Ode to OSHA

Today the electricity for my oven was connected by a man who is not only an electrician, but also a plumber, a guard for my building, my best source for sex vocabulary, a father to several of my local friends, and an inspirational drinker. You can see him from half a kilometer away because he's about 6-foot-5 and always wears anime-print club shirts.

After the connections were done, I helped him lift the oven back into its spot. Then he began to demonstrate how to use it.

"This knob is the timer."

"Mmmm-hmmm," I responded flatly (the clock icon gave it away).

"This knob is the gas if you turn it this way. 155 degrees here. If you turn it the other way, it's the grill." He did, in fact, turn the knob, and the oven light came on. He opened the door to point at the electric element. I put my hand under it, waiting for the heat to radiate. "Let me show you," he said as he, too, reached inside the oven.

I retracted my hand to get out of his way, but he motioned for me to put it back in. "Let me show you," he repeated. I think I also heard him say the word kema.

At this point my brain chimed in, saying Look, you idiot, he's about to burn your hand on that thing! Despite all the immediate evidence that this was true, a deep-seated rational part of me maintained that he must be joking, and that I should play along.

So I put my hand back in. With the utmost grace and gentleness, his fingers clapsed my wrist and guided my pinky straight upward, where — yes — it touched the element.

My oh-shit-I'm-on-fire reflex kicked in, and I jumped back from the oven. "You just burned my pinky!" I shouted. Communication is the foundation of any good relationship. I wanted to keep him in the loop.

"Hahahaha," his smile said.

"That's gonna leave a mark," I added, gawking at my finger and its band of rapidly congealing skin cells.

"Ah, yes, you're white," he agreed, "you burn differently than we do."

Before he left, we reviewed the day's new vocabulary.

Carving out a Little America

Thanks to:

• the U.S. Embassy for the turkey
• PCV Steve and his neighbor Arlinda for roasting the turkey
• me for the gravy and the pies
• PCV Brett Beach for twice-baked potatoes, mashed potatoes, biscuits, fine wine, and hosting!!
• PCV Brett Slezak for the pasta salad, expert apple-cutting, and all of the following amazing photos

some preparation

then, you know, a trip to the beach

the feast!
clockwise: pasta salad, twice-baked potatoes covered in
cheese, mashed potatoes, gravy, turkey, biscuits, a hand

clockwise: Cristiano, Nelson, B. Slezak, B. Beach, Chase

PCV Brendan waiting for pie

feast means festa! (PCV Steve seated at left)

it was dark outside, so we put on sunglasses to match

The Rains Came: Time-Delay Live-Blogging to you Direct from Inside a Flooding Building

I was in the city, in an office at the Ministry of Agriculture, when I overheard someone mention it. "Txuba forte na Fajã!", they said. Phooey, I thought. I piped in, mentioning that I live in Fajã and desperately want to see a downpour there, but that it never seems to happen unless I'm somewhere else. I joked that maybe if stayed in the city for a whole two weeks, we'd actually get a decent rainy season.

As if to prove me peripheral, it started downpouring outside the Ministry that very minute. Across the street, wind whipped white curtains out into the wetness, until rushed hands reached through the windows to pull the shutters shut and fidget with the bolts until they locked. People ran for cover. The air lost its stickiness as raindrops taxied all the heat to the ground.

Satisfied, I went back to work, or whatever it was that I was doing.

In the afternoon I returned to Fajã. The earth was damp, but you couldn't tell how much water had passed through it. Puddles weren't any larger than I'd ever seen them after other rains, though. When I got home I sat for a few minutes, then began to read magazines and other things lying in piles around me. I searched for a graph of supply-and-demand. I looked up a recipe for Sweet 'n' Sour Chicken. Not finding the graph, I sketched my own version, and not having chicken, I started defrosting some pork.

I would have left the house to buy the pineapple juice that I evidently need for the sauce, but it started raining again. By the time it stopped again I was somehow in the middle of frying sweet potatoes, so I couldn't go out. As I finished off the last few crispy, greasy, coma-inducing morsels, the rain picked up once more, this time matching the force that I had seen in the city in the morning.

