Elections...again

April 4, 2009

Elections seem to be occuring more and more frequently. When I was here last October/November there was also a campaign going on for regional head. Next week are national elections where the people choose representatives to the provincial and national parliments. The roads are lined with an incredible number and variety of flags and posters. I am told that there are 44 parties each with different candidiates.

I should also explain that in the presence of many languages, and a high rate of minimal literacy, symbols and pictures are very important here. Each party also has a number which is very important as they will be listed on the ballot by that number. In the past, the ballots consisted of the symbols of each party printed on a page and the voter poked a hole in the symbol of the party he chose. This time the system is being changed slightly. Instead of poking a hole, they will now have to use a pencil and mark (check or x) the symbol of the party they are choosing. The ballots are quite large (poster sized) because of the large number of candidates and will require special folding.

At the school where I have been teaching I saw a letter posted on the bulletin board from some interchurch body. It said that they had been asked for guidance on voting so they got together and came up with several guidelines. According to them, you shouldn’t vote for a party which was likely to receive less than 2.5% of the vote as your vote would essentially be wasted since such a party couldn’t win. They also said you should chose a party that wasn’t aligned to a particular religion but should instead vote for a party committed to the rights of all people, and they listed several examples. Then they said you should look for experienced parties which had experience in governing and they narrowed it down to two. Lastly they said you should not belong to the “white party”, the euphemism for those who don’t vote.

When discussing that letter with one guy, he objected strongly to the narrowing the choices down to two and he also felt that telling people it was wrong to not vote was wrong too. He felt that people should have the right to not vote if that was their decision.

Out in the village I heard further discusion of the matter. Many said that 44 parties was way too many, how could you even know what they stood for. Some felt that not voting was the best option in the midst of too many choices. One guy opined that you could easily eliminate a lot of them because they were religious parties and had cresent moons and stars in their symbols. (Indeed, it did look a bit like they were electing the Minister of Religion rather than parliment representatives.) I also noticed several posters which had Arabic writing or ladies in headscarves. So eliminating those would narrow the field down quite a bit. Many of the people running are well known in the area. One popular traditional party has as its candidate a former governor. But that governor was on trial for corruption not too long ago. I assume he was cleared or surely he wouldn’t be running for parliment but some locals seemed to write him and his party off because of that case. They apparently assume he was guilty.

Perception is everything.

April 30, 2009

Election day cane and went. Several people at the last minute decided not to vote. Others who did go expressed concern that they had done it incorrectly. As the counts come in, people in general seemed glum. The largest recipient of votes (the party of the current president) garnered only 20% of the votes which means 80% of voters are disappointed. Some expressed amazement that that party had gotten that many votes and immediately speculated that the counting had been rigged. Stories were out about various losing candidates becoming clinically depressed or even suicidal. Only the top 10 of the 48 parties are listed as potentially winning parlimentary seats.

Oh, well, there's another election coming up later this year. That one will be for president. Interestingly, no one seems quite sure when it will be...

Traffic, uh, Flow

(Some of these posts are delayed because of power and internet issues.) 4 April 2009

While teaching these past three weeks, I have had the interesting experience of driving a motorbike and experiencing up close – very close - the traffic patterns here. Every town has its unique characteristics even within the same country. Traffic in this country tends to resemble a stream gurgling over and around rocks on its relentless path down the mountain. But it seems in recent years some serious eddies, whirlpools, and riptide rapids have developed in this town.

People drive on the left side of the road so for those of you from right-handed places, just think the opposite to get the same effect. In other words turning right here is like turning left for you. The majority of vehicles on the road are motorbikes but there are also plenty of cars, and some trucks and horse carts and man-pushed carts.

