Three books that I think all Peace Corps Volunteers should read before leaving the U.S.:

1. Island by Aldous Huxley

2. The Ugly American by William J. Lederer and Eugene Burdick

3. Confessions of an Economic Hit Man by John Perkins

And three songs from the sixties that capture the zeitgeist of the era of the Peace Corps' creation:

1. "Volunteers" by The Jefferson Airplane

2. "Lay Down (Candles in the Rain)" - Melanie

3. "With God on Our Side" - Bob Dylan

Here's how the songwriting process works (in a nutshell).

First, something awful happens. More often than not you get your heart ripped out and devoured whole by some boy or girl you thought you were in love with. After a few days of booze, junk food, illicit drugs, or otherwise just catatonic melancholy you wake up a bit. Then you come to that guitar or piano or maybe bagpipes that you've been tooling around with. "What have you done for me lately?" you ask the seemingly inanimate object. "I'm in real pain here."

"Play me goddamn it, you fool," it says.

You pick it up or sit down at it or strap it on and start fiddling on the thing and hey, wait a second, this feels good. Strum, plink, honk. And wait again, this isn't the Beatles or the Stones. This is you, pouring your busted little soul into some clever little chord progression that somehow got beamed down into your brain from the gods of young heartbreak. You start to sing a little melody over it. Doobie doobie doo. It locks into your brain and you couldn't forget it even if you tried. (Or if somehow you ever actually mastered the art of musical notation you can write it down, but let's say this is unnecessary; the most distinct songwriters you can think of usually never did.) If you give it a week or so those other bits will come - the verses (if you didn't start with them already), and, if it's truly meant to be, oh baby here we go a nice little bridge after the second chorus to tie everything up in a nice pretty package that would make your uncle Elvis Costello proud.

OK, so it's not really that easy. That very first song will probably suck balls so you best keep it to yourself; it'll take years of wading through your own stinky cheese to get to something even remotely suitable for the masses. But the fact is, songwriting is pure, short-form craftsmanship. The perfect turnings of phrase combined with a backdrop of colored chords can achieve more in 3:30 than most books can in 50 pages. Or so says I. But what's the use of writing about music anyway?

I can't claim to know what made Amy Winehouse the way she was or the singer-songwriter she was. I can only guess as to how she was probably a natural wild child, a born rebel, and how as such no schoolhouse walls or social mores could ever have kept her roped in. Maybe she felt real pain from the beginning. Maybe someone hurt her deeply early on or later or both. Maybe her natural recklessness caused the vast bulk of her complexity. Which maybe in turn produced such personal turmoil that thus begat Back to Black, her masterpiece. Regardless, that voice, those goddamn smoky, soulful, slap-you-in-the-face pipes, singing all those fantastic songs that somehow melded the Great American Songbook, jazz, Brit pop, classic R&B, and even ska and reggae into something wholly contemporary and meaningful. Something that could get away with such deliciously droll lines as "What kind of fuckery is this?" That one.

There are those who have called (or are still calling) her a spoiled brat or a pig or a whore or a junkie or any number of awful things that she may or may not have been. But no matter what the haters say, Amy Winehouse was vindicated through song. And her song will live on.

Unfortunately for her and all of us who loved her music, however, it just wasn't enough to keep the woman herself with us here for very long.

RIP, Amy Jade Winehouse, 1983-2011

Original artwork by Joanna Wallace

I wish that I could cry. I don't mean get a bit teary-eyed, like when I watch the M. Night Shyamalan movie Unbreakable (don't laugh, it gets me every time). Or the one moment in The Royal Tenenbaums' denouement, when Ben Stiller, as Royal's son Chas, tells his father that he's had a bad year, almost in tears himself. "I know you have, Chassie," says Royal (Gene Hackman), consoling his still- bereaving and estranged widower first-born. A simple hand on his boy's shoulder and the scene moves quickly on.

No, I wish that I could wail, bawl, moan. Like the women in funeral processions on Santiago Island, in Cape Verde, their hysteric sobbing echoing between canyon walls and down through the valleys of the fora.

The heart, it really can only hold so much in. And it seems as though one of my valves may be broken.

