It feels like I spend most of my life writing. You probably do too. Work emails, personal emails, reports, text messages, multiple afternoon hour-long g-chats with friends (most if whom are really, really far away and finally get to work or stay up really late which seemingly bridges the 8 hour time gap). Plus there’s blogging. Mustn’t forget about that.
That also means I spend a lot of time reading. So do you.
From here I’m torn and am going to take this post in two (somehow related) directions – first about education then on to something funny that I read and helps explain why I spend a disproportionate amount of time looking confused and stifling the “WTF’s” from escaping my wish-they-were-a-little-more-plump lips at unfortunate times.
So first, a bit on education. As a kid I mostly liked school. Teachers liked me. It was easy. I was good at it. Sure I almost never wanted to get out of bed early enough to attend, but I also never really had to work very hard when I got there. Apparently I got that gene from my mom. In fact, I was so good at it that over the holidays my Aunt presented me with a book that I made in the 7th grade. She now works at the same school as my 7th grade teacher, who had kept it all this time, showed my Aunt she had it and then demanded that it be returned after the holidays. I’m tootin’ my own horn about this one cause that’s a ‘lotta years to keep something that my mother would have likely thrown out by now.
My brother didn’t get the gene. He had to work for it more. Malesh Mark (that’s ‘sorry’ in Arabic. Cause I’m so smart.) I didn’t set a very good example for him but he did turn out pretty ok anyways. And he did get lots of other good stuff. Mostly from my dad. Which means that mom and I get to roll our eyes at each other and ‘piff’ cause they’re from Mars and we’re totally from somewhere that makes us not understand them.
If it weren’t a Friday at the end of a long and sweaty week, I might have been able to more creatively interweave all that info into my broader point, but I’m tired. Also, I’m hoping that I don’t have to convince anyone reading this that girls are just as good as boys. It seems silly to have to assert this doesn’t it? Cause we all know it already, right?
So remember when I told you about the really conservative village that I went to? Not the one where the kids thought I should be killed but the one where I had to wear the traditional outfit and hide if a man walked by?
Not a single girl goes to school there. Not one.
Ok, maybe one or two, because it’s statistically possible that my two-stage random samplecluster survey didn’t randomly pick them, which is why we take in to consideration the 95% confidence intervals to indicate that although my point estimate is 0, it may be somewhere between 0 and, like, 2. But of all the households we interviewed, not a single girl between the age of 5-16 years was attending school, and the chances of us having missed some major pocket of educated girls is quite unlikely. Of the mothers that we interviewed, the only schooling most of them received was to attend religious education, so at least there’s that. But woah!? Shocking. Sad.
Of course other areas I’ve surveyed haven’t been quite as drastic. Though none are very high. That’s a shit load of girls who will never, ever have even the slightest chance of getting to sit at their Aunt’s table on Christmas Day pissing themselves laughing at their 7th grade self (who was fabulous but didn’t know it yet).
The second path this post will take is to talk about a study that was done on this same area. It was an Anthropological Study - in theory a professional piece of work - and I had to read through it in preparation for writing up the full MICS report, which needs to include background information and a well-informed Discussion Section.
I’m pretty sure that someone got paid seriously decent money to do this. And I am so glad, because I got so much entertainment out of it. In fact, it practically made my day yesterday. I’ve not made much progress in deciphering most of it for the purposes of writing my report, but man, it’s been a fun ride!
Here are some excerpts, so you can enjoy too, along with some witty commentary (and some light editing so you may have a hope in hell of figuring it out. Punctuation isn’t a strong suit here). Maybe it’s only funny to those of us on the inside. Maybe the extreme heat and dehydration is playing a role. I hope not. But if so, malesh.
Discussing the local vegetation:
"The Dom trees do not burden civilization with a heavy hand in the hill, but draws the troglodyte gently from his fastness to mix with other people, and gives him the wherewithal to buy and to experience things which his fathers did not know."
Apparently we hired a poet instead of a researcher. Do you have any idea what he’s on about?
Moreover, selling Dom kernels in the market yields almost the same amount of money as skilled labour. A good husk of nearly a thousand nuts a day, at present high prices, lying each nut on a stone and cracking it with a couple of deft blows with another stone before extracting the kernel and throwing the husk to his expectant goats: it takes the inexperienced five minutes and a crushed finger or two to extract a single nut; expert cred.
Watch your fingers…
Also, I need to stop worrying about my street cred; perhaps my expert cred is suffering as a result?
The communities have no taboo about visiting clinics. Even during our visit the 1st caesarean delivery in the history of [the town] was conducted on a 13 year old mother.
I’m all about promoting clinic deliveries, but I’d like to think we could get some girls in school before the delivery room
“Kai”
The traditional healer heats a metal poker in a fire, and then presses the hot poker onto the parts of the body that are troubling the patient or certain places. i.e., the joints or shoulders. The type of sickness determines the type of Kai.
Remind me to never seek treatment for a pain in my eye while visiting this area. Or pain in my ass for that matter.
[A certain tribe] are noticeably more lax than the [tribe in this particular area] and in 1932 the tribal authorities were driven to disallow the usual compensatory fine of a she-camel, for adultery on the grounds that husbands were deliberately encouraging the infidelity of their wives.
If you’re encouraging/encouraged to sleep with another person for financial gain , I’m pretty sure we have different words for that…
Our key informant about the locality is [guy’s name here], who works as a tax collector in the animals market. When asked about his job in the locality, after expressing his boredom from so many questions, he designated himself as special representative of the Commissioner.
Next time I’m talking to someone and get bored, I’m going to tell them they are not keeping me sufficiently entertained. Then I’m going to say that I’m now formally representing Bon Jovi, cause he writes the soundtrack to my life and has great hair. Seems reasonable to me.
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