what may’ve she swallowed?

september 21, 2012. redwood city, ca

american journalism finally kills the english language.

i live in a country of approximately 80 million people.

in my experience, 0.1% of those i have met can properly conjugate the english verb to go.

the other 99.9% demand to know “where are you go?!”

oh, ethiopia. this country begins teaching its school-going youth entirely in english starting in the ninth grade. this of course means they expect all children attending high school to be fluent in english.

not even close.

what can you expect, really?

the school schedule covers the typical blocks of time – five days a week from late january to early june, then again from early september to late december – but children only attend for three hours a day. any national holiday is a reasonable excuse to take a full week of school off. any local holiday is as well, and guess what? every day of the ethiopian calendar is assigned a patron saint. st george day is an excuse to knock off a few days, george being ethiopia’s patron saint, and reigning over one day a month. a town’s local patron saint’s day is an excuse, and each family is free to select their own saint(s), whose days are also an excuse. if there is an athletic competition, citywide celebration, or a particularly sunny day, that’s an excuse, but who needs excuses? most children who attend school – in that they are within the boundaries of the campus –  do not attend school in that they sit in a classroom where a teacher attempts to impart knowledge on them. further more, after the tenth grade, all students take aptitude tests. the results of those tests dictate which subjects they can study in university. anyone who fails that test outright is sent to teachers’ college, where they are trained to become teachers. applying logical principles to this strategy, we can assume that each class of teachers yields a class of future teachers less intelligent than they, so on and so on, ad infinitum, until… i don’t even know. idiot supernova (band name, called it!)?

what i do know, is that every now and again i get a clear signal that america is – albeit more slowly, and through different tactics – taking that same trajectory.

so it was on the night of september 21, 2012. as jenny and i enjoyed our last evening back in california with friends and family and a few beers…

* * * *

it used to be a rule in journalism. don’t bury the lead.

that means: tell your readers what they’re about to be reading, otherwise, you insinuate that there is nothing important to read. these days, that rule has been flipped on its head. scroll through huffPo, daily beast, or any other news aggregation site, and enlighten yourself of current events through gripping headlines like REALLY?!, and at it again…, and he said it. admittedly, this is an equally effective way to draw readers in. don’t tell them anything about what lies inside, simply give them a hyperbolic reaction to what lies inside. or, even better, lie about what lies inside. the shocking truth about why your favorite soda is literally killing you right now links to a single line of text: everyone knows sodas are full of unhealthy sweeteners, but who can resist treating themselves to an ice cold, bubbly beverage once in a while? this followed by a slideshow of ten soft drinks the writer saw at the store this morning, accompanied by articulate captions like “RC cola, still?!” and “coke. love it or hate it, it’s a classic”. well written, dipshit. i hope you’re getting paid amply for that contribution to the dumbing down of the american public. if it’s not instagrams and google images of the ten shiniest things a particular “writer” saw on the way to work, it’s scare pieces about how we all have eating disorders, rheumatoid arthritis, multiple sclerosis, COPD, crohn’s disease, sexual inadequacies, marital inadequacies, or wheat allergies. and let’s cut out the terrifying moment that changed their lives forever: horrifying giant monster came out of nowhere during pleasant family vacation to the everglades. how officials plan to stop this rare menace. it’s an alligator. i already know it’s an alligator. it’s always an alligator. you know how i know? because they were in the everglades. if the story is from florida, it’s an alligator. if it’s from california, it’s a mountain lion. if it’s from anywhere else, it’s a bear. i don’t need to read the story, and i don’t care! if these rubes were so horrified by seeing an alligator in the everglades they should have stayed the fuck out of the everglades in the first place.

here’s a headline for ya: entire family of morons mercifully eaten by majestic prehistoric reptile. daves all across masha, ethiopia breathed a sigh of relief.