I asked my sister yesterday if she thought I was strong. As a man. She said, "Yes." There was a qualifier about our family in there, to paraphrase, but I don't want to hurt anyone else's feelings. I'll just say that for my brother and myself, we've been given the freedom to learn things about being men as we've gone along. We have had to choose our role models wisely instead of having one(s) thrust upon us. This can be tricky at times, but we have managed. It has been both a blessing and a curse, but perhaps more so a blessing, I'm finding with time.

I feel strength inside of me, to accomplish things, to be good to those nearest to me, whether in work or my personal life. I very much want to be strong, as a man and as a human being. I've spent a long time prioritizing and re-prioritizing my life so as to bring myself and those close to me the most happiness and freedom from pain. I want to give so much to those that I love. And I still have so much left to give. But it takes all my strength sometimes to keep my heart from palpitating out of control.

The last time that I can specifically recall crying was over ten years ago. A friend - not close, but someone I really admired - had tragically taken his own life. He was the best bass player I knew, a poet, a rapper, a kind and gentle soul. He was older than me, and well-known and liked around our hometown, and in many very different circles. A Korean skater punk who had no reason to be nice to me, the prep-school-bound interloper I was. But he was always happy to see me, with a warm shake of the hand and a glint in his eye. I remember him telling me about how even though he didn't smoke, he always carried a cigarette behind his ear: "It's just such a great way to meet somebody and start a conversation," he said, meaning that he'd gladly give away the smoke to make a new friend. That might've been the last time I ever saw him, but my memory is fuzzy on the details. Regardless, he was one of the best people I've ever known, I know that now.

When he died, I hadn't seen him in probably two years. We went to different high schools and he was two years older. And I had drifted away from the punk and skater scene almost entirely. But it hit me, the news of it, and I heaved and sobbed for a moment, binding my eyes against the incredulity of it all, on my bedroom floor.

I missed half a day of school to go to the funeral out in a faraway suburb, on a horrible dreary day. I couldn't even find the words to explain to my high school friends where I had been when I came back that afternoon. They didn't know him. They wouldn't understand. I wouldn't try to make them or resent them for it either. It just was what it was. He was gone, but I had remembered him then, as I still do now, with fondness and love. And I know his spirit has helped give mine strength, with needle-point precision from the distances of time and space and experience that divide us. And I thank him, with all my heart, for being who he was.

But almost always when I feel that my heartstrings are about snap under the tautness of my uncertainties, I don't cry. I wish that I could. I wait in bed for perhaps a flood or even just a spring creek to wash away the stinging into something less unbearable, perhaps to wash my very mind and body into the sweet sleep of gentle dreaming. But the drift does not come and I must be strong in another way.

When I feel pain, when I feel doubt, when I fear that I might just be a mutant after all, and a fool and a desultory dreamer with only chaos by my side, I write, as I do now. And in the absence of sweet, briny tears that bring others such comfort in their precipitation, mine are flavored 26 letters and come to you with all the honesty and pathos of a bucket of that trapped water hidden somewhere behind my eyes and below the place where I know my heart must be.

November 6, 2010

Without too much effort my New York roommate John found a subletter to take my room for the entire month of November. Being the only official lessee in the same attractive Hell's Kitchen triplex for over five years, he has mastered the art of filling any vacant rooms via newyork.craigslist.org. The main perk is that he can claim any rent he deems reasonable on these rooms, leading his own rent to be significantly subsidized. After all, in a place like Midtown Manhattan, the cost of living is whatever people are willing to pay.

I had so many social and family obligations in Chicago that month that it made much more sense to just stay there instead of flying back and forth. And it's not really like I had a real job to worry about. My Peace Corps readjustment money was still going fairly strong and I would avoid rent entirely by staying with my sister, in Wicker Park.

