, mostly because all he had in his eyes were dollar signs when looking at us: he tried to get a “commission” from us even though he did none of the leg work that real estate agents actually do.
Another strange, though humorous, incident occurred in “La Galette”, the German butchery/bakery in Kigali. I was trying to buy some chicken when one of the young butcher-ladies was motioning “you, me, go outside together?” I didn’t understand but when she figured out I knew a little French, she shouted “Je t’aime!”, which to the Anglophones means “I love you”. I laughed, embarrassed, and showed her, and the rest of the butchery, my new wedding ring. Everyone broke out laughing, and she did accompany me outside with my groceries. So I was hit on my first week in Africa, although for the wrong reason: when she helped me out, she saw a Mercedes parked out front and immediately thought it was my car. Was it my worn and scratched Timbo’s or my geeky digital watch? The Asian eyes? Hmm. Whenever C wants to tease me she threatens to leave me with the “chicken lady” in Africa.
Other than finding out at the wrong time that "droit" (French) means "right" AND "straight", nothing new to report. Just trying to find a house, learn more French, find a job and beat the damn jetlag. More updates and pictures to come.
"When we thought that factual nature matched our hopes and comforts - all things bright and beautiful, and all things made for our superior selves - then we easily fell into the trap of equating actuality with righteousness. But when we sense the different fascination of evolution's naturalistic ways, and of life's astonishingly rich diversity and history of change, with Home sapiens as but one contingent twig on the most luxuriant of all trees, then we finally become free to detach our search for ethical truth and spiritual meaning from our scientific quest to understand the facts and mechanisms of nature. Darwin, in defining the factual 'grandur of this view of life', liberated us from asking too much of nature, thus leaving us free to comprehend whatever fearful fascination may reside 'out there,' in full confidence that our quest for decency and meaning cannot be threatened thereby, and can emerge only from our own moral consciousness."
Stunning paragraph. A bit wordy, but Gould has the talent to capture some underlying insight that talented but not as whimsical writers grasp at, but can only reveal through indirection or rhetorical questions. From Steven Pinker's How the Mind Works, "If you base your ethical, spiritual conclusions on science, what happens to your spirituality and ethics when the science goes the other way?"
Notice the difference?
As a pre-honeymoon, and a week before Hurricane Dean made landfall, C and I ventured to the wilderness island that is Dominica. It was wild, lush, rugged and steep. At one point, there was a 45 degree incline on the road to Trois Pitons National park. The locals were much nicer than in Barbados, while the Creole cuisine was unmatched. We stayed for a total of 5 days, one of which was spent recovering from our hike up to the Boiling Lake in the natural sulfur pools at our hotel -- one of the hardest day hikes we've completed. We stayed at the Papillote, a local wilderness retreat hidden in the valley just 10km from Roseau, the capital.
The roads were treacherous and within the first 4 hours of our arrival, I scratched the front bumper of our rental jeep significantly on the narrow, windy and hilly roads. An 18-wheeler almost demolished us on the way to our hotel.
It is said that of all the islands that Christopher Columbus would remember were he alive today, Dominica would be the one -- it remains unchanged over hundreds of years. This is due to active and conscious preservation of the island: two national parks span its length, one of which is a UNESCO World Heritage site housing the Trois Pitons mountains and the world's largest boiling lake.
One of the reasons we picked Dominica, however, was its world class scuba diving spots, but C got an ear infection the week before at another diving trip in Barbados, so we didn't experience Dominican diving at its best. More reason to come back, and come back we will!
There is so much the island has to offer in terms of outdoor adventure: a 13-day trail through the heart of the island is in the works, the endemic species, the history between the British, French, African slaves, Carib Indians and Amerindians in the region, and the natural, unprocessed cuisine. The last of these is believed to be the cause for Dominica housing the world's highest concentration of centenarians!
For pictures of our trip, click here. Enjoy!
Taken in the early afternoon. Drunken stupor (note the wet spot on the pavement) ? Afternoon nap? You judge.
Easy, light read. Nothing particularly penetrating, but Mr. Levitt certainly does ask refreshing questions. Hmm.. that's pretty much it really. I can't say it deserved all the media attention, but I did find the section on "What Makes the Perfect Parent?" enlightening and reinforcing. That is, the data suggests that what parents are affects their children more than what parents do. So obsessive parenting hardly works.
Although Levitt suggests that the "conventional wisdom" is always wrong, there are instances where his results support the "conventional wisdom": men and women routinely lied about their height/weight on their on-line personals ad thinking that they would get more responses -- they were right. The usual stereotypes still applied online.
Yet that was the extent of Levitt's "unifying theme" -- that common sense is usually wrong.
Great. Thanks for the update. The examples of this fact were cool, but not enough to merit the coining of "Freakonomics" as a wholly distinct form of inquiry. Save the hubris, pass the cheese.