i could go on and on about my many linguistic pet peeves: the gross misuse of the phrase it’s all i can do to…, or the painful overuse of the word literally, or the teaching of students to put two spaces after a punctuation mark when MLA formatting clearly states to use as many spaces after a punctuation mark as you would put between words in the sentence. yes, i notice these things, and yes, it bothers me… and yes, i am slowly becoming my sophomore AP english teacher whether i like it or not.

here’s something else i picked up in sophomore english class: in formal writing, avoid contractions. typically, as a rule i don’t follow that rule. i’m an advocate for informal writing. injecting a bit of style into a piece of writing turns it into art. just ask e e cummings, who also put as many spaces between words, punctuation marks, and lines as he damn well pleased, capitalized letters seemingly at random, and wrote poetry that has no equal. i don’t hate contractions. i don’t hate the word y’all… when chelsea says it. chelsea gets to say it because she’s a southern belle with a lovely country drawl. y’all just sounds right when she says it. when someone from venice beach says it, it’s nails on a chalkboard.

why on earth am i going on about all this, you might ask.

because on the evening of september 21, 2012 i picked up the redwood city daily, and the headline of the front page included the word may’ve. as in OJ simpson may’ve been wrongly accused. i shouldn’t have called it a word. it is not.

for years i have dismissed the downward spiral of the american dialect with a snarky comment here and there, but i cannot overlook this.

may’ve?

no.

i do not accept this “evolution” of language. i will look the other way on a lot of things, but when our headlines use words like may’ve we may’ve jumped the shark. we’ve nuked the fridge. we finally pushed the boulder over the hill, and it’s gotten away from us at a frightening speed.

the next day, i flew back to ethiopia.

i carry on with life in a country that thinks simply yelling FINE!!? at your back as you walk past, constitutes a american greeting. a country where kids sit outside in the grass chewing on garbage during class time and blurt out such sound bytes as “you money give me!” while i walk to work.

at work i get online and check out what AOL today thinks is news this morning, as i wait for my email to load on masha’s blazing fast internet connection (.18kbs per second? slow down trigger!). i’m not expecting the headlines to be intellectual fare – i save that for more respectable sites – hell, i just witnessed a professional journalist headline a newspaper with the word may’ve. at this point, i’m not even expecting the headlines to read as though they were written by a sober, literate person, over the age of ten.

i am expecting them to be stupid.

but not this stupid:

i don’t know why she had to swallow. i didn’t read the article. i don’t know what she had to swallow, or where she got it. i don’t know why AOL couldn’t find a picture of this woman wearing more than a one sleeve plunge neck fishnet shirt, or why they chose to place a photograph of a pile of phallic loaves of bread standing at attention below a photograph of this woman dressed like a porn star next to a headline that insinuates possibly decades of expertise in the field of swallowing, and i certainly don’t know what the fuck a traffic referee is. all i know is: whatever she’s swallowing, apparently she’s been swallowing it since she was ten years old, and her experience with swallowing whatever it was she swallowed affected the purchase of her new house. i sincerely hope it resulted in a discount.

in six months, ethiopia’s contractual death grip on my life is released. where do i go from here?

a person with as many linguistic pet peeves as myself… do i return to a country that allows headlines like why she had to swallow…, do i give up and stay in a country that memorizes the sounds what is your name, but has no idea what those sounds mean when shouted at a person who speaks english… or do i pursue other?

i would love to get a job as a writer somewhere, or even to publish my own stuff, but how? every day i scroll through “news” and various other published forms of the written word – alec baldwin explains the debt ceiling, mario batali op-eds about gun control laws, why men cheat written by some bitter old bag who was recently cheated on, huffPo ranks 50 public domain pictures of colleges we may’ve heard of, all infested with typos, glaring grammatical errors, improper word use – i scroll further, past the “related articles” – kDash finally wears opaque clothing, still manages to show entire world vagina, breaking science news: one easy trick to get flat abs today! – further… past hundreds of reader comments – obama is literally sodomizing the entire country with communist ideas, the GOP is literally raping the economy with upper class tax breaks – finally the little scroll bar on the side of my browser window hits bottom. contact us. contribute. jobs.

i click jobs. nothing lower than managing editor for divorce section: ten years experience required. ten years experience at what? being a managing editor for a divorce periodical? where the hell do i get that and why would i want it? i’m bitter enough without that experience, thank you.

i click contribute. as usual i’m greeted by the message: all unsolicited material will be disregarded. unsolicited mail and email will be thrown away, unread.

good lord. what may’ve i to swallow to get a writing gig around here?

that master’s program in australia looks better every day.

i may’ve too learn me an knew contraction:

g’day!

