The Sleeping Giant

I will post something of substance I’m sure once I’m home, but for now enjoy these:

-Danger

Okay, this has been in the news for more than a week now, and it really makes me want to fly down to Greece, and punch a young person in the face. Perhaps there’s a list of international students here and their country of origin so that I can save some time.

If you haven’t heard, I’m talking about this

There have been over a week of rioting and violence in major Greek cities by young people and general shit disturbers causing many injuries and a whole bunch of vandalism. The big set-off for this was the shooting of a 15-year-old boy by police officers. The protestors are vowing to “bring down the government” and fight for justice. Well, makes sense, I mean if the government is letting this happen then you have to fight against this kind of police corruption and abuse of power.

What’s that Captain Information? You say the police officers involved have been charged with murder? Well then… what else would you like? I mean, that’s a pretty solid response in my eyes, and it happened before the violence started.

I read an article about Greece having a strong culture or resistance, but to me this just seems like a strong culture of stupid. There’s complaints now of riot police using “excessive force” but you know what? If I had to work 10 days straight in a hostile environment I might start getting a little peeved too.

Shut up and go back to class Greek students. Learn to pick your battles.

But hilarious just the same, careful, that tune gets stuck in your head and you’ll find yourself singing it in the most awkward places!

This post contains a distraction.

http://www.playauditorium.com/

I found this linked to from one of the bottom posts by Tycho on the Penny Arcade site. Make sure you play it with the sound on for the full effect, I don’t think it would be nearly as cool without it.

-Danger

I’ve been struggling with this instruction thinking about Saturday:

Please dress as Caleb would like to see you dressed

So I’ll put it out to you guys. Are you dressing up in suits? Everything else the family is doing is a little untraditional, so I wouldn’t want to be the only person showing up in a suit and throwing off their plan. But I also don’t want to be the only person not in a suit and then look disrespectful.

What are you guys planning to do?

Do you ever have one of those nights where you have just one thing you have to do, but you find yourself doing everything except for that one thing?

Three weeks left until exams, my schedule kicks ass, I’m actually looking forward to it. Totally burnt out right now though, it kind of sucks. I’ve got to get back to doing stuff… for realz. The Social Entrepreneurship is coming up, I really found the speakers kickstarted my energy last year, so hopefully that helps. I’ve been a bit of a crappy don in the past week, and an okay student, but I’ve been so much better this term and its frustrating to be burnt out again. I’m set up to have my highest average in a term yet in University, and my midterm don reviews were the highest I’d had too, and I’d done a pretty good job of managing myself, not pushing too hard.

What do you do to get your energy back?

So I’ve decided to make a video for the $500 contest. A video that will win that contest!

If you want to be in my video I will use anybody that shows up at my room at noon on Saturday, November 8th.

The more people I have the better it’ll be, so I’m just going to recruit from everywhere I can think of.

The video will be posted when I’m done.

EDIT:

Well, turns out I’m helping with hiring new dons during that time, so I can’t make the video.

Sorry to any potential volunteers!

This video explains it best.

It happened this Sunday night.

-Danger

Disclaimer: This may very well be the longest post I’ve ever made, I’d like you to know that going into in case you have places to be and people to meet. Also, there’s a very short one just below it.

Donning these past 2 years, I’ve found the biggest thing that effects your life as a part of donning is the people you meet. This past Winter a lot of the dons I worked with graduated and moved on to other things, and it amazes me to see what they’ve done, where they’ve gone and what they’re experiencing. My Facebook main page regularly carries updates from the wide world of dons and their many adventures, and is probably the main reason I sign on so often. I suppose the further in University I get, the greater the urge for freedom and adventure is that builds up inside me.

A while back I posted this comic:

I find the mere glimpses I get into the adventures of my former colleagues help to give me a little perspective on the infinite possibilities that each day offers, and I thought I’d share a few with my readers.

Marlon:

Marlon is a fellow math and business guy, not double degree but we’ll forgive him on that. He was also Binks’ don at some point, and was the “papa don” on my first team. After graduating (in the Fall of 08) he traveled to India to see family and then Peru, where he managed a hostel for 8 months. He regularly wrote notes in facebook, and I thought I’d share a few. (I’ll try to keep the reading light, skip what you don’t like.)

#1: Feb 20th 2008
As I was walking over this internet cafe, I was thinking about what I could share since my last Note. I´ve been managing the hostel here solo for about a week now, and I´m gaining the enviable position of consolidator of many stories. I love people watching at the airport because there are so many cultures and peoples on display. I must say working at a hostel is even better because you actually get to talk to these zany people.

Marlon

#2: March 6, 2008
Now, I wouldn´t say that I´m an environmentalist or anything. I recycle and try not to leave too many lights on. Of course, that probably doesn´t offset my epic hot showers, but I digress.

Marlon

#3: May 26th, 2008
(Note: Kate in this note is his girlfriend, she could only visit once in the 8 months he was away.)
It´s amazing how time flies when you´re having fun. Since the last time I wrote, I:

Marlon

#4: May 28th, 2008
Human Resilience
Cast unto the sea fer mateys t’ see
Windsday, May 28, 2008 upon the hour of 3:19 in the evenin’
I´ve always lived at sea level, so I could never appreciate how things change when you don´t live on flat land with low oxygen.