On my windowsill the BBC was discussing why Africa is poor. The window was closed, but the shutters were open, affording a wonderful view of the weather. And yet, somehow, I missed two strikes of lightning — a rude disappointment, considering that before today I had begun to wonder if thunderstorms ever happen here. Each strike was accompanied by a pop in the radio transmission and a flash in the periphery of my vision. After the first flash, I went straight back to reading, thinking that I'd missed my only chance. After the second, I stared intently into the sky, waiting for the third. But the third never came.

What I saw instead were drops of water beading on the underside of my windows. That probably shouldn't be happening, I thought to myself. Minutes later the rain got even stronger — the strongest I've ever seen here — and the pitter-patter on my windowpanes gave way to sheets of water sloshing down.

     |        |        |         |
man  |        |        |         |  nature
     | window | ###### | shutter |
     |________| ###### |_________|
    ###############################

As you can see, if everything had been closed, the shutter would have protected my kitchen. But let's zoom in and see what happens with the shutter open:

     |            |
     |            |+-- crazy raindrops
     |            |+-- crazy raindrops! 
man  |            ||
     |   window   ||  ############            OMG!!! no
     |            ||  ############           shutter here!!
     |____________||  ############
                   |  ############
  <----------------+  ############
      OMG!!! no       ############
   weather stripping  ############
         here!!       ############
    ##########################################################

It's kind of like those cop movies where the S.W.A.T. team rappels down the side of a building, kicks in the glass, and gracefully arcs their way inside onto the 5th story. That's how the rain surged under my window and started flooding my windowsill.

I began to mop it up with a rag, but there was too much water, so I added a small towel. Two small beetles who had been living in an old 10-kilo margarine tub drowned to death as I wrung out water there, flooding their home to keep mine dry.

I was still losing headway on the windowsill, so I opened the window and reached through the rain to pull the shutters closed. That did the trick, and a minute later, I was at rest.

Oh, I then remembered. The conference room is probably a lake by now.

Let me step back a bit, to a boring but important part of the story: I live in a two-floor building owned by the Ministry. On the second floor are my apartment and a conference room; on the first floor are offices and a classroom. It was gutted and totally renovated last year. Generally this means it's all shiny, bright, new, and up to western standards. Generally.

The conference room floods because … well, we're not entirely sure yet, but it probably has something to do with the fact that they only put one coat of sealant on that half of the [flat] roof. For the last few weeks [of dryness, between the last rain and this one] I've been waiting for the contractor to apply a second coat. But the rain beat him here. Sure enough, when I checked, there was a huge, deep puddle in that room.

I don't own a mop, so I decided there was nothing I could do. But the sight inspired me to check for problems elsewhere. Good thing too, because my bedroom looked more or less the same. Practically the whole floor, under the bed and all, was covered in water. I beamed at my good fortune for having cleared every inch of that space a few weeks back. Had this happened any time between February and July, I would've ended up with a lot of very soppy, smelly clothes and blurry-inked papers.

So I put the rag and the towel on tag-team duty. One went down for the soak while the other got wrung out over the tub. Then they switched. It worked, but eventually I got tired of the rag's measly absorptive powers and I retired it. After a while the towel got smug about its efficacy, so to punish it, I stood on top of it and sashayed my way across the tile while singing MGMT's "Kids".

The problem in my bedroom, by the way, was conceptually the same as in my kitchen. Instead of normal windows I have these door-height shutters that, like doors, go all the way to the floor. The bottom half of the "shutter" can't actually move, so it should be sealed to the floor with something like caulking. But it's not — there's just a gap. So raindrops are free to slide down the outside of the shutter and slingshot theirselves onto my floor.

Anyway, all the hand-mopping put me in the mood to write, so I headed downstairs toward the office. But on my way, I noticed water coming in under the balcony door in the hall. It being the balcony door, I decided I could just sweep the water back outside. So I went to the broom closet, picked the rattier of two available brooms, and started whisking the water back to nature.

