Adventures in Onionism

Who has the worst customer service, Cingular or Sprint?   I think most people would say Sprint wins hands down, but Cingular is giving Sprint a run for its money in my mind right now.   Apparently they're convinced that unless you're active duty military you can't suspend your service and billing.   Sure you can suspend your service, but monthly billing still applies.   Excuse me, but WHAT KIND OF F___ING MORON DISABLES THEIR PHONE IF THEY'RE STILL GOING TO GET BILLED FOR IT?   Never mind the whole common sense issue, they straight up told me over the phone when I set up the suspension that I wouldn't be billed while the service was suspended and now they're denying it.   Dillholes, all of them.   OK, enough of that.   I ran the Nairobi marathon on Sunday the 29th.   I took the 9-hour night bus to Nairobi on Friday, then waited in line for 4 hours on Saturday to get my race number and all-they-had-left-was-XL t-shirt.   Then the rac...

The highlight of my day today was when I wrote a nested foreach loop in Stata on some cleaning code. (Once the data entry firm gives us the data I write code that flags possible logical/skip pattern mistakes, then the data analysts check the hard copies against the soft copy on the stuff I flagged.) It was wicked awesome. Yesterday at lunch I had some errands to do in town so I rode my bike in. Instead of my usual trying to get bodas to race me, I ended up in next to a bike with a kid with his brother on the back.  They asked me for some money, and the kid wasn't shy at all and was way good at English, so we had a funny conversation about whether he had asked me for money just because I was white, how he had managed to get the sugar cane in his hand if he didn't have any money, and what he needed the 10 shillings for.  He said he wanted to buy a parrot. Then I went shopping at the market and got unnecessarily ticked off that the store actually has bulk-buying penalti...

Friday was Kenyatta Day, and Tuesday was Eid, so I skipped work Monday and made it a five day weekend. I left Busia Friday morning, matatu'd to Kitale then Kapcherop and started hiking in the afternoon. I looked into getting a guide in both Kitale and Kapcherop, but that was basically only to assuage paranoid concerns and since I didn't really want one, I headed out. It was mostly walking on small dirt roads, but no cars, few people, and great scenery. It reminded me of the Nimitz trail on top of the coastal ridge in Berkeley (well, the Belgum trail, more specifically) except in Africa, at 7,500 feet, with monkeys and grass thatched huts all over the place. I met a cool South Sudanese refugee; he told me about 11 of his 12 siblings dying in the civil war in Sudan, and we ragged on George Bush together as he showed me a cross-country shortcut. Just around dark I walked into the village of Kapsait and asked for a place to set up my tent. A dude told me to go up the hill to the Ni...

the local moving company kids carrying stuff home a poinsettia, or something a school with a hill behind it (not a very insightful caption, sorry)

Apparently someone managed to pop the hood of my locked car in Marcus' ghetto neighborhood in Berkeley and steal the ignition module wiring connector.  Thankfully the replacement is only $35.  Since I'm pretty sure those 35 bones are coming from Marcus' pocket, from my point of view the cool story I get is definitely worth the price. Friday is Jomo Kenyatta Day (the anniversary of his imprisonment during Kenya's struggle for independence) and Tuesday is the end of Ramadan, so I think I'm taking off to do a trek in the Cherangani Hills.  It seems like it's a lot of walking on dirt roads from village to village, except not as flat as around here.  Plus this region is where all the marathoners are from, so you pass right by one of the shoe company training centers.  Should be good stuff. Anyway, what should I do when I'm done with this job in January?  I could go right back to grad school, retake the classes I need, and retake the labor field exam August 2007....

king (queen, I suppose) of the chicken coop clouds routinely look this cool before a big rain this is the latest bug I've found in my room a baby blue monkey drinking water from a leaky tank a big blue monkey

It took a little gesticulating because my guide's English was not that great, but I think he seemed to think that black and white colobus monkeys do have abnormally bright blue testicles. That means I went to the Kakamega forest again. I couldn't decide whether to go to the forest or down to some islands on Lake Victoria, so I went with whichever matatu (minivan/bus that technically seats 14 but often carries 20-plus) came first on Friday after work. I camped at a guest house in the forest Saturday night. This place had so many monkeys it was ridiculous. I saw blue monkeys which I didn't see last week, but I didn't see any more red-tailed monkeys. The blue monkeys were not very shy so I got better pictures (coming soon). I went to church in Misikhu again and got invited over to this guy Anthony's house. He lives out in the sticks near Ndivisi. He boda'd (gave me a lift on his bike) me and it still took about an hour to get there. Plus he didn't ha...

Boring stuff first: I've spent the last few days doing the intensive sample selection for my project.  In normal people words that means I randomly selected 1/5 of the pupils we hadn't been able to track yet, and now we really go after these ones, so statistically we can track about 80% of the pupils even though we really only survey about 60% of the original sample. In slightly more interesting news, I ate some termites.  They're not blech, just dry and blah. That was Sunday, and I had chocolate fondue on Saturday.  Mixing the two might've been interesting. Saturday I biked most of the way from my house to the Lake Victoria; Tuesday (the not very popular Moi Day holiday) I ran most of the way.   Both attempts failed, but mostly because I started in the afternoon and got interrupted by monsoons.  Sunday I went to Kakamega Forest National Reserve, which is the last East African vestige of the rain forest that used to stretch uninterrupted across the continen...

I 've been having a lot of fun the past few days. First off, here's that cricket I mentioned. Here it is alive. Here it is dead. Also, to get all the pictures of dead stuff out of the way, here are a bunch of dead fish that served as bait, a dead mouse, and a dead lizard. Oh, and speaking of dead stuff, here's the guy that told me you die if you swallow the sugar cane fibers. Friday (Sept. 29) most of my team took the day off sine they were working consecutive Saturdays, but I went out with Blasto and Esther. We went to a secondary school, and while they were each interviewing respondents I read the school library's HIV/AIDS literature for kicks. Here's what I found. In addition to the Sugar Daddies thing being a "wow, this is not the rich white people world I'm used to" moment, it also saddened me that the literature had absolutely no mention of condoms. Then we went to a primary school out in the sticks. The roads are getting worse...

I ate a jackfruit today.  It's bigger than a watermelon, the outside is covered in spikes, the part of the inside that you eat is surrounded by string-cheese-like fibers that are about as sticky as marshmallow fluff, and it tastes like a banana crossed with celery.  Interesting.  I also saw goat sex, which was way louder than I expected.   I went to Kisumu over the weekend and saw hippos and other cool stuff.  It's just taking Marcus forever to post the pictures.