Marlon

Here’s a picture from his facebook of the village he was living at. (The guy in the photo isn’t Marlon, someone he worked with I think, those are Incan ruins he’s leaning on.) The picture is taken from on one of the mountains surrounding the village, and you can see more Incan ruins on the outskirts.

Adam:

Adam was the don at Minota directly before I got there and I worked with him in UWP as well. A co-director with Matt Colatti on the famous “Last Stand at Minota” among other things. He’s an optometry student who will graduate this Winter, but he made the cut for this post anyway.

Now, Adam is a wordy fellow, but I think a few of his stories warrant reading. As far as I remember, he’s been to Hong Kong and Africa basically using his optometry-related skills to help the locals. He’s probably been other places too, but those are the ones I know of.

#1: October 3rd, 2008
After our minibus decided to stop driving, the details became fuzzy, but somehow they’d arranged for us to get a ride with someone else, so we did that. That someone else, though, was a pickup truck, so we jumped in the back. Like I said, this was a fairly small town, and we were driving through what was basically the middle of nowhere. This, of course, meant that a couple of mazungus riding like regular people in the back of a truck was a very odd sight, and we got a lot of staring, yelling, waving, and the like. A couple fellow drivers even shouted hello or gave us a thumbs up. Children seemed particularly interested, and most of them waved. This is something that happened a lot in Tanzania, kids waving at white people driving by, but almost never seems to happen here in Malawi. We were in the back with a woman and her kid, who had been on the minibus with us, as well as a couple men and an old woman, who presumably were there before us. (Chisoni, our guide, was in the back with us until later, when he moved into one of the front seats.) As we were driving, if people were standing by the roadside, the driver would honk, and if they wanted on, they’d wave, and the truck would slow down or stop (yes, people tried and managed to jump in the back of a moving pickup) so they could get on. Oh, and in case you’re thinking “isn’t it illegal to be in the back of a pickup” or “you didn’t have seatbelts” or anything along those lines, relax — everyone here does this, including the police! Anyway, some way down the road, we’d managed to accumulate ten people and all their associated luggage and packages. A couple of them, upon noticing I had a camera, asked me to take their picture. (Well, one gestured towards my camera and then herself; the other one asked, in broken English, if I could “flash him”!) Then we stopped for two men who had a ton of stuff with them. After making half the passengers get out, we loaded (Mark and I helped arrange things) about 300kgs of sugar, flour, maize, and anything else that’s white, powdery, messy, and edible. Then all twelve of us got in and kept rolling down the road.
Now, I should add that there’s a pretty big highway up to Monkey Bay, but it’s being redone. This means that most of it is perfectly fine, but there are sections where you have to get off and drive on the shoulder (which is the old road, and is somewhere between one and six feet lower) for a while. Anyway, on one of these transition places, we managed to get a flat, so the truck stopped, we all got out, and they managed to jack it up, put the spare on, and get ready to go. Spare tires in Malawi seem to just be an extra tire; it’s not like those little tiny North American spare tires that are only supposed to go ten kilometers or something ridiculous. Anyway, since there were new two people waiting to get on, we put them (and their giant boxes that smelled like a bad combination of fish and wet garbage) on the back… so that made fourteen people (seventeen, if you include those who were riding in the cab) that eventually rolled into Monkey Bay, along with a few hundred kilos of associated baggage. Yes, this was a regular-sized pickup truck.
So at Monkey Bay, we got off at another gas station, gave Chisoni money to go buy a loaf of bread (he didn’t explain why we needed it until later), then hopped onto another, larger truck to ride the eighteen kilometers to Cape Maclear. The truck almost left as Chisoni was buying bread, but since the store didn’t have any, he got back in time. There were other white people on this truck, although they were all speaking Dutch to each other. Want to know how I can tell Dutch from German? Say hello to them — if they can speak English properly when they respond, they’re probably from Holland. There were two girls about our age, who turned out to be medical students as well, plus a random older guy and a girl aged somewhere in between. All in all, there were eighteen people, plus a smaller amount of sugar and whatnot, in this larger truck. Which was good, because the road was absolutely ridiculous. People in Cape Maclear joke that they have the best road in Malawi. Everybody, no matter how bad their English is, understands that it’s a sarcastic comment because there’s only the one road in and it’s terrible. It was 18km of hills, curves, and odd angles on the road. I no longer find it odd to be at twenty or thirty degrees from the vertical while driving.
One way or another, we all got to Cape Maclear. The village also only has one road, so the truck went down it and started dropping people at their hotels and whatever. Except we hadn’t pre-made any arrangements, so Chisoni randomly told us to get off when the Dutch girls did. They had a reservation, but were a day early, so we all had to find somewhere else; the place they had planned to stay was full but had friends down the road with a new place, so we went there instead.
More details on Cape Maclear tomorrow.