Except then the broom snapped in half. Or nearly so — one end now dangles from the other by a thread. (The pole is evidently a hollow tube of the thinnest possible aluminum, made to be bought cheaply and used briefly. I don't have much patience for such products, but all the same, I wish I could post a picture of the way I have it stored now. It's kind of post-modern. It's in a closet leaning against a chair, except the chair has a dark rag draped over it, which hides the break in the pole. So glancing up from the ground you see a perfectly normal broom getting lost in a rag, but then the top half is sticking out sideways at an angle that makes no sense. When the housekeeper sees her broken broom, will she find it as funny as I do? No, sadly, but I can still dream of a universe in which she would.)

Thankfully, the other broom had a solid-wood handle — yeeessss! — and I used that to finish the job. Then I scurried back to the computer and wrote a bit (I jokingly call this "live-blogging" because I'm writing as it happens, but without Internet I can't actually post anything today, so maybe it doesn't really count).

Then I went to check on my bedroom, which turned out to be soaked again. Banishing from my thoughts a certain sense of futility, I hand-mopped it again. Then I had the insight that stuffing paper towels in the gaps under the shutters might convince the water to stay outside (hallelujah, it did!).

Then I noticed water dripping in a new place: the stairway. Turned out to be coming from the rooftop landing, which was flooded edge to edge because of — you guessed it — water ninjas sliding down the outside of the door to the roofstop and throwing themselves inside through the gap at the bottom. I brought the good broom, opened the door, and started casting the water out onto the roof. But I had to ask myself if the roof, wet as it already was, deserved more of a burden. The roof is supposed to drain itself — it has pipes for that — but the slopes are all so meager and sloppy that huge lakes still form before the pipes start doing any good.

I decided to speed up the process. So with bare feet, white shorts, a brown dress shirt, and a broom, I marched out into the rain and the night and started sweeping water towards the drainpipes. Without a proper push-broom, I really couldn't do much, but I enjoyed myself just the same. By the time I stopped skipping around and singing ("Singin' in the Rain", Gene Kelly), I was soaked.

From up there, incidentally, I could see a river of muddy water rushing across my front gate. No exit. And by extension, no Sweet 'n' Sour pork that night.

O, curse ye, flawed house!

Most of the time, mind you, I believe that my housing situation spoils me, but then I remember all these nagging half-measures, and they totally cancel out the benefits. I can accept western comforts and conveniences, but then they should work like western comforts and conveniences. For example, I enjoy having nice clean tile floors instead of the dirt or straw I might've ended up with in mainland Africa. But in the U.S., houses are hermetically sealed, so the only thing that gets tile floors dirty there are spills and footprints. Having to worry about the elements is not part of the gameplan. If I have to worry about the elements, I don't want tile floors. I don't want that responsibility.

A friend of mine named Ryan has embraced the tiny-living (small-living, maybe?) movement. The idea is to have only exactly as much stuff and space as you need. The houses these people build cover less ground than most master bedrooms, but everything is contained in that space — a place to sleep, a place to cook, a place to work, a place to live. And a place for all your stuff.

I kind of like the idea, and I think it's what I found so romantic about the old [tin-roof, concrete-floor] farm house that I once expected to be my home. It wasn't fancy, but I loved that there was nothing to take care of. Nothing to diagnose! If an electrical wire fried (few as there were), I'd see the smoke. A roach could run, but there was nowhere for it to hide, no closets, no cracks. Perhaps today there would have been a leak in the roof there, but if so, I would have seen it and put a bucket under it. None of this seeping-through-the-plaster mysticism. Who knows, maybe the whole house is flooded right now! But who cares? It's just cement, and under that, just earth. If I lived there, I would have just picked up my clothes and papers and feet for the night, and waited to sweep away the water at sunrise.

* * *

A few days have passed in which hardly a soul greeted any other soul without mentioning rain. The shiny new paved road here is, in many parts, still shiny, but in other parts coated with mud, or covered with rocks, or both. In several spots there is so much mud and so many rocks that it looks as if the mountain has reclaimed the notch that was cut out of it. But men don't like their roads to be impassable, so they came with their machines the next morning and started excavating the notches anew.

In other news, the air has been washed, every color on the hills is vibrant, and the corn is about to grow.

