Nobody wants to be the last one holding the hot potato when the time is over; that’s kinda how I feel about electronic waste. E-waste is a really, really big problem. There is a village in China, for example, where people crouch over fires of melting electronic components (mobile phones, motherboards, wires, CRT monitors, etc). Children have sores all over their bodies, mothers have breast milk with heavy metals, cancer rates are through the roof. All of this just to reclaim a few ounces of gold, silver, or who-knows-what other precious metals live inside that 21st-century trash.
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Kenya
The Evolution of Language
Last week I was reading about the evolution of Latin languages in Western Europe and it made me think about Swahili here in East Africa. Swahili is the official language of Kenya and Tanzania (and apparently Uganda, but I’ve been there and I didn’t hear much). The thing is, while most Kenyans do speak Swahili, everyone knows it’s not the sanifu (“pure”) brand you’ll find spoken in Tanzania. After independence, Tanzania’s first president was all excited about forging a strong national identity, and part of that was pushing for the adoption of Swahili as the national language. I read in Paul Theroux’s Dark Star Safari that one independence-era government official’s words were: “English is the language of the imperialists.” Sure enough, traveling in Tanzania is hard if you don’t speak Swahili because English is by no means pervasive!
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Things Always Get Worse
Whenever you think that things couldn’t possibly get more busy/stressful/expensive/whatever, they do! Here’s the deal, I posted a few weeks ago that our semester had started and that I was teaching four classes; it turns out that I’ll be teaching five!
A student came last week saying she failed a class in 2005 and she wants to come sit for the class again. The thing is that it’s my favorite area, and I’m really the only one at the school who can teach it. The course is Operating Systems II, basically Unix/Linux system administration. It’s not really terrible, it’s just bad timing because we’re already in the fifth week of classes.
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