* * * *

stay tuned for our next episode:

hey jugdish, what if i got my nose pierced? wouldn’t that be hot?

meet the peace corps: mary feels different.

of course mary brought her medical scrubs to ethiopia.

october 21, 2012

mary’s illustrations finally go out in their (almost) polished form.

sometime last january, mary pitched to the group a children’s book that she had written. she was looking for an illustrator, and well, i was bored, and needed a creative outlet.

posted below is that book (with a few artistic revisions from the one that is going to print sometime soon). its intention is to give new volunteers something to share with children in their community, whilst teaching the little bastards in this country that yelling racially inspired names at anyone who looks different is f—ing rude. as you can tell i love children…

regardless, the book was not my idea, nor did i write it. it was all mary. all i did was illustrate it. so kudos should go to mary for this project. in fact, other than illustrating it, all i did was drag the deadline back over and over again, as i took forever finishing the drawings. i’m so glad i got the chance to work on this with mary, partially because i hadn’t yet had a chance to get to know her, and now that i have, she has taken her rightful place as one of my peace corps favorites (we even did a favorite album music swap, and now one of her favorites is one of my own – check it out after the jump).

mary is possibly the feistiest person i’ve ever met.

my first real mary moment came at the end of pre-service training, when a few of us were playing pick-up basketball against some habesha kids. while most of us were huffing and puffing, lamenting our descent into old age, mary was shining glass, boxing out, and throwing some vicious elbows. i’m not sure any of us saw it coming, because normally mary carries herself with a very laid back, almost reserved posture (almost), while she repeatedly adjusts her glasses and gushes over obscure medical trivia. she now writes the medical minute segment for the ishi bekka chronicle. she’s just about as proud as anyone i’ve ever met of being from detroit, and isn’t shy to brag about it at about a hundred words per second through the biggest smile i’ve ever seen. during a game of two truths and a lie, one of her truths was that she had once been fired from a job as a rape hotline operator because she was too perky.

i love that story.

it’s not just hilarious, it’s so perfectly mary. she’s caring enough to be an outreach counselor, and tough enough to do it as a rape hotline operator, but she’s unabashedly happy to be wherever she is, even if it is the rape hotline… or under the hoop slamming her elbow into your chest because you’re blocking the lane.

but working on mary’s book wasn’t just a good chance to get to know mary. i also needed a little fuel to fire my creative juices once again. i was getting a little dusty and out of practice. the result is that this book represents a slow return to form for me, as i dusted off my skills with art as actual work. the style is intended to be a childish adaptation of the work of an artist named “ben” whose work can be found in various high end establishments in addis, and is something between picasso and american street art. interestingly enough, while his style has such a unique and modern look to it, shows a clear evolution of the traditional ethiopian style of painting with bright colors, hard lines, geometric shapes, and simple, delineated shading.

we’ve briefly tossed around the idea of funding the printing of the book by selling it tom’s shoes style (purchasing one copy of the book pays to print two, and the second goes out to a PC community). if that happens in the next seven months, i’ll let you all know. until then, now that you’ve me mary through my writing, meet her through her own, though she will tell you through a devious smile that this book is entirely fictional of course.

without further ado, enjoy feeling different…

* * * *

stay tuned for our next episode:

coach to india, only way to travel!

*    *    *    *

easy listening: dave matthews : some devil

reverse werewolf ninjas.