Life Raft

Behind my house there is a small road, and at the end of the road is reservoir #4. I like reservoir #4. I sit on its outer wall and dangle my feet over the water, staring at one grove of banana palms as the fronds of another rustle behind me in the breeze. Few other spots here are so green and so calm.

The reservoir is always being filled and always being emptied, so although I never see the same water twice, its height never changes. That's too bad, because its height is measly; it stands more than a meter below the top of the wall. Frogs can't jump that high from water, so when they manage to get themselves inside the reservoir, they usually tire of swimming and die before they get out.

Today it was all interrupted — the green, the calm, and the judgement of frogs — because there were two large pieces of styrofoam floating in the water. From a distance I thought to myself, Silly people, what made you think that styrofoam is biodegradable? I was being facetious, of course. Whoever put it there surely didn't think about it at all. Trash, after all, is something that just disappears.

The careless trash culture doesn't totally explain this one, though. If you drop a wrapper on the ground, maybe you believe that it'll just blow away to the sea and nobody will ever notice. Or maybe you drop it at a soccer field knowing that somebody is paid to pick up trash there. But large pieces of styrofoam in a water tank? What you know is that somebody else will have to deal with it. Maybe even your cousin. But you drop it anyway.

And lo and behold, the frogs thank you! To them, the styrofoam is a precious, life-saving lily pad. When I got there, one adult frog was perched atop the larger piece. After I sat down, another crawled up to beach himself. And across both pieces were dozens of baby frogs no larger than a fingernail, perhaps freshly graduated from tadpolehood and totally unaware that solid ground could be anything but white, slick, crumbly.

Appreciating the frogs' predicament but still bemoaning the litter, I searched for an alternative. Specifically, I searched for something plank-like that the frogs could use as a ramp to get up and out. But the best I found on the ground were gangly, unstable twigs, and I didn't want to start ripping fronds off of trees that weren't mine, so I made peace with the status quo. I read one chapter of my book atop the wall, then one chapter at its base with my back against the stone and the banana palms now looming above me. From there I could see neither the styrofoam nor the farmers passing by with the busyness of work, so my green and my calm returned. Sadly, though, the frogs were out of sight, and I missed them.

Like marching band, but … different

The annual Festa de Santo Antonio comes to my town, Fajã de Baixo. Kids jump through fire, the Bob Marley crowd pounds drums, and everyone else pumps their hips. It's Cape Verdian tradition, you know.

Bohemian zen quests

Yesterday I talked to a friend here in Cape Verde who is having some troubles with her boyfriend. As usual, I played the proxy homewrecker. I told her that it's all his fault and that she should find someone better.

That's how my personal philosophy goes. Sure, if you sometimes run into snags with a part of your life (work, romance), don't wig out... fix it. But if you continually run into snags with a part of your life, you need to drop it and move on. Immediately. The moment you know that your lover or job isn't going to make you happy anymore, they're not worth another day of your time. Yeah, change is scary, but the comfort of the familiar is not worth the cost of watching your life whoosh by.

Evidently, though, this depends on you having options.

Not many young men in Cape Verde are more responsible, mature, or motivated than my friend's boyfriend. Dropping him wouldn't mean finding somebody better; it would probably mean having nobody. She doesn't really like her job, either, but because jobs are so scarce here it's a miracle just to have one. That's what you do here: you go to school, you apply yourself, and if you're lucky, you end up doing something that brings home the bacon. If you do that, you've succeeded. Passion for what you do? Pah! That's like winning the lottery. That's God's gift to the few, and you'd be arrogant to expect it for yourself.

It was thus that I found myself confronted by my own privilege. I never realized it before, but the "pursuit of happiness" isn't just utopian fluff; it wasn't written just to sound good. There really is an American dream, and moreover, it is quintessentially American. Our whole society is so meticulously calibrated for it that in the rest of the world, we are synonymous with it. It's an amazing achievement, really.

But in the developing world — even here in Cape Verde, where the people lead decent lives — happiness is something you'd be crazy to pursue. You try for money and companionship instead. If you aimed any higher, you'd have too far to fall.

This troubles me. I want bohemian zen quests for everyone.

Carnaval sta sabe!

