Oscar Jr. Was Here

A Blogs around the World Sampler

Whistling Thorns is a place literally in the middle of nowhere. But, you get pretty good pizzas there.

It lies on the pipeline road that connects the highway to Tanzania with the road to lake magadi. Kinda like connecting two points without a name on the map with a straight line. With the workhorse Pug 504 loaded up we made good speed. While a bitch in city traffic, the Pug is a master of the Kenyan highway. This arrow straight-road passes through savannah of the Tsavo eco-system. There aren't many people living here, traffic on the road is practically non-existent.

@Unganisha.org

We were discussing Naadam and she confessed that she finds Mongolian wrestling boring. I admitted that I'm not too crazy about cricket, my beloved country's national sport, which is as much of an acquired taste as Mongolian wrestling. I think it would take as long to understand the rules of cricket as it would to understand those of Mongol wrestling. Then we got onto the Mongolian diet. She started explaining how eating mutton and fat and dough in winter, and yoghurt and curd and milk in summer, leads to a long life, it being a perfectly balanced diet.

@chris in mongolia

One old tradition in Ukraine is to greet guests w/ an elaborate loaf of bread with pretty decorations on top and salt, both of which the guests eat. We were entertained by the musical stylings of one of the host mothers who performs Ukrainian folk songs with a group while wearing traditional embroidered dress. I kept thinking how we had traveled so far and how we were now, I don't know, rewarded for our efforts. Not so much by the food and music, but rather from all the effort that these people make for us. It is so hard still to fathom that these people take us in as strangers and treat us as honored guests, all on no merit of our own. I am humbled every day to be here, to be treated as I am. We are tremendously privileged to have this opportunity and I thank especially the American taxpayers for supporting us.

Much merriment, toasting and drinking of homemade wine and vodka ensued, from which I already have a headache (the wine, not the merriment per se). There may have also been dancing to loud Ukrainian traditional songs translated to pop music and a poor rendition sung of "America the Beautiful" but I will never tell our cluster's secrets.

@Peace Corps || Ukraine

To write with such casualness is not to condone such behaviour. Nor is it to condemn it. It is simply to acknowledge a particular national trait, birthed in our colonial past. It is a phenomenon at once both simple and complex, one that still holds strong, even in this anodyne, politically correct age. In essence it has to do with the harsh colonial mentality of not allowing anyone else dignity, of seeing everyone as being in the same leaky boat as yourself. Since no one was exempt from being lampooned - not even the white masters - the result was that, in the main, and once you weren't being genuinely offensive, no one's pride was damaged. In any case, there was no such thing as racial pride to be damaged. No solid notion of racial consciousness had as yet been formed.

Of course, now we're up to our ears in racial pride - almost exclusively African and Indian - which has more to do with politics than it does with any genuine concern for ancestral heritage. But peel away that flimsy layer and beneath is the true Trinidadian, who, regardless of his race, and whether he wishes to admit it, or even if he doesn't realise it, is the same as everyone else: a Creole.

@Notes from a small island

Last night Norbert made his return in spectacular fashion. For those of you who might not remember or didn't read my email about the critters in my house, Norbert is the foot-long green gecko that lives in my fale.

So last night, while I was struggling to get to sleep in the middle of the night about 3am or so, I heard this huge crashing sound in the kitchen. I get up, walk over 10 feet to the kitchen and turn on the lights.

What do I see?

The first thing is the glass top of my stock pot, which is on the floor. Fortunately it's in one piece. Then I see my kittens. Mak is on the screen door and Filemu is on top of the fridge. They're looking up in the corner. Up in the corner is, of course, Norbert.

@American Idle

My point being...get over yourselves already! Not everything that happens in Latin America is the result of some plot hatched in a smoky room at the State Dept., y'know? Learn to deal: there was going to be a coup in Chile anyway - because whatever the CIA might have been up to, a huge swathe of Chilean society and almost all of the military supported it. CIA connnivance sure didn't hurt, but for the love of christ, what kind of catatonically self-involved view of the world puts a little CIA logistical and financial help at the center of the analysis, while showing no interest at all in the psychology of rampant fear that took over the Chilean middle class, its order and progress ideology, its deep catholic roots, and its cultural ascendancy over the military? Is it really that difficult, or boring, for you to stop thinking about your own damn country for five minutes and consider the internal dynamics of the societies you're purportedly interested in? Because, you see, these kinds of questions strongly suggest that you're not actually interested in Latin America at all! You're just using Latin America as a screen on which to project your little ideological anti-US-imperialism circle jerk. Enough!

@Caracas Chronicles

Posted by oscarjr at August 3, 2003 03:36 PM | TrackBack