The first of the events was the wedding of an old friend to a young lady we went to grade school with. The funny thing was, on both sides I had a fairly deep connection beyond just having grown up in the same town. The groom's mother and her siblings - also 100% Italian-American - all grew up with my mother on the Northwest Side of Chicago from the 60s to the 80s. The girls all went to Mother Guerin (now co-ed, I'm told) and the boys - my uncle and the groom's uncle - both went to Holy Cross. They played football together. In fact, the two pairs of uncles and aunts were all good friends. Our grandparents were fond acquaintances. My mother was a cheerleader with another of the aunts. And yet another aunt is a surgical nurse that, through the Chicago medical community, knows my father as well as my brother, the med student. Just one of those small world things. And as for the bride, her paternal uncle is married to a woman who is the sister of my dad's brother's wife, my aunt. Got it? So I have cousins who are cousins to her cousins. Confusing? A stretch? Sure, but it's always nice to know you have connections, even if they are a bit circuitous.

The wedding was a traditional Chicago Irish-Catholic affair. The ceremony was at Old Saint Patrick's Church, in West Town/Streeterville, just north and a little west of the Loop. My friends Ben, John, and I all showed up about ten minutes late so we snuck into the back pew, relatively unnoticed. I was excited to see some old faces after so many years. I had recently made a slew of customized pins with an old typewriter and a bit of crass humor, so I relived my Catholic church-going days by silently placing one that said "Do me." on my friend's leg. There's nothing like stifling laughter during mass when you're 27.

The reception was held at the exact same place as my brother's, Galleria Marchetti, though his patently religion-free ceremony was held there as well. Which reminds me of the final words of my maternal grandmother as the door on her ride home to Glen Ellyn was being closed: "I don't think that was a Catholic mass!"

All in all, it was a great time. The food and drink were superb. We danced like maniacs. Everyone was in great spirits and I was reminded that I do indeed like where I come from. Another friend's future father-in-law asked me several very thoughtful questions about my Peace Corps experience. After I told him about it, he said, "We're all so proud of you young people."

But the best, most memorable moment of the night didn't happen until the wee hours of the morning. As things wound down for most of the wedding guests, I found myself accompanied by not only Ben and John, but three other old classmates whom I hadn't seen in a while. All three are known for their hard-partying and wild behavior, which I have joined in on more than a few times over the years. The six of us together was essentially about the most potent group of mischief-makers that you could hope to assemble out of my graduating class.

Long story short, here's what happened (pretty much as I recalled it to a group of friends only three days later): As the bars all closed we were forced to take refuge from the cold November night at my sister's apartment. She, however, was in the suburbs that weekend, babysitting. Only one of her two roommates was at home, ostensibly asleep as all six of us stumbled in at around 5:30 am. One of the members of our group - I'll call him Steve - wanted to prove to my sister that he would make a good dogwalker to her little mutt, Birdie. Apparently he was so bored during his sabbatical from the world of finance that doing this regularly seemed like a good temporary career move. So I, hoping to also take care of my duties as caretaker in my sister's stead, of course agreed.

Walking down North Avenue, Steve was soon stopped by two Amazonian figures of dubious gender. "Hey, baby! Wanna date?" asked one of them. Steve declined, but as he attempted to move on, they stopped him and kept him from passing. He tried to break free, but to no avail; these were particularly muscular transexual prostitutes. "Give us your wallet or your doggy gets tased!" One of them, on cue, produced a police taser, its current cracking in the dawn light. Steve looked on in terror. "Don't hurt the dog!" he retorted, honorably stepping in front of the small, clueless animal. Sensing danger, however, Birdie got out of her harness (recall that it had been put on by a very drunk man at a very obscene hour) and ran away down the street. As Steve turned to run after her, in his full groomsman's regalia, he was maced. At this point his wallet was also stolen, although there's a chance they had already swiped it when they clotheslined him moments before. Despite his maiming, Steve chased after Birdie and managed to get her back into her harness. With the help of a friendly cabbie who had witnessed the scene, he then reported the crime to the police.

I had been wondering what was taking him so long so I looked out the window to see flashing blue lights of a squad car and Steve attempting to explain the situation to the bemused officers.

As of yet there have been no arrests made in connection with the incident. Steve made a full recovery from the assault after a few days and will soon be attending business school. Birdie remains unfazed by most things except food, petting, and fighting the neighbor's dog.

So what about the closure on my two years in the Peace Corps? I know MF is still wondering. I'll just get down to it.

Basically, I feel like it's not over yet. It's a hard order to fill, summing it all up, I'm finding.