November 28, 2012

the day before peace corps ethiopia’s first ever regional meeting.

jimma.

what’s so scary about jimma anyway?

the addis staff practically wets themselves at the very mention of jimma. as mark and i try to push our jimma regional meeting pitch past the higher ups in the PC hierarchy, we’re getting emails every ten minutes –

don’t go out in jimma after dark – don’t go too far from the central hotel – don’t go near the bus station for any reason whatsoever – don’t approach strange dogs when the moon is full – if you find yourself in the vicinity of any habesha, move to a well lit area where other ferenji can witness your impending assault, robbery, and possible rape – be wary of anyone who attempts to engage you in hand to hand martial arts combat, they may be highly skilled ninjas – anyone in jimma dressed as batman is an imposter who works for darth vader, do not trust them – most of all, during the regional meeting in jimma, remember: do not go to, toward, or anywhere near jimma for any reason at all.

sincerely yours,

          the ever changing, impossible to comprehend, policy handbook

i’m sorry, i’m gonna need chapter, page, article, and item numbers for those policies, and let’s be clear in which edition, under which of our many rotating country directors, this policy was enacted. i swear our policy handbook has more interpretations that the second amendment to the US constitution, and the handbook is written in some hybrid of management speak, legalese, habesha english, and esperanto.

i motion to form a PC supreme court for interpreting handbook policies at the highest level, please.

in the ongoing case of the US peace corps v common sense, some new information has recently come to light regarding a few of the staff’s hesitations toward jimma. initially they insisted that staff treats jimma like chernobyl circa 1986 simply because a female volunteer who was out drinking late at night was almost assaulted there, but that can’t be the whole story. can it? i mean, before one of the volunteers in the east was nearly gang raped in desi, the volunteer who was stationed there had filed over a dozen formal safety and security complaints about that town, and guess what? there’s a volunteer in desi, again.

admin, you got some ‘splainin’ to do! (i love lucy? desi arnaz? no one here but us crickets, eh?)

so why is jimma such a big scary town? hard to say. the loop PCVs love it there, as does every habesha in the loop. well, not every habesha. rachel rhetorically asked me if i knew why daniel, our education sector program director is so adamantly anti-jimma. i guessed that it’s the freakishly large aggressive looking dogs that roam the streets all day. of course that’s not it. daniel, it seems, grew up in jimma, and he recalls that wushu (think karate) was a very popular pastime for children in jimma during his childhood. thus he has concluded that the nocturnal criminal element in jimma is composed of evil geniuses, masterfully trained in the east asian martial arts.

ninja thieves, he says…

ninja thieves.

because kids in jimma take karate classes.

i guess it’s a good thing, then, that i’m the one pushing to lead this regional meeting, as i also took karate classes as a kid, and I take wushu classes in masha from a guy who calls himself both “the tae kwon do dinosaur”, and “son of lee”, which i guess in daniel’s eyes makes me chuck f—in’ norris. then again, this may all have been lost in translation. after all, the amharic word for “i have no idea” is aninja (i kid you not). so maybe it went something like: “daniel, why don’t you like jimma?” “aninja.”

or maybe jimma is in fact some kind of drunken fist kusosawa film. that’s actually more cool than scary. unless it’s worse than that, even…

i say why stop there?

as long as we’re assuming that jimma is rife with killers and thieves skilled in the ways of ninjitsu, let’s assume that the dogs in jimma are abnormally large, hearty, and ever-present because they are reverse werewolves, only turning back into humans during the full moon. and while we’re pulling paranoid delusions out of our asses, let’s go ahead and assume that people are so rarely accosted by these ninja thieves because they are the reverse werewolves, and are only active in human form once every lunar cycle.

this partially explains why we’re not supposed to go out in jimma after the sun goes down, at least.

reverse werewolf ninjas, i says…

reverse werewolf ninjas.

so imagine my surprise to find out that staff was not only planning to place a regional office in jimma, but was also going to allow a jimma loop regional meeting… in jimma!