The single most important unwritten rule seems to be do not ever stop if it can at all be avoided, and its corollary, avoid slowing down. Thus we have people wanting to turn right (left) who won’t stop and wait for a gap in traffic, they just turn right (left) and drive along the edge of the road on the wrong side of the road waiting for an opportunity to finally zoom over on the proper side of the road. I have seen people 2-3 blocks later still driving down the wrong side of the road who haven’t yet been able to get over. (Had they stopped and waited there was a big gap in the traffic coming up but since they couldn’t wait, they end up following the crowd and can’t get over.)

This of course produces hazards for others. As you drive innocently down the road on the proper side you may have to squeeze uncomfortably close between those right-turners driving down the wrong side of the road and people in the oncoming traffic who are in a big hurry and swing way out into your lane to pass someone.

Passing is wild too. People pass on the right and on the left. A wise driver never swerves because you never know what might be coming up behind you in a big hurry. While vehicles here do come equipped with turn signals, it appears to be optional as to whether you use them. And even if they are on there's no guarantee that the correct signal is on. You must learn to read minds as to whether the vehicle ahead of you or in the oncoming traffic is planning to turn and you must keep your foot near the brake at all times as precious seconds count when you guess wrong.

There are several traffic lights in town now too. The lights rarely all function and with the constant blackouts, they often don’t function at all. From observation, it appears that a yellow light is mere decoration. A red light means keep going as long as somebody ahead of you is still going. You don’t want to be the first vehicle stopped at a light. People turning right (left) tend to start turning from half a block back cutting across the oncoming traffic’s lane and pose serious hazards to the first vehicle stopped at the red light since they nearly get clipped by the folk turning.
In addition, people waiting at a red light to turn right (left) typically start a new right (left) turn lane on the oncoming traffic’s side of the line. Usually this is just motorbikes but sometimes even cars will do it. As you can imagine, this can cause serious traffic blockages as the oncoming traffic has to squeeze through what’s left of their lane. Last Friday I had to sit through three cycles of red lights because of this type of gridlock. And this is NOT a big city.

This behavior is not just young high school kids. I have seen government workers in uniform do the same. I have even seen policemen do it. And it is not my imagination, I have talked to several others (natives) who see the same things I do and complain about it.

Several years ago before the internet was very common in SE Asia I used to have to babysit a computer that would receive an international phone call every night some time after 10pm with the bundled email for our office. We had the only phone with a modern line capable of receiving digital signals with minimal garbling. I had to make sure the computer was on and booted up and then would wait for the call and make sure the info was completely downloaded before turning it off. While waiting I would play games that were installed on it. I remember noticing at the time that playing the games had noticeably improved my manual dexterity which had sort of gotten rusty after several years of village living. I think it was also helpful in improving hand eye coordination and helping me in my driving now especially as I try to anticipate moving targets, etc. My impression: a certain amount of video gaming may be beneficial for driving!

Addenda 4-30-09 It occurred to me the other day that the basic thing going on is that people drive like they walk. People on foot do not stop, nor do they bother with lanes or staright lines, they just walk around obstructions and cut across to where ever they are going, whenever there’s an opening at whatever angle it takes, but they never stop walking.

Avoiding dengue fever--

It is 8:15pm and the temperature in my room has finally dropped to 90 degrees. Earth Day or Hour or whatever it was has passed and we DID have power so I spent it sitting in front of the fan! (I'm off to the village tomorrow seeking some slightly cooler place.)

I am teaching a class on cross cultural communication and one thing we talked about is how people can see the same event and have very different perceptions of it. Or people have the same experience and interpret it very differently. Today when I arrived to teach I was almost overcome by the strong chemical/pesticide smell. The place I teach is a large school complex with several hundred students from kindergarten through high school and college. Apparently government workers had been by earlier in the day and sprayed for mosquitos for the prevention of dengue fever. They sprayed while all the kids were present. Some of the children had vomited.

Not only was I practically gagging at the odor myself, I was horrified that they had sprayed with the kids all there running around. All sorts of questions flood my mind - do they not know that the spray is poisonous? Why don't they spray in the afternoon or on a weekend? I wondered if the sprayers even take any protective measures themselves? Etc.

