ktravula – a travelogue!

Browsing ktravula – a travelogue! blog archives for January, 2011.

Subzero in the Midwest

This is how to freeze: move from a tropical town in an African country to live in a part of town in America where four inches of snow and (up to) minus ten degrees of cold is never enough to close the school even for one day. Have a series of clothes that will look a little weird when stacked upon another in a fashion meant just to defy the weather. Have a series of apartment mates whose idea of a hot temperature on the house heater is different from yours. Have classes that take place in the evenings when it is usually the coldest. Lastly, well, be thin enough to let into your chest all the cold air that blows. Be restless. Resent all the fatty American-style food that, even though may be junk – sometimes have what’s required to battle cold: fat.

The result is usually the same: a week or more of terrible flu, discomfort, and bed rest. And after a while, and plenty of fluids, and sometimes after breaking one’s promise never to dabble into American medication for worry about ever present contraindications, one is back up again. It also helps to have lost one of one’s pair of gloves.

PS: Clarissa seems to have had it worse than me. Please give her some love.

Subzero in the Midwest was published on January 13th, 2011, with the tags , , , under the Observations, Soliloquy category. There are currently 4 comments on this article so far.

Fringe Benefits of Failure

This Commencement speech given by J.K. Rowling at Havard in June 2008 is worth sharing.

Fringe Benefits of Failure was published on January 13th, 2011, with the tags , , , under the Academic, Literature category. There are currently no comments on this article so far.

On Jos, Again

This is how I usually know that something bad has happened in Jos again. My stat counter starts showing new readers coming in after searching for phrases like “Jos killing” or “Jos crises” or “fight in Jos” or “hausa and fulani”.  It’s heartbreaking. Every day, new figures of people killing each other makes it even harder to grieve without asking if there’s not much more we can do to prevent future occurrences.Government won’t solve it either so we’re here wringing hands.

I have written a few posts on my thoughts on Jos, my visit to the town in July 2010, and a conversation I had with a few citizens while there. We have even raised money to send to the victims of the first major wave of attacks last year. Now, all of it seems so grossly inadequate to deal with a deteriorating state of things in a once peaceful place. Security officials are complicit and nothing seems to be working. Greedy politicians are busy slugging it out with themselves for the ticket to the next election while compatriots reduce themselves to ruins. Plateau has turned into a state of nature, and yes, it does have fanatical religion tied to its root cause.

So what needs to be done? Another state-of-emergency? A dialogue among all stakeholders so that they find a permanent solution to the conflict? A UN intervention? More guns, so that when each side is armed, there will be no monopoly on violence? Or a continued preaching of love so that everyone gets along? Do we need the African Union? I’m open to ideas because I haven’t come up with a satisfactory one.

On Jos, Again was published on January 12th, 2011, under the Soliloquy category. There are currently no comments on this article so far.

Stoning the Devil

written originally for Iraq, and Mecca, and Amina Lawal about to be stoned: March 2003. Now also for Kano, and Afghanistan, and Mali…

A million march of contrite feet
Have trudged on these bright hallowed grounds
While rams of hate graze along in God’s own fields.

Heavy paces in annual contrition
Have trekked like peasant armies on a sea of evil heads,
On thousand squelching grains of stone
As small rocks of war.

Thousand heads have rolled in this dust
In mounds against target gods…

“We are stoning the Devil”
We are always stoning the devil.

Eternal zest with religious strength
Have pelted the Significant with harsh pellets
And a stone will to fiery extinction, yearly,
At varying levels of human will…

“Gbosa!”

Rocks have darted across in wilful spread
on evil personified ahead of the surging crowd.
Hate yet thrives in unnumbered axes
In rains and moulds, on hills and western skies.

So cast the first stone then
When evil remains in hearts across the open earth.
Cast a stone as hate grips like a fiery noose
Around a strained neck of drunken love?

Cast the first stone.

On a crooked way to light
Always lies this crude, black rock.

_________________________

Culled from Headfirst into the Meddle (2005)

(c) Kola Tubosun.

Stoning the Devil was published on January 12th, 2011, with the tags , , , under the Art category. There are currently 2 comments on this article so far.

Scheduling a Semester

One of the more challenging parts of the beginning of a semester is figuring out a right schedule so as to prevent a case when each day is spent trying to catch up with the previous one. A graduate student who is also a graduate assistant faces the challenge of being able to balance his time in order to satisfy both his employers and his academic sponsors. It makes no sense to be a stellar employee and then become a poor student. I’ve always wondered how people who do more than one job (and have families, children etc) cope with being graduate students at the same time. Imagine having two young children, two or three jobs, and three classes a semester. But it’s America. Being resilient might just be the most important trait to possess.

I taught the first Foreign Language Yoruba class yesterday. It was mainly introductory, and it lasted an hour. In my experience, the first class is always the most crucial, especially for students hoping to see if the class is worth taking at all or not. The pattern is also always the same: the strange man walks in to a full class of staring students. They’re all silent and wait for him to break the ice. He stands there for a moment, thinks of the first words to say, and then walks back to the blackboard to write out a list of key words that they would need to remember – Yoruba, Nigeria, West Africa, 30 million speakers, Wole Soyinka, Hakeem Olajuwon, Sade Adu, Adewale Akinnuoye Agbaje… – and then returns, by which time the words would come by themselves. “Hi. I’m Nigerian. Last year was my first time in the United States…”. From experience I know that it always helps to be seen first as the outsider.

I also attended my first class for the semester yesterday. It’s called “Discourse Analysis”, and I’m looking forward to all I can learn about how to analyse conversations and classify them on the basis of content, use, participants, context and many other variables. In the absence of a new commitment to the International Institute, I’m hoping that my class and work schedules will give me enough time to gain as much as possible knowledge from class interactions in a new course whose content looks promising so far.

Scheduling a Semester was published on January 11th, 2011, with the tags , , , under the Academic, Observations, Opinion category. There are currently 7 comments on this article so far.