I may look like a snarling hound, but still, Carnaval sta sabe.

a boring little entry about going out

I moved recently (more on that later, in another entry), and the community where I live now is probably the smallest I have ever called home. It being small, there's not much to do. They blast music and play soccer on the handball court most nights, and many people go to church on Sundays, but "restaurant" here refers to a bar that serves french fries with fried eggs (notice how I used the word "fry" twice to describe one meal? that's a recurring theme with my diet here), and crowds congregate when somebody fills up a water jug. It kind of reminds me of Minnesota sometimes. Nobody has much business, so everybody is a little bit into everybody else's business, and that's the way everybody likes it.

In practice, this means that when I venture outside my house I am usually making a commitment to hours of conversation in a foreign language and — depending on which way I walk — possibly lists of new names to remember. On top of that, I can't even get outside without the keys for deadbolts on two separate doors. So you can imagine that I sometimes shy away from the effort.

But when I don't, the rewards can be stupendous. Yesterday was the day I had agreed to visit my coworker in the neighboring town of Estancia Bras to see their Carnaval parade. I was supposed to head down at about 3pm, but it was nearly 5pm before I got my act together, and when I did I only made it about 50 feet beyond my gate. There I met my neighbor, who (through the misty veil of Creole) seemed to be asking me for advice on vegetables. I deftly eschewed the subject and concealed my ignorance by telling him how beautiful his vegetables look, after which I was invited inside for a beer. More than an hour later, I knew a lot more about the intricacies of local politics and had secured the right to use his stove or borrow his spare gas tank. We parted, but I ran into him again on the main road and he introduced me to a car of other guys who happened to be right there and going my way. I rode with them, and it turned out that they were the party crew: they brought me to the dance floor in Estancia Bras and I got to see them setting up the bar, gassing up the generator, etc. From there we went downhill, to the starting point of the Carnaval parade. People were already gathered and celebrating; a minute later I had my arms around people I'd never met and was singing fragments of a song I'd never heard into a megaphone.

Later, after hearing it sung over and over again by everyone from mothers to pre-teens, I figured out the words. For a big public ballad, I think it's funny.

oji é dia do Carnaval (today is the day of Carnaval)
e grogue é nos pa bebe (and grogue is ours to drink)
oji é dia do Carnaval
e nos ta bai fusca (and we're going to get drunk)

To be fair, there was a longer version with gentler themes on the lips of the dancing children's chorus. But this one, about getting hammered, is what the guy with the microphone sang on the loudspeakers during the parade.

Before the parade, though, I finally made it to my coworker's house. There, I watched a soccer game on TV, ate a delicious dinner, and exchanged drawings of Mickey Mouse with his 7-year-old daughter. My drawing, amazingly, was better than hers (although her brother clearly upstaged me). At some point she snuck under the table and wrote her name on the top of my shoe. I felt the pen scratching there and thought for a moment about trying to stop it, but something about the idea of having my apparel vandalized while I was still wearing it seemed so improbable that I had to see whether it would actually happen.

It did.

Now I'm back in my house, and I just listened to Car Talk for the first time since last May, and I won't deny that it feels really good to rediscover things like NPR that were once such a familiar fixture of my life. I was alone last year, and solitude felt less solitary with a voice telling me stories. But it's slowly occurring to me that those stories are merely prepackaged versions of real life, and if I spend enough time around other people, I can make it my privilege to tell stories of my own. I can see all the colors and subtle details around me, deciding for myself which details are most deserving and which colors are most beautiful.

51 things

Here's how it works as written by the person who tagged me… I'm not sure where this original project started but I got tagged and decided to continue it by tagging those of you whom I consider to be great friends or I haven't heard from you in a while and would love to hear what you have to say. Hope you'll play along because it would/will be fun hearing from you.

Once you've been tagged, you are supposed to write a note with 25 random things, facts, habits, or goals about you. At the end, choose 25 people to be tagged. You have to tag the person who tagged you. If I tagged you, it's because I want to know more about you.

As you might guess from the title, I'm actually going to do two lists: one for Cape Verde (because it's so deserving) and one for me (because I'm supposed to).

