T.I.A.

Last night, through no merit of my own, I was given temporary access to vast quantities of very hot water and a bathtub built to accommodate the full length of an adult Victorian white girl. (I had to scrunch a bit to get my own self fully under the water, but I managed.) I am aware that drought could return to Southern Africa, and I do not know by what precious energy the water was heated. (Was it through the burning of scarce wood and the ATP cycled during its collection? Was it through the combustion of scarcer petrochemical resources?) I tried to feel guilty for my extravagance, but I could not. I was fairly tired, very cold, and extremely dirty; I also hurt a pretty good bit. So I lay in the water and thought about the phylogeny of the Reptilia (today’s Wildlife Management subject). If somebody had demanded at gunpoint that I exit the bathtub, I would have said, “Shoot me, you son of a bitch. If I’m headed for hell, at least I’ll stay warm. And if I’m going to heaven, I feel as if I’m already there.” This is Africa.

The day had been a hard one, at least from my soft-American perspective. Another instructor had come by to show me my classroom. When we got there, my students were present. I said, “So this is where we shall meet tomorrow.” One of the students replied, “The Timetable [= syllabus] was changed last night, and we are here for class now.” So I babbled about Wildlife Management for a while, trying without success to learn names that make “Abercrombie” sound as short as “Smith.” After an hour of embarrassment I escaped to my office and crashed down into the single chair—which crashed down itself, all the way to the floor. That hard landing jammed up my back quite painfully, and I spent 10-15 minutes cursing Africa University for its infrastructure and the United Methodist Church for its lack of support. Then I struggled into action and tested the PowerPoint projector that I’d brought from South Carolina. The power-load blew my 220à110 transformer, which had faithfully served three tours in Africa and one in Vietnam. This is a semi-tragedy since I brought only rechargeable batteries for my field equipment and since all my battery-chargers are 110-Volt only. So I reset my laptop and PPT projector for 220, and they worked OK; I’ll worry about the batteries later. After all, TIA.

While I was still in the throes of electrical tragedy, the Acting Dean swept into my office with the warmest of hugs and absolutely effusive praise for my teaching ability and my selfless dedication to Jesus and agricultural education. Well, folks, I thought it was affection, but it was, uh, foreplay: I was about to get screwed! It seems that one foreign lecturer believed what he heard about Zimbabwe—and on what would have been his first day of class, he backed out of his teaching contract (by e-mail; if he’d been here and resigned in person, he might have been killed, perhaps by me). Of course the Ag faculty will have to split up his courses amongst available staff, and I had been officially defined as “available staff.” In other words, I’d run from Sparkle City to avoid a semester of statistics—and am teaching statistics in Old Mutare. So what if the students don’t have textbooks or calculators; so what if I don’t have my notes or even a table for the normal curve. I just hope my Second Years know some calculus. And who knows; after all, TIA.

After I’d become a statistics teacher, I attempted to replicate, with Dry Erase Markers, Jesus’ loaves-and-fishes miracle. For some reason I failed and consequently had to give away one of the four markers I’d brought with me—uh, to a darn botanist. I celebrated my generosity (or stupidity) by trying to send some e-mail; this was another attempted miracle, which may or may not have failed. In the nasty world of local economics, I attempted to set up the exchange of dollars (in a market that is at best dark gray); we’ll see how that works. As quitting time approached, I saw an open storage-room door, so I entered and stole a T-square and a Keson land-measuring wheel from Engineering. As I headed back to my temporary lodging, I tried to say a few prayers (mostly that I wouldn’t get caught with the measuring wheel before Monday), but for me prayers are about as easy as A.U. e-mail.

Speaking of things religious, I should tell you that an old boy came into my office today trying to sell carved soapstone figures. I’d never had that happen on campus before, so I asked the would-be seller what the heck was going on. He said that he’d had a business in town that did OK, but that in recent years he’d made a lot more money VIM teams (VIM us U.Meth acronym for Volunteers in Mission; these folks are briefly deployed into sundry areas to accomplish sundry good deeds; at A.U. they would captive buyer-audiences for soapstone carvers). So he’d sold house & business in town to move next to the A.U. campus. “But this winter there have been noVIM teams, and I am having difficulty feeding my family.” I told the man good luck—no, of course I didn’t buy anything. (On campus? I’m not that crazy.) I did tell him that if no VIM teams came at all, we could talk in October. Perhaps I should not have been surprised soon to discover that this no-VIM-poormouthing was a scam, but at the time I felt fairly wretched about saying No.

Despite my (uh, in this case unnecessary) guilt, and perhaps as a special grace, I received the bath described in Paragraph One, and it was wonderful. Afterwards, I tried to sleep, but I soon woke up and began thinking about small-sample statistics—uh, in a very personal context. You see, late last night the darn mosquitoes came out in squadrons. (How they manage to sustain flight-metabolism at 10^oC is a mystery to me; they sounded as if they were cruising in on snowmobiles.) Since I haven’t been able to get to the Mutare chemists (= drugstores, who are probably out of Deltaprin anyhow), my thoughts turned to malaria. (Yep, I’ve already given out of my U.S. emergency stock of pills.) Since I couldn’t sleep anyhow, I pulled out a flashlight and tried to observe a mosquito in the process of Ab-exsanguination (sp?). But the little winged devils were very light-shy. (So why didn’t I sleep with the lights on? Power outage.) I finally did catch a bloodsucker in the act, and it was not Anopholes (sp?). So I had a very favorable result from a sample of one; that’s way too small to suit me; can’t get me no variance term; can’t work me no probability. Therefore, folks, if I start writing about lime-green clouds and the Three-Horned Nature of God, you’ll be able to guess what happened. And again, TIA.

Now it’s Wednesday morning, and shortly I’ll go out to seek an Internet connection for transmitting this missive. Meanwhile, I should offer an update on the VIM business. As has been my A.U. custom, I attended the Wednesday 0800 worship. As the service progressed, I was shocked to observe the entrance of about a dozen white people. It was—you guessed it—a nice, big VIM team, in this case from Fairview UMC in Maryville, Tennessee. You folks at home can have no idea how much I wish I could have discovered previous information about their coming. I’d have given hundreds of green-colored Yankee dollars for such news. It would have made a huge difference to my financial situation, to my personal comfort, to my book-related research, to my classes, to my colleagues here, to my students! If each VIM-er had been willing to carry even 10 extra pounds of stuff for me, I could have had a couple of hundred pounds of material that I really, really need. Before I left the USA, I’d asked about VIM teams but couldn’t get any relevant info. Now, for some reason, this missed opportunity has banged me around more than shortages, more than admin screw-ups, more than my add-on stats class. Indeed, I have been sitting in my office, muttering under my breath, suggesting that the whole U.Meth hierarchy should seek sexual congress with members of the Anatidae. Heck. But I know about common problems back in the States. T.I.A. (That is America.)

I need to recover my equilibrium and give up this selfish concern with missed opportunities. I think I’ll walk outside and try to see a new bird.ecH