But I was apparently the only one who was upset. Everyone else just laughed or said that that was just the way they do it here.

I suppose so. Just like the article I read recently which said gold miners on a neighboring island sometimes rub mercury all over their skin to make them strong....

Earth Day

There's a lot of hype out there about Earth Day and save mother earth, yadda, yadda, yadda, by turning off the lights for an hour. Yeah, yeah, go have your candlelit dinner if you like but as for me, if the power is on, I do NOT plan to turn the lights off!

It’s 8:35am and 85 degrees. The power is still on but the internet has died. It is best in the morning or late at night, perhaps due to high demand or some system of business prioritization. Or maybe the power is off at the phone company.

I have now taught three days of Cross-Cultural Communication, of which I know nothing. I really need to learn to just say “no” to some of these requests! I have materials but no real idea how to use them or where I’m going with the class. It’s all complicated by my own fighting against the environment. The heat and humidity have been rugged. It is hot in the day and muggy at night with several-hour long downpours at night. The electricity is often off more than it is on, especially in the daytime. So, no fan to counteract the heat. It’s a wonder my skin hasn’t rotted off yet since it is rarely dry. My face and neck in particular just run with sweat until the front of my blouse is as wet as a slobbering baby’s.

I teach at high noon so am hot and bothered when I arrive. I try to get there early so I can sit and cool off but of course it takes quite awhile to cool off when it’s over 90. Being endocrinally challenged doesn’t help. And I have to dress professionally AND wear a jacket while on the motorbike. Overheating is unavoidable and to a large extent untreatable.

At the house where I am staying, when the power comes on you jump up and plug the water pump in. Then you run around filling things, washing clothes and dishes, maybe cooking while you’re at it to take advantage of there being water. Sweating profusely all the while. You also need to remember to charge all the accoutrements of modern living such as cellphones and computers. If you remember, you can reset the wireless internet and check your email. The pump no longer has automatic turn-off so you have to keep an eye on it and go unplug it when you aren’t actually filling anything. There’s an automatic washing machine here which is incredibly slow filling. To save the pump, I’ve been filling buckets and helping the machine fill. Then you go unplug the pump while the machine washes. When it’s ready to rinse you go plug the pump in again, fill buckets, etc. For this week I am the only one here so I do it all.

When the power goes off I can work on my computer until both batteries are drained – usually 2-3 hours. Then I just lay on the tile floor and try to stay still and cool off a bit. I have an MP3 player and have been listening to various pre-recorded radio broadcasts and talks and lectures so it’s not been a total waste of time. At least you don’t need a light to do that.

And yet, I also have to count my blessings. I am staying at a clean house that actually can get some cross breeze in the afternoon. It is safe, the roof doesn’t leak. I am only teaching once a day. I do not have to dress up and go out to any social events in the dark in the evenings. There IS a water pump and a washing machine, I do not have to hand pump and hand wash like I would in the village. There are screens on the windows so it is fairly mosquito- and fly-free. I have money to buy food. I only have to cook and wash for one, not for a whole family.

So go ahead and turn off your lights if you wish, but as for me, I'm all FOR leaving the lights on!

Competition of the mosques

It is 5:01am. There is a bass voice rumbling on with a lot of vibrato coming from the neighborhood mosque. The call to prayer, judging by the dull moan in the background from all over the rest of the city, was around 4:41am. But the mosque next door seems to be on a different time table than everyone else. It started sounding at least an hour before that, I didn’t check the clock but probably before 4am. Then its call to prayer was at least 10 minutes before the rest of the mosques. It is now continuing on with more chanting. The last several evenings too they have had an hour of chanting before the 6pm call to prayer in which a man calls out something and a couple of women’s voices then repeat it. It is very repetitious in intonation and cadence, almost trance-producing.

