Photos taken at the food and products exhibition of the above name taking place at the weekend at the Missouri Botanical Garden on Shaw Blvd, St. Louis. Missouri.
Browsing the archives for the Observations category.
I figured that it’s been long since I last put up a photo post, so here – a few random shots mostly taken in our neighbouring state of Missouri.
My left arm hurts from a TD immunization injection. I’m resolved to blogging about it only because all those darlings I’ve approached for petting the said hand to health have turned it down or have kept quiet and I’ve been left to my own devices: rest, and vulnerability, like a little boy returning from his first hospital visit 🙁 .
The only memorable thing to say was that I paid $6 for said shot, and I have become the last person to do so. As from tomorrow, people approaching the University Health centre to take the shots would pay up to $39. For the first time in over a decade, the State of Illinois is withdrawing subsidies on this service to students and the University Health Centre, as they told me yesterday, will now have to buy the medication by themselves at market value, and sell to students at market price.
It’s the economy, stupid. I’m sure that students won’t be smiling from the Health Centre anytime soon. Not international students at least, many of whom are studying on very limited personal funds. Neither does it help that this mandatory expense is not covered by the $500 per semester compulsory students Health Insurance policies.
On reflection on the coming milestone in Nigeria in the coming days, I came to the conclusion that one of the biggest drawbacks in the national progress till date is the poor handling of the country’s diverse ethnicity condition. For many years, I’ve wondered what it would have been like to live in the times of Tafawa Balewa, and Nnamdi Azikiwe, and Obafemi Awolowo, and the many other earlier nationalists that struggled for the nation’s independent many times from ethnic, but for the most part from nationalistic, standpoints. Eventually, I get to wondering how things could have gone wrong.
Tafawa Balewa remains one of my most admired men of those times not because I knew him, but because I didn’t, and because he was killed for no reason I could easily understand. And because he was one of the brilliant educated northerners who managed to get into the position of authority. And he was a simple man. Yet he was killed. Azikiwe was another one who became the opposition leader in a Western House of assembly in 1952 as a Nigerian and not as an Igbo man. When I think back to how things could have been different if the first coup hasn’t happened, or how things could have been if the coup had been bloodless, or if it had not had an ethnic slant, I sigh and get back to doing something else. Because I wonder if something beautiful and great could have evolved.
On invitation, I have written a post on my reflections on Independent Nigeria at 50 for the Nigerianstalk.org website. There are a few new posts there also by other Nigerian bloggers and I cherish the opportunity to join those distinguished folks in sharing my thoughts with the new generation of Nigerians to whom the future belong. I am not feeling as giddy as the government wants me to feel about these celebrations just yet, not surprisingly. I guess it’s because the country wasn’t born in 1960 anyway, and neither were those who had evolved their different ways of living together even long before any foreign forces stepped foot on the land area we now call our own. If 50 years of independence from the British could still be counted as an achievement, I guess it is a memorable milestone. In any case, check out the Nigeria@50 post series on Nigerianstalk and leave comments when you can.
There’s a law that I can’t yet name, but it says that if you had all the time in the world, you most likely won’t do as much as you would if you were very busy and occupied all through the day. For now, let’s call it the KTravulaw of Time Management. It is the truth in that law that has prevented me from blogging as much as I should this month, and it’s just as well. Studies are kicking into full gear. If symptoms persist, I will blog less and less until I would be able to write only one post in a month. And maybe that will be Nirvana.
Before then, I will be busy finishing the autobiography of William Shatner titled Up Till Now. As expected, it has a lot of funny stories of the man’s life, from the time a female gorilla held his balls and wanted to sleep with him to his very many risks taken in life and in his career. And then I can get over my obsession with Fela! the Musical, and the life of those who populate the story, e.g Sandra Iszadore who was the only woman ever to sing lead on a Fela track. Who was she? How did they meet? What was her relationship with Fela like? Was the relationship consummated? And if so, why/how did they separate?
And then I will try to go to St. Louis all by myself for the first time tomorrow with or without a GPS. Thinking about it now, it sounds like an impossible task. But I have signed up as a volunteer at the International Institute where they teach and resettle immigrants and refugees from parts of the world. I would be teaching (very basic and elementary) English, and I look forward to the experience. More than just a chance to see how volunteering works, or how second language speaking adults learn English for the first time, I also need the experience for my pedagogy class. I was at the Institute for the first time last week with a classmate and I was impressed by what they do with little funding from the Government, but now I will have to go there all by myself. If I get lost, I know whom to call. That is if the road police don’t get me first for being confused on the very confusing interstate highways.
Many more things have happened to me since a while, but I can’t tell you right now. I should either be sleeping or reading for the week’s classes. The weekend went by too fast. Have a nice week.