1. Last Sunday, I visited a coworker in his town. Had no particular plans, but we hiked for several hours, I nimbly danced my way out of a nasty fall while jumping across rocks, his 7-year-old daughter fell in love with me, I got fed four times (once for cake, which was so delicious even without frosting that I scribbled down the recipe on the back of a receipt), I attended the meeting of the local community association, and I spent quite a bit of time lounging around in his house, where his bottomless baby son [predictably] peed on my lap.

Not wanting to outstay my welcome, I mentioned twice that I should get going. The first time, they said it was too early to leave; "ka bai" (don't go), his daughter told me. The second time, they said it was too late to leave and convinced me to sleep there (his daughter was overjoyed). I woke up the next morning in my slightly pee-caked jeans, used my finger and a little bit of toothpaste to brush my teeth outside, and got fed a fifth time before catching a ride to work in the back of a pickup truck. This is Cape Verde.

2. Cape Verdians wear sandals and flip flops (usually flip flops, and usually cheap plastic ones) in many situations where lesser people would surely perish without boots. Hiking? Flip flops. Hiking down a steep, uneven cobblestone road in the rain with 20 kg of sugar cane balanced on your head? Flips flops. Tilling the field with a sharp pickaxe-like instrument that you pretty much aim at your feet? Consistently flip flops.

3. Flip flops are also a beacon of civilization. Because they're cheap and plastic, they break. Because they break when they're being walked on, and because broken things are trash, and because trash usually becomes litters, you find broken sandals in the places where Cape Verdians walk. And that usually means you're close to the place where they live. Which is awesome news if you've been hiking in nowhereland for two days (ahem) and would really like a bite to eat.

4. Booty-shaking is a science here. Women of all shapes and sizes move their butts in ways that are not physically possible.

5. Cape Verde is poor, but not remotely as poor as mainland Africa. Some people here are hungry some of the time. No one starves. No one goes thirsty; even when it gets really dry, they still sell water for about a penny per gallon… less if you have running water, which is common in larger towns. People here wear nice clothes, hats, jewelry. Youth compete in soccer leagues. Whole families are addicted to a Brazilian soap opera about vampires. Of course, it's unsustainable because it's all built of remittances, but at least for now it's comfortable.

6. That said, nobody in Cape Verde has water heaters. And after six months here, I almost find it hard to believe that everybody in America does. Coming back to hot showers will be eerie and glorious.

7. Recently, it came up in conversation that I like classical music. The 50-year-old man I was talking to nodded, telling me enthusiastically that he also likes classical music and offering to lend me a DVD of one performance that he particularly loved. I agreed, and a moment later his daughter returned with his collection. Flipping past Janet Jackson, Britney Spears, and at least a few Steven Seagal movies dubbed in Portuguese, we came to the piece d'resistance: Shania Twain: Up! Close and Personal (to be fair, Shania was backed up on violin by Alison Krauss).

8. The shortage of resources here extends to names. Across nine islands, there are at least three towns called Tarrafal, and on our island we know about 15 people called João or Bia.

9. We call São Nicolau the "Isle of Man" because no female Volunteers currently serve here, but if you look at it on a map you may notice another way in which it is quite manly.

10. During the day, jobless men play games in the streets — usually a type of mancala without end buckets, but sometimes a card game. I have watched the card game and am convinced that it has no rules. Or at least, no sense of suit, number, or trump. After a while, it actually comes as sort of surprise that they take tricks and play clockwise.

11. On São Nicolau, there are three old ladies who buy fish in Tarrafal, load it into the back of a Hilux (a public-transport pickup truck with benches on either side of the bed), and ride with it to Ribeira Brava to be sold. The road between the two towns is 26 kilometers, and it passes through several smaller towns where these fish ladies have customers. I caught a ride with them one day and saw how they makes their deliveries. About 50 meters before the target house, they take their pipe out of their mouths and start screaming the customer's name: "DILMA! DIIILLLLMAAAAAAAAAA!!" When they get closer, they add, "PEXI NA STRADA!" (fish in the street). Then, with the truck still going full clip, they drop the fish onto the pavement (sometimes in a bag, but it tends to break). The fish, still fresh and slimy, race forward for a bit as if going for one last swim before being cleaned, cooked, and eaten. The fish lady replaces her pipe and takes a puff.