Mosque noises have always intrigued me because, except for Friday noon sermons, they are rarely intelligible and so I wonder who it is for. Presumably they are speaking Arabic but of course since hardly anybody knows any Arabic, they could be just making it up. Apparently it is sacreligious to use an intelligible language. I remember reading about a guy in another part of the country who was teaching people to pray in the national language and was thrown in jail for defaming the religion. Perhaps it is thought that they are speaking to God. If so, it is wondrously easy to talk to God in this day and age of electronic recordings. Indeed, if God likes hearing it, one wonders why they don’t just play it all day and all night? (Maybe the neighborhood mosque is on a campaign to do just that!)

I always look at it as basically a city-wide alarm clock to waken the faithful and unfaithful alike with the hope that they’ll crawl out of the sack and do their ritual. Most people can roll over and go back to sleep after the call to prayer, which in itself is beautiful in a mournful sort of way. But this hour of pre-call to prayer and the 30 minute post-call to prayer vibrato stuff was too much for me today. That is why I am up on the internet writing this.

A few years ago a professor, who is also of said faith, was commenting on a recent spate of increased noise and said that some mosque operators seem to think God is deaf. So I gather that there is currently another competition going on between the various “denominations”. My hypothesis is that our neighborhood mosque belongs to one of the newer varieties and not to the traditional variety most common in this area and perhaps seeks to win over more adherents by showing that it is more holy via its noise campaign. Certain people might indeed find that attractive because after all, maybe holiness can rub off on you, and a person can’t have too much holiness when facing Judgement Day.

Update

The Mayor vs The Church seems to be on hold for the moment as outrage over the murder of the young teacher has taken front and center in the news. Meanwhile I am back in the second of my worlds for a few weeks....

Apparently the spat between The Mayor and The Church has been put on temporary hold due to recent events. Another summary execution, but not by the masked bike riders.

A few days ago a 20-year old woman was kidnapped on her way home from her college in this city. She is the daughter of the head of one of the main rebel groups. Her body was found a couple days later in a canal on the outskirts of the city. She had died of multiple stab wounds and showed evidence of torture. It is not yet known who was responsible but speculation is rampant. Members of the rebel group assume it was the military. The Mayor has begun his own investigation and announced the other day that he is 70% sure it was not anyone from a government agency. The modus operandus led a leader of a consortium of activist groups to speculate that the perpetrator was a certain retired general. According to her, those killers are new in this area and are not part of the usual assortment of thugs which are under observation by security forces. Whoever did it was smart enough to make a fake license plate to display on the vehicle used.

The papers, The Mayor, the local military chief all pointed out that killing family members of rebel leaders makes their own families vulnerable to similar attacks and condemned it most strongly.

Some of the ordinary folk conceed that they could see somebody wanting revenge on her father since he has been responsible for the death and maiming of many. But everyone seems appalled that such a thing should happen to a young woman who by all accounts was not involved in her father's rebellion.

The Mayor vs The Church, Part 1

What happens when an irresistable force meets an immoveable object? Maybe we will find out as The Mayor and The Church square off.

Recently some of the local officals of The Church have been overtly accusing The Mayor of the vigilante-type killings of drug pushers in town, They are saying that if he is not personally behind it then he is protecting those who are. (And maybe since he’s the mayor, that makes him ultimately responsible for what goes on in the city.) They are outraged at the continued extrajudicial killings, and have demanded that he speak with them in private. The Mayor has steadfastly denied that he has anything to do with it and says that he is happy to have a meeting but it must be in public.


Last week The Church racheted things up by printing a 2 page prayer that all the faithful in the city are required to pray at the end of the church service in which the faithful were pointedly required to, among other things, ask forgiveness for the sin of “hating” drug pushers, and to pray for the souls of the innocent killed by extrajudicial vigilantes on mere suspicion. The prayer also pointedly mentions "the lustful greed in the hooded killers on motorbikes" etc. Of course The Mayor was outraged and said that while it’s fine to pray for the dead, the prayer is incomplete and should also include prayer for the victims and families of the death and destruction caused by drug pushers. He also intimated that he knew some dirt on certain local Church officials and that they should clean up their own act before presuming to interfere with others.