#2: September 9th, 2008
(I shortened this one)
The other two days, Saturday and Sunday, we essentially did nothing. Laundry and that sort of thing, but nothing special. I think the most exciting thing was on Sunday afternoon, Mark came rushing into the bedroom saying there was a hurt goat outside. My response was “we have goats?” I hadn’t been aware of this — we see the cows, chickens, and dogs all the time, and the cat periodically, but no goats. There were three goats tethered in the back corner of the yard, which is on a bit of a hill. Two of them were tied to ropes which were staked down on the flat part, at the bottom of the hill; the third goat’s stake was in the middle of the hill. Of course, it had managed to get its leg tangled in the rope, fallen down, and slid as far down as it could, pulling the rope tight and eliminating any chance that it could get up on its own. At first the goat seemed confused as to why I was trying to lift it; eventually it figured it out and started cooperating. It had managed to get the rope (tied to its right front leg) wrapped around its left hind leg, which had somehow gotten crossed over its back right leg. It took a few minutes, and the goat resigned itself to being stuck more than once, but we got things untangled and got it back up. (Now, it was still stuck on the awkward slope of the hill, but at least it was upright.)
Now, if you’re anything like us, you’ve got a few questions at this point. For starters, who stuck the goat on the hill? And where did that person go? There’s usually a few staff around (the family we live with has a couple servants, some of whom seem to be responsible only for the animals), but nobody was anywhere to be found. Even the people who usually cook and clean seemed to be taking it easy since “the boss” was away. On the plus side, I now get to add “goat rescuer” to my resume!

#2: August 25th, 2008
(This is one post taken out of his 7-day hike up mount Kilimanjaro. If you recognize the name, I knew it from the Reach team in high school. It’s the tallest mountain in Africa. He was hiking to the summit.)
August 17th
Another long-ish hike, this time through the “desert” — dry but cold, and full of rocks and dust instead of sand — between the two peaks. It’s incredibly windy — even with a toque on, my ears hurt by the time we’re done. We reach Kibo, which is the “base camp”, so to speak, of Uhuru peak — all the routes converge here at the hut. It’s busier than our other camps have been because of this, but still not overly crowded. Because of our schedule change, we’re also here with our friends from the hotel, who had scheduled the 6-day climb, as well as us and the other 7-day people. And because of the wind, our eating tent is gone. (It either broke or lost a piece, nobody’s really sure.) In any case, we’re now squeezed into our own tent to eat our meals. Kibo is high — 4700m — and doesn’t have its own water supply, so we and our porters had to bring what we needed for the next couple days. Because of this, we decide that there’s no sense in waiting around to acclimatize further, as our schedule had initially called for; rather, we’re going to head for the summit at midnight.
This leads to another interesting point — English. It’s not the country’s official language, but those who can speak it tend to have better jobs, and most of the schools seem to be teaching it. That being said, there are lots of things that don’t quite make it across in translation. Telling time — time already being a ‘weak point’ in Africa — is one of these. Our guide says we’ll be starting to summit at midnight. We ask if this means we wake up at midnight, or we’re leaving at midnight. “Yes”, is the answer. “What time are we leaving?” “12:30.” “So what time do we get up?” “5:30.” *confused look* “No… what time should we wake up?” “5:30!”… “When will the waiter wake us up?” “Oh…. 11:30.” Once we’ve got this sorted out, we’re off to bed (at, like, 3pm) to sleep until we summit.

He’s got a pretty solid web presence if you want to read more, he blogs all of the notes he’s put on Facebook. Maybe look up the whole Kilimanjaro story if you want. And his presentation kicks the RCG’s ass.

Here’s a picture I stole:

Kate T:

There’s a lot of Kates in the donning world, so I’ll just say that this one is different from those previously mentioned. She’s an AHS student, going to be donning in the Winter, and is currently in Botswana working in the cancer ward of a hospital.

I’ll just link to the blog for this one, since my word count is getting up there. The pictures on the first page are all taken by Kate herself, just to give you an idea of what she’s been experiencing. I know I’ve seen pictures like this, but I don’t think I’ve ever been the one to take them in person.

Kate G:

Another Kate, just because she’s pretty awesome. I meant this Kate at the returning don retreat two summers ago, she was my partner in a “let’s talk for an hour and get to know each other” activity we had to do. I don’t quite remember the point of this activity, but my description reveals what happened.

Kate organized the don reading week trip to go see The Price is Right and actually got called down herself! Not sure if you’ll be able to see this video but it’s worth a shot. She also happened to be Avril’s don last fall/winter. Oh, you might recognize this picture of her since UW posted it all around campus after she won the award for Canada’s national Coop Student of the Year Award in 2007.

Just a sample of some of the interesting people you meet as a don. I’m going to do my best to make sure in two years I have some equally interesting stories of my own to post.

-Danger

This is directed at Binks and Jordan, but is not totally exclusive if you have a means of conveyance.

Max Payne is coming out this coming Friday, and I am humbly suggesting a celebratory get-together and viewing in Waterloo. I can provide a roof to sleep under if given some prior notice, and even something decent to sleep on. Now, my initial invitation is directed at Binks and Jordan simply because I know they played the game and will want to see this movie no matter what. But really anyone can go, I just know I’m going and I’m looking to gather appropriate company.

-Danger