regional meetings are something i’ve been working on for a while as a way for volunteers to better network, exchange resources, and be more active in their regions without having to travel to addis. perhaps it was something of a pet project for me. not everyone understands the pain of traveling to addis. most people to the south have well paved highways, and quality bus service to their doorsteps, and anyone more than five minutes north of addis only has to put on the “poor me” face to get the office to fly them in at PC’s expense. meanwhile we westerners have to take real busses, on real crappy roads, and stop in weal scawy bus stop towns, stay at real grungy hotels, and arrive in the big city smelling real rough, kinda like we’ve been sleeping in the back of a diesel garbage truck and pissed ourselves to keep warm, which isn’t too far from the truth, sometimes.

personally, i think volunteers not only need more opportunities to exchange ideas, resources, and skill sets, but i think it’s ideal, for many reasons, to keep those opportunities close to home.

lucky me, staff agrees, and it’s that agreement that makes me think that i was the best pitchman for this job (not just my theatrically improvised jackie chan style kung fu skills). i mean, staff has a conniption every time they find out i’m leaving site, even if it’s for peace corps work, because if i’m leaving site and going to addis (or beyond) it’s going to be a six day round trip (or longer) plus the time for work (or play). if there’s a five day training in addis that i have to attend, i’m not out of site for five and a half days, i’m out for eleven. while staff doesn’t quite seem to grasp the cause and effect in relation to my total time out of site here, it at least weighted my argument for the regional meeting with personal experience.

in the end, reverse werewolf ninjas aside, this project i had been working on was a go. staff has its complaints about me being out of site, but i found a way to use that to my advantage, and get the job done.

of course, i can’t be foolish here. the staff still had complaints about my time out of site, and in my efforts to push this project through, i drew their attention back to those complaints. i had achieved a minor victory with the staff back in the capital, but in the end, the house always wins, and my life still exists between the hard reality of ethiopia and the detached delusion of addis, somewhere on the road to masha…

* * * *

stay tuned for our next episode:

as it happens, i saw that same shooting star, and i wished for you to drop dead.

the ishi bekka chronicle

November 2012

issue 1, volume 3 of the ishi bekka chronicle

you know, since i heard that there was a PCV run newsletter circulating around this country, i wanted to run the show.

oddly enough, i never contributed to the newsletter before i took the helm. i guess i like to be my own boss. if i’m going to write something it’s going to end up here where i have total creative and administrative control. if i’m going to contribute to the newsletter, i’m going to be the big cheese. so when waidmann (the previous editor) looked toward his COS plans and prepared to hand the ishi bekka chronicle to the next generation, i got in his ear as soon and as often as i could.

then i started preparing to make the ishi mine. i couldn’t tell you what the best part of this job is, because there are so many. it’s writing, it’s graphic design, it’s creative collaboration, it’s a free pass to explore and expound upon everything under the PC ethiopia sun, it forces me to keep up with current events, and turns socializing and bullshitting into “business meetings” and “brainstorming”.

i can tell you the worst part of this job: bureaucracy. i hate that, to paraphrase chuck, an outlet for PCVs to rant, rave, vent, and act out – occasionally about and against the office, the country, or work in general – has to be scrutinized by the higher ups. i mean, look, i don’t run every blog post here at whitey by the staff, hell, i don’t run any of these posts by staff, and all the ishi is is essentially a readers’ digest of PCV writings and creative output. the staff really shouldn’t have any control over it whatsoever. but they do. so what does it all mean? does it mean that since the ishi has to be sifted through staff approval before i can even release it to my fellow PCVs, that there is a gelati’s chance in danikil of all you whitey fans getting your eyes on it?

what it means is i spend a large portion of my free time – often all of my free time – working on something that comes in large part from my brain and my efforts, and in collaboration with the impressive skills and efforts of my friends and colleagues who trust me to present their work to the world. the ishi belongs to me and my collaborators, writers, creative staff, etc and it’s something we are proud of and want to share with the world. so…

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stay tuned for our next episode:

you must be kessler.