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My brother and I went and saw this awesome exhibit yesterday.  It’s free and at the Smithsonian until October 5.  Pick a day and put it on your calendar now.

If you don’t live in DC, it may be coming your way soon: check the calendar.

I have recently been frustrated because I don’t have Adobe Acrobate professional on my computer and so have not been able to make PDF files.So a friend sent me to download Cute PDF, a free application which lets you make your own PDFs. Once you install it, Cute PDF is listed as one of your printers: just print to it, and it then asks you for a file name and location for your new PDF file.

My life has become easier.

And we’re off for another week!  We’ll see how my airplane reading pans out…

I’ll be on vacation next week, which probably means I’ll post less.

…than in the field!  Finally out of the office and off to some coastal villages.  More when I return, hopefully.

I have a pleasant tradition of birthdays around the African continent: last year I was in Abuja, Nigeria, the previous year in Kampala, Uganda, and at least once (2000) I was in Busia, Kenya.  And now, Dar es Salaam and outside, Tanzania.

Best wishes to you all, fine readers!

I’ve received ten more reviews for the Africa Reading Challenge.  Here they are:

1. Wizard of the Crow, by Ngugi wa Thiong’o / Aburiria (Magic Man)
2. A Bend in the River, by V.S. Naipaul (Rob Crilly)
3. Coconut, by Kopano Matlwa / South Africa (La Lucuma)
4. The Syringa Tree, by Pamela Gien / South Africa (La Lucuma)
5. Before I Forget, by Andre Brink / South Africa (La Lucuma)
6. The Uncertainty of Hope, by Valerie Tagwira / Zimbabwe (La Lucuma)
7. The Translator, by Leila Aboulela / Sudan (Kate)
8. Measuring Time, by Helon Habila / Nigeria (Amani)
9. Waiting for an Angel, by Helon Habila / Nigeria (Ms Four)
10. Olive Schreiner, by Ruth First and Ann Scott / South Africa (Zhiv)

Jon Stewart and his Senior Black Correspondent give us the best ideas on who would make a great running mate.  (Note: this has a tiny bit of crass language and some flatulence.  But it’s wicked funny.)

Who said Jon Stewart wasn’t a journalist?

I’m listening to J. Maarten Troost’s memoir The Sex Lives of Cannibals: Adrift in the Equatorial Pacific (which – incidentally – has nothing to do with anyone’s sex life). I find the book ultimately not nearly as fun as it should be (more on that later), but I enjoyed his characterization of the nation of Kiribati, made friendly to the U.S. audience:

To picture Kiribati, imagine that the continental U.S. were to conveniently disappear leaving only Baltimore and a vast swath of very blue ocean in its place. Now chop up Baltimore into thirty-three pieces, place a neighborhood where Maine used to be, another where California once was, and so on until you have thirty-three pieces of Baltimore dispersed in such a way so as to ensure that 32/33 of Baltimorians will never attend an Orioles game again. Now take away electricity, running water, toilets, television, restaurants, buildings, and airplanes (except for two very old prop planes, tended by people who have no word for “maintenance”). Replace with thatch. Flatten all land into a uniform two feet above sea level. Toy with islands by melting polar ice caps. Add palm trees. Sprinkle with hepatitis A, B, and C. Stir in dengue fever and intestinal parasites. Take away doctors. Isolate and bake at a constant temperature of 100 degrees Fahrenheit. The result is the Republic of Kiribati. (p15-16)

This morning we drove up to a school in Port Loko: we got there at 8:40, forty minutes after school starts.  School enrollment is 202 students with 7 teachers.  Present?  1 teacher, 1 student.  That’s 0.5% attendance.

[Several more students and teachers came when the lone attending student rang the special HEY-NGO-or-other-foreign-people-are-here bell in the schoolyard.]

After a week of work in Pretoria, on Friday evening I took a taxi to Johannesburg, to the home of my cousin (first cousin once removed, specifically) EP and his family. We talked until late into the night, and around 2pm my brother Daniel arrived in his rental car from Maseru, Lesotho.What to do with one day?

1. In the morning we visited the Apartheid Museum. While I believe the museum could be better organized, it was still powerful to see how this horrible set of policies evolved and then how people of many races and classes fought to bring it to an end. Three hours well spent.

2. We drove to the Soweto township. After seeing Sarafina in the early 1990s, I was very interested in seeing the location of several important events in the struggle against Apartheid. We had only a few minutes, so we just drove for a bit. The parts we saw looked much nicer than some of the townships I saw in Cape Town.

3. We went to a professional rugby match, a steal at US$12 per ticket! We saw a New Zealand team, the Hurricanes, destroy a South African team, the Vodacom Blue Bulls. I’ve never seen a rugby game: men without padding run into each other and form giant piles. It was loads of fun: I also ate a bag of some powerful jerky bought from a vendor. (No hot dogs, but plenty of jerky.)

4. We ate ostrich burgers at a mall food court, surrounded by South African teens and pre-teens. Only one element of that experience was unfamiliar, but it was delicious. And then we browsed a bookstore, discussing options loudly; this is a must for any gathering of members of my family. (The per-trip “zoo visit” threatens to replace the bookstore browse, but we need to hold the line.)

A great day.