Stay tuned for further developments....

The Mayor’s latest problem

As I’ve noted before we have a sovereign king here who is called The Mayor. He is well liked by the vast majority of the voters who have reelected him 5 times by overwhelming majorities. He is credited with cleaning up this city of criminal elements. Other projects have been garbage collection, anti-smoking laws, anti drug campaigns, and work on traffic flow. He has a reputation of being very tough but fair and has also worked for peace in this troubled area, and has won the trust of many on all sides of the various conflicts.

For a number of years there have been mysterious killings of suspected (and often convicted) drug dealers in this town. The modus operandi is always the same: two masked men in black pull up on a motorcycle and one shoots the victim, usually in the head and off they go. It can happen at night or in broad daylight, but always out in the open. Since I came, I have heard many rumors that someone big was behind it. Some say the mayor, some say the police because it is efficiently done and no one is ever caught.

Locals tell me that the vigilantes rarely (some say never) make mistakes. People say that folk caught selling drugs are given two warnings. The third time is it. We have heard stories of people being let out of jail on a second or third drug charge and getting shot before the day was out. A neighbor of ours had a troubled son who was arrested twice for drug possession. Then one night a warning note appeared on their door. He was smart. He left town before dawn. I hear he has since cleaned up his act.

I barely missed witnessing a killing one day. Shortly after I passed by at 2pm, a man walking down the same road was shot and killed by the vigilantes. Another friend tells of walking home late one night from the factory where she works. Two masked men pulled up in front of her in a motorcycle, one shone a light in her face and said “It’s not her.” They then took off. But my friend was so badly shaken that she could hardly stand. Apparently there was a woman of similar build and similar long hair who had also worked intermittantly at that factory who was rumored to use and/or sell drugs. Needless to say that woman left town too when she heard about the incident.

Another friend was telling me that it has spread outside the city now. A young man in her village was recently shot dead by the same method. He had been a troubled youth and known to use drugs and alcohol a lot. Two men rolled up on a motorcycle and shot him one evening as he was sitting in front of a local shop. My friend said that according to neighbors, it was likely he had been selling drugs and that is why he was targeted.

It IS very unnerving to think about people getting shot like that. People say that drug peddlars often get out of jail easily because they have lots of money and it is apparently easy to bribe your way out. So they say that the judicial system doesn’t work and that’s why the vigilantes have stepped in. But of course what happens if there is a mistake? What if someone is falsely accused of drug pushing, perhaps by an envious neighbor, and they end up getting killed? I mean, you can recover from a beating and live to mend your ways, but getting killed is pretty permanent. The other troubling thing is that, like everywhere else, the big fish are never caught. It’s always the small dealer.

(There are other types of killings that go on around here too, particularly gang killings and what are called “summary executions”. Different modi operandi. If killing could be ranked, no doubt they would be worse. But that is another story.)

Rumblings

A friend from the second of my worlds texted yesterday morning and said they had just had a strong earthquake. She had been out in the rice field spraying when it hit. She said there was a loud rumble with it and it was so strong it knocked her to her knees. She said the local elementary school kids were outside at the time having a flag ceremony and when the quake hit they just scattered, running home crying. Schools were cancelled the rest of the day. She didn't have any news at that point as to any structural damage or whether the hot springs in the next village burst open again.

Amazing what you can do with modern technology - I looked it up right away on the internet at IRIS Seismic and there it was already posted, a 5.7 with a center 20km south of town - just about exactly where my friend lives! So I texted her the info. Two friends in the nearby town said they were okay, that schools had been cancelled but people weren't panicking and running for the hills in fear of a tsunami or anything. No further news so apparently all is well.