The elephants are still fighting

Now we are in the post-election phase. Losing candidates are busy complaining about the automation machines, challenging results, demanding recounts , accusing the winners of corrupt tactics, and filing lawsuits. The top two vice-presidential candidates have been neck and neck with only a few thousand vote difference so that has been mildly interesting. Both have been very civil about the whole thing. They haven't yet declared a winner but are promising to do so soon.

What's been interesting is the local mayoral race. The Daughter won 65% of the vote for mayor and the incumbant Mayor won 80% of the vote for vice-mayor, or rather, Vice-Mayor. The election committee has long ago declared them the winners. But somehow the Opponent continues to fuss. Rumor has it that he threw huge amounts of money into winning this election but after all he didn't and he can't believe it. I guess he doesn't yet understand the perfidy of people.

He is the one who demanded that the election committee take over the city during elections lest the emcumbant Mayor cheat. The Mayor agreed and so the election committee has been in charge of the city since a couple days before the election until now. Now he is filing a suit accusing the Mayor's party of having 17,000 dead people vote and 40,000 zombie voters (people registered in more than one precinct), and of other irregularities. (Not that 57,000 votes would have changed the election results anyway.) Meanwhile the current Mayor wisely noted that the suit should actually be filed against the election commission, not him as they are the ones who were in control of the city and the election. The head of the election committee is annoyed and says that that was not possible, that THEY were in control and were very strict and weeded out people registered in more than one place. The new mayor-elect, Daughter, said she was expecting about a thousand suits from Opponent. So this is just number 1 with 999 to go. But even frivolous lawsuits have to go through the courts and takes the time and money of the accused.

This has been an interesting election. Apparently many if not most politicians are lawyers who can spend all their spare time throwing legal challenges at each other. I also learned that these elections are deadly serious affairs, and the power struggle is awseome. Reminds me of the African proverb - when the elephants fight, the grass gets trampled. It may make for amusing news stories, but you sure don't want to get involved!

The first "automated" elections

Two weeks ago was election day for president, vice-president, senators, congressmen, and locally, mayor. It was the first time they used what they called “automated voting”. Each polling station had a machine that looked like a fax machine. Voters blackened in ovals next to the candidates of their choice on the ballot cards and then fed the ballot into the optical scanning machine which was supposed to count the votes and store the info on a flash card. It was then supposed to contact home via satellite with the counts every hour or so. Apparently there were numerous problems with the machines. Some had battery problems, some didn’t work at all, some were just slow and ballots had to be fed in multiple times before they were finally accepted, and there just didn't seem to be enough of them to handle the numbers of people quickly..

It seemed that the print was small for some older folk, and so some brought a grandchild with them to help them cast their vote.

One friend went at 7:30am and after multiple problems with the machine plus the slowness of the whole procedure, didn’t actually get to cast her ballot until nearly 7pm. It sounds like a lot of people gave up and went home without voting so that was frustrating.

Sounds like vote-buying was rampant too, especially by the Opponent of the Mayor. People reported being offered round trip fare if they would sign a list saying they would vote for the Opponent of the encumbant Mayor. Workers were reported as going door to door even on election day, offering up to $22 per household to vote for the Opponent. In some neighborhoods the Opponent was sponsoring roast pork parties on election day. Others whose kids had scholarships thru the gov’t (the Opponent has been a national congressman for a long time and has sponsored many scholarships) were threatened that the scholarships would be cut off if they didn’t vote for the Opponent. It was also reported that in certain precincts the ballots listed two candidates with the same last name as the encumbant Mayor. This was done in the last election as a way of splitting the vote for those who didn’t read the whole name carefully. The interesting thing is, though, that if you download the official ballot form off the national election site, there is only one candidate listed as having that last name. So when was the second name added????

Privacy isn't quite what it is in some other places. Most of the polling places were at schools. People were sitting at school desks in a classroom, several at a time filling in their ballots. A friend said that the print was so small she didn't think anybody could see what another person was filling out. But some people said that at their polling station there were people looking in the windows and they were afraid that, since they had accepted money to vote for the Opponent, those people might see if they didn't vote for the Opponent and so felt intimidated. At other polling places there were curtains at the windows and people felt secure.