12. Cape Verdians have a meal called "lanche" that happens about the same time as brunch. It consists of coffee, juice, and normally a small assortment of bite-size foods like pizza squares and baked, breaded tuna balls. On a normal day, most people in most jobs seem to do perfectly fine without lanche. But if you're working in the field, or are traveling for business, or are attending a formação (training session), then lanche is for some reason required, and the hours of 10am to 1pm are useless without it.

13. "Packing light" is not part of the lingo here. Travel of even a few days requires a full-size suitcase, and if you're going on a plane or boat, you'll take two. If that plane is headed out of the country, you probably also have a few boxes, and maybe a guitar case or one of those huge old-fashioned trunks that Americans prefer to leave in one place for decades at a time. Again, the fact that Cape Verdians can move all this stuff seems not physically possible.

14. Especially on my island, hospitality here puts midwesterners to shame. If they're eating, some of the food is for you (I just had lanche because it was brought into the room where I had been reading online news, and before I could finish sheepishly shutting down the computer, they were urging me to dig in). If they're going somewhere, you can hitchhike. If you're stuck, then of course you can spend the night. And while you're at it, why don't you come back next Saturday for the baptism/wedding/birthday party?

15. The living room decor here is not unlike what you'd expect to see at a 6-year-old girl's tea party, which adds a strange ambiance to my meetings with male coworkers in such rooms.

16. Sixty-two degrees is considered serious jacket weather, especially in beach towns that are normally much hotter. To my surprise, I'm starting to agree.

17. Cape Verdian folklore, as once passed down through storytelling and now immortalized in printed comic books, centers around a mischievous wolf called Lobu (wolf) Xibinhu. I find the choice of animal strange, since there have never been wolves here. Wouldn't it seem strange to you if Smokey the Bear were actually a giraffe?

18. Native to São Nicolau (and very few other places) is the dragoeiro, or dragon tree. They call it that because its bark takes the form of spindly, slithery, dragon-skin-like tendrils, and because you can extract from it a "dragon blood" (some sort of sap, I suppose) that tastes great when mixed with local liquor. It grows for hundreds of years and is rare enough that you're not allowed to cut them down, which is pretty cool.

19. Soccer Futebol is serious. We have two stadiums with FIFA-size fields on this island alone, and only 16,000 people live here.

20. Everyone here is happy when it rains.

21. Pork is something you reserve, like people used to reserve hams during the holidays. When enough reservations are made, somebody goes and slaughters a pig, and then a kid shows up at your doorstep with a still-warm chunk of leg in a grocery bag.

22. The biggest party of the year is carnival. It lasts for four days but gets talked about for two months in advance, partly because it takes that long to make all the costumes.

23. I've never met anybody here that lives alone.

24. Based on what they know (which is not always representative, but that's another issue), Cape Verdians think America is great. Especially now that we have Obama.

25. Time moves more slowly here. Few events are expected to start until hours after the announced time. New Year's parties, for example, didn't even let people in until 2am. And the sort of man-on-the-street interviews that American national news would cut off after 15 seconds go on for minutes here. And when they have nothing to say, people are content to sit with each other in silence. Again, they'd rather do it together than alone.

27. My favourite number is 27.

25. My favourite way to spell favourite is with a U, wavy red line be damned.

24. I love writing stories, especially when I can weave in a lot of tangential details that relate back to the main thread in obscure ways. Unfortunately, I only write stories that are true. I don't have practice with the other kind. Now that I mention it, actually, I wonder if I ever made up things when I was a kid. I'll have to ask mom.

23. In real life, I never lie. I used to invade people's privacy sometimes, but I didn't like that, so now I don't do that either.

22. Most things that I do are at least tangentially about love, the goal being to increase both the world's capacity for love and the amount of love in it. Peace Corps, for example, has three official purposes, two of which are about finding love for other cultures. The other is about development, and I try to accomplish that in a way that's good for the earth, knowing that we can't share love with others in this life if we have to compete for the resources to keep living.

