If depression didn’t exist — if we didn’t react to stress and trauma with endless ruminations — then we would be less likely to solve our predicaments. Wisdom isn’t cheap, and we pay for it with pain.
Great article in the New York Times, titled “Depression’s Upside”, on a developing theory that human depression may have evolved as a biological advantage.
Apparently in South Korea people have taken to using snack sausages as iPhone styluses in the cold weather when their hands are mittened. Funny thing, I recently ran into this issue when I was in Europe in below freezing weather. I took to using my nose to navigate Google maps.
From Fish to Infinity is a new series in the New York Times by Steven Strogatz exploring math. A math professor, he realized that many perfectly intelligent people are frightened or at least made uncomfortable by math.
I have a friend who gets a tremendous kick out of science, even though he’s an artist. Whenever we get together all he wants to do is chat about the latest thing in evolution or quantum mechanics. But when it comes to math, he feels at sea, and it saddens him. The strange symbols keep him out. He says he doesn’t even know how to pronounce them.
In fact, his alienation runs a lot deeper. He’s not sure what mathematicians do all day, or what they mean when they say a proof is elegant. Sometimes we joke that I just should sit him down and teach him everything, starting with 1 + 1 = 2 and going as far as we can.
I will always be indebted to my 4th grade teacher Ms. Gellerman at Peralta Elementary school. She had no fear of math. Even though I make my living as a graphic artist today, I use math constantly in my work. Even my comfort with the computers I use as my tools probably results from my early exposure to the basic concepts of programming she taught us.
Devapriyo Das wrote an article published in The Observer yesterday about the photography class Moses taught in one of the IDP camps outside Gulu. Dev is a journalist originally from India, but now working in Uganda where he lives with his wife Line who had been working for a Danish development organization. Dev and Line hosted us for a couple of nights at their home in Apac after we left Gulu. Dev also let me borrow a telephoto lens one afternoon, which I used to take one of my absolute favorite pictures in Africa.
There are now updates to the Uganda gallery and a new Tanzania gallery including a few pictures from Zanzibar. (The half uploaded pictures in the Uganda gallery have been fixed, and many new images added.) I mean to add a final gallery of odds and ends from the trip that gathers together some of the stranger moments I was able to record. Don’t hold your breath.
The Uganda gallery has a few more pictures uploaded upon arrival in Arusha, Tanzania, including images from Masaka, Gulu, Apac and Mbale. The child above watched the photography lesson Moses gave to a group of young mothers in one of the IDP camps in Gulu. He improvised his own camera and mimed the taking of photographs throughout the afternoon, which reminded me of a story Eduardo Galeano told at book reading of a boy who proudly showed him the watch he’d drawn on his wrist.
We’ve just returned from Endulan Hospital which serves the 77,000 Masai who live in the nature reserve surrounding the Ngorongoro crater. Endulan Hospital itself is a small outpost with about 50 staff with about 72 beds. Much more on that later…
I took this photo of a woman we met in Apac who was on her way to fill her plastic jerry cans with water from a public pump from one of the town’s wells. One of the ongoing subjects Moses has been documenting during our trip is how water is used by people in East Africa. He’s gathering images for an organization called Clearwater Initiative which works on water issues here. Every town has at least one public well with a pump from which people collect water for drinking and often washing clothes as well. We didn’t have a way to test the quality of this water so we purified it with my Steripen or iodine before we drank it ourselves.
In addition to the public pumps, many buildings here include systems for catching and storing rainwater from their gutters on the roof. This water is usually only used for washing.
A few days ago in Apac the power was out, so Moses plugged his MacBook Pro into a petrol powered generator. With a snap and a spark which left an acrid burned plastic odor, his power brick was suddenly non-functional. We did some research by phone and internet to discover that the only places where we might find a replacement are the capital cities of Kampala, Nairobi and Dar Es Salaam. Kampala was a six hour drive in the wrong direction, and we aren’t due in Nairobi for a few more days.
So yesterday, here in Mbale, I found a man named Uumar at the U&A Electrical and Electronics shop. He and his partner Abdul repair mobile phones, boom boxes, televisions and all sorts of other devices. Their small workshop is festooned with broken electronic equipment from which they scavange parts. Uumar examined the broken power brick and after I assured him that it was OK if he broke it while taking it apart, he got to work with a hacksaw blade and a screwdriver.
In the end he established that a capacitor and a few transistors had blown. He had to ask around town in various places before he could find replacement parts. But within about an hour and half he’d tracked down what we needed and soldered everything in place. We carefully tested the output with a voltage meter before he superglued the case back together. Then I plugged the repaired brick into the MacBook and the LED glowed green, and the computer was charging again.
All this cost 38,000 Ugandan shillings: less than 20 US dollars. More than half was for the parts he had to buy from other people in town. His labor fee was about five dollars. As my friend Gerry Lusk commented on Facebook, in the US it would be difficult to find anyone capable or willing to do the job. And if you did find such a person, the labor charge would probably exceed the $80 cost of replacing the unit.
Finally I’ve successfully posted a batch of photos to my gallery documenting our first week in Uganda.
Sub-galleries include:
A couple of short videos I shot while riding on the back of one of the boda boda scooter taxis with Moses can be viewed over on http://djiboutiorbust.blogspot.com/
I’m in the airport in Amsterdam with my friend Moses Ceaser. We’re on our way to Uganda and beyond, where we plan to take photographs for a variety of NGOs. Moses telling the story of the trip at djiboutiorbust.blogspot.com.