The perfidy of people. A number of people reported having accepted money from a candidate but having no intention of voting for him. In a way I kind of felt sorry for some of the candidates passing out candies, t-shirts, snacks, and even cash and hearing people say oh yes, they were going to vote for them and then here comes the election and they lose big time. Then again they aren't supposed to be engaging in vote buying.

There were no reports of violence in this city – though I did hear of one guy who got so frustrated he tried to smash the voting machine. Police pulled him away and then he turned and broke a window so they hand-cuffed him and took him off somewhere. In other parts of the country there were some reports of grenades and gunfire used to scare off voters lined up.

There were daily updates on the status of the presidential candidates but it was a few days before they announced the results of the mayoral candidacy. Apparently the local election committee didn’t want to release any info until all precincts have reported. Eventually it was revealed that the Opponent garnered about 35% of the votes and the Mayor’s daughter won 65% of the vote. (The Mayor has to step down for a term because the law mandates a limit of three terms in a row. He can run again in 3 years time. So in this election he ran for vice-mayor while his daughter, who is the current vice-mayor, ran for mayor.)

My Dengue Journey

Everybody’s writing their Journey stories so here’s mine. This is the fourth time I’ve had dengue fever. According to what’s out there, there are 4 types of dengue. So I have apparently hit them all. Am I a world record or what? So unless they discover a fifth type that should mean that I am done with it and need never fear another mosquito!

Nobody writes much about what the dengue journey is like. You read about the symptoms of high fever, severe headache and backache but not much about the real, you know, experiential part of it all. Today is Day 6 of Round 4.

Headache. Oh yeah. All four times I had a headache. They say it’s often pain at the back of your eyes. Well this time it was the bones above my eyes, the bones below my eyes, the bones of my temples, the bones in front of my ears and my teeth. They hurt so bad I didn’t even notice the back of my eyes! Move your head and unnghhhhhhhhh!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Lower backache? Oh yeah. Not as bad as the time I had it in South America when I had to grit my teeth and stop breathing just turn to the other side. This time I could still breathe when turning but it kept me rolling back and forth ever searching for some comfortable position.

Fever? Of course, that’s why it’s called dengue fever. Highest recorded this time was only 39.8 and that’s cuz a friend persuaded me to take paracetamol whenever it got above 39 (almost 103F). The record was the second time when it hit 41 (105+F).

Stomach pain? It wasn’t so noticeable earlier, it was a vague cycling from extremely hungry to nauseous to slightly painful and back around again. Now that the fever has broken those sensations have intensified. I don’t usually vomit as long as I don’t drink too much at a time. And nothing sounds good so no danger of eating too much. Besides, you get a weird taste in your mouth and if you do eat anything with chemicals in it the flavor of the chemicals is super enhanced.

Rash? Today I do have a rash but frankly I couldn’t really have seen whether I had a faint rash before that or not because when my fever gets that high my vision gets dim. Yeah, literally like somebody dimmed all the lights, including the sun, moon and stars.

What I don’t see mentioned in the medical literature is the weird mental stuff. It’s kind of funny but when you’re in the midst of it, it is not boring. Most of the time you’re lucky and just sleep or lose consciousness but sometimes you see weird things. Like, the time when my fever was 41 (105+F) I would see lots of ugly stuff, like heaps of squirming guts, mounds of worms, disgusting nasty things. If I opened my eyes and looked at something real it helped. But in the dark of a moonless night in a remote village you don’t see anything at all even if you do open your eyes. The only thing that helped was praying and forcing yourself to think about beautiful things like flowers, butterflies, clouds, etc. This time there was none of that but my mind was like incessantly nattering away at nothing, like it was busy-busy working on some urgent problem until I finally had to forceably shut it off and think consciously about something else. Later I was reading a weird email so long I couldn’t scroll long enough to ever get to the bottom and I kept finding it embedded and looped upon itself. The person it was from would never in a million years have been so verbose about anything! Of course in reality there was no such email but hey, I was READING it! I could give you a synopsis of it! That’s the weird kind of mental stuff you don’t hear much about.

The next step is wait and see if you get any of the the hemorrhagic stuff with it. So far on this journey I have been blessed and have not had any bleeding that I ever noticed, no gum bleeding or nosebleed or even noticeable rash. May God grant that this (hopefully) last stage of this journey also be so
blessed.