21. My haircut has never changed. People have tried, but I always end up with what my mother used to call "a little boy's haircut." I think that's the way we actually used to order it at the barber shop in San Diego (which was next to the mediocre but wonderfully-named Royberto's Mexican Food). I'm not sure you'd call it a haircut anymore, though, or even a hairstyle. After seven scissorless months, it's just hair. Some day it will become clear to me that people take me less seriously when I look like this, and in the interest of professionalism, I will shave it down to scalp fuzz. Until then, the mop stays on top.

20. I dearly miss my cat, Sophie.

19. I don't like clubs, or disco dancing in general. In fact, unless it's a Flaming Lips concert, I'm not in favor of much that hurts my ears.

18. I dearly miss my friends and family. Which is exactly what a person in my position is supposed to say, but I wouldn't have expected it from me. I've never been in the habit of reaching out to people. Yet now, when reaching out is harder than ever before, I suddenly see how much I have to gain from it. (You and I need some face time, and we're getting it when I get back.)

17. What I wore to 8th-grade graduation fits me better now than it did then. What a misproportioned young boy I once was.

16. I tend to bake on vacations if the opportunity presents itself.

15. Crushes keep me alive. I may try to give the impression that I have some choice in the matter, but girl, if I like you, I'll actually do anything for you. And I'll be happy about it. Being romantic is the most fun thing I do.

14. I can put a good portion of my foot in my mouth. A friend took a picture once. It looks awful.

13. Fellow Peace Corps volunteers think that I usually wear pants and a short-sleeve button-down, since that's all they ever saw on me during training. U.S. friends know my uniform to be shorts and a T-shirt. Both groups seem to find it hard to imagine me the other way, which I find funny.

12. The silliest song ever sung about me is called "Either Chase," by Sam Spencer.

11. I probably have a bit of an Internet addiction, but I attribute it to the fact that I love learning. In an earlier, age, I probably would have haunted libraries (in fact, at an earlier age, I did — I had a rack installed on my bike specifically so I could strap down books with a bungee cord and schlep them home). Now everything in libraries seems so dated. But they could still teach me something I've wanted to understand for a while: advanced physics, especially relativity and string theory. It'll probably go right over my head, since I was too lazy to take basic physics courses in college… but that, of course, doesn't mean it's not worth trying.

10. I am occasionally interested in teaching, but mostly as an exercise in learning and logic and writing. I like the idea of working hard to understand something complex, then manipulating it into something that sounds simple (if you keep up with my blog, you may remember an old post about this). I believe that most bad teaching is a shortfall in explanation or enthusiasm, and it excites me that both can be remedied.

9. The tallest tale I ever told was about 7'4".

8. I never went to summer camp; when I was a kid, I never asked (even though I watched "Salute Your Shorts"), and my parents never thought to offer. But now I wish I had. Last week, I listened to an episode of This American Life about camp, and it made me outstandingly sad because it reminded me how complete a world you can invent in the company of others, and how much fun it can be to live there, and how much you can care about it. I don't like knowing that inconsequential things are inconsequential. I wanna feel them.

7. I rarely get up later than 8:30, even on weekends. Actually, especially on weekends. It gets so quiet, and I hate to miss that.

6. I'm no good at drawing or dancing, but I enjoy both on occasion (though usually not at the same time).

5. Good food gives me more pleasure than most things. I think about food all the time, and am constantly searching for ways to improve my culinary finesse. This makes me a bit of a food snob, which I find distasteful; but I can't change who I am, so I just try to be nice about it. Besides, we all have our vices. Sometimes dipping your Big Mac in microwaved Velveeta is exactly where it's at.

4. It's a bit early to worry about this, but I don't know where I'll live when I'm back in the states in 2010. Thoughts are on DC, SF Bay area, NYC. Any ideas? I kind of like the people in Missouri, but I don't know what I'd do there.

3. When I was a kid, I believed I could fly. I had memories of doing it.

2. Because computers and Internet are scarce in Cape Verde, almost everything I write here starts out on paper. Item #18 on this list is still true, but on paper you can see that it was originally about a specific person whose name is now scratched out.

1. Of all the wonderful things my mother sent me for Christmas, I love my Oxford dictionary and my new blanket the most.

Unflattering photographs from Christmas and New Year's

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