For one, I might be going back to Cape Verde pretty soon for a job. So, in a way, I can't really talk about "closure" because the country I served in still plays a role in my life. And if I keep going with graduate study of Portuguese (thinking seriously about it), it will likely be a place that I can think of as a second home for many years to come. I think one mistake a person could make in this kind of situation is to think of it as a discrete event just because of the semi-official status involved. A lot of times people that I knew in Cape Verde didn't even know what the Peace Corps was, much less that I was a part of it. I was just Rob(erto), or to those who didn't know me, kel branku la. I think that it's a lot easier and natural for Volunteers who serve in really remote, particularly non-Western countries or regions to think of their service as a truly discrete event, completely separate from their lives before and after. But Praia is a fairly modern city and I was constantly in contact with the outside world. Which had its pros and cons, I should add.

Anyway, what more can I say really? I feel like I'm letting any interested parties down. I did have a lot of interesting experiences there. I learned how to speak a couple new languages. I helped some students get better at speaking and teaching English. I made a lot of friends, from not only Cape Verde, but also Luxembourg, Brazil, Portugal, France, and, why not, the States. If you want to see the official document on what I did and achieved, feel free to check out my Description of Service.

I guess what people want to hear about is a wild African adventure, maybe with some spear-wielding tribesmen and a crazy old British guy with one of those safari hats and a big mustache. I would've loved to see some zebras and lions myself. Cape Verde is its own little island world though, with much more in common with the Caribbean than the archetypal "Africa" of places like Kenya or Botswana. So I guess that's one thing I learned: The world is big. And it changes quickly from place to place. At times I felt like no one noticed anything particularly foreign about me as I walked around Praia...as if I was just another Portuguese tourist or businessman. And since I mostly worked in an office, I can't say that anything that exciting happened on most days. Other days I felt so out of place that I should just hide in my apartment and not come out. Some days I loved the quiet. Other times I couldn't believe how loud and inconsiderate my neighbors were. Some days I loved being a part of the ruckus downstairs at the bar where the same neighbors hung out bullshitting all the time.

There are a lot of moments. One time I met a monkey and he bit me, but only because I tried to get him to wear my ugly orange shirt. One time I kissed an island lass. One time I climbed to the top of Santiago Island's highest peak and crowed like a mad banshee after a nine hour hike in the baking sun. One time I sang the de facto national song, "Sodadi", along with a local singer in front of a hotel restaurant crowd. And then they let me play a few of my own. One time I had a lovely family home in the mountains, full of smiling kids. One time I had a second mother, whose sweet smile and kind nature were among the most genuine things I've ever known. One time I made it half-way up a volcano before having to run down, screaming in joy but mindful of the downpour now preventing our ascent. One time I met Charles Darwin's great great grandchildren and showed them around. One time I wrote an article about it in Portuguese and had it published. One time I brought my dad the doc and my brother the med student to the city hospital and when I came back they had done surgery on a girl. One time I saw a passarinho bird - the grey-hooded kingfisher you see above - as I walked past the shimmering ocean and I knew it was going to be a good day.

One time I had an adventure. But it won't be the last.

My friend MF visited me and my roommate John in New York City this past January. We got to talking about this blog and how, as one of its many millions of loyal readers, he felt that I hadn't yet captured my final thoughts on my Peace Corps experience. Nor how the transition back to the U.S. was going. He was looking for some closure, he said, and I agreed. Only problem was, I don't think that I was ready to write about these things yet. Until maybe now. Before I do that, though, allow me to catch you up on my last know whereabouts.

So it's April already and the flowers and life in general are starting to slowly peek their heads out from a long winter's coma in Chicago. I've been back here in my native city for about a month now, bouncing between my brother's and sister's apartments in the Ukrainian Village and Wicker Park neighborhoods, respectively. I kept my return from New York fairly secret and really only told my closer friends, the ones who I really wanted to see, that I was back. So I guess now that cat's out of the bag. Although I'm not sure how many people actually read this thing anymore. As opposed to the last few times I've passed through this city while living in either Praia or New York, this time felt more like a quiet, almost silent homecoming, much less like a boisterous celebration of my adventures abroad.

Coming back here was filled with mixed feelings. When I left Cape Verde, I was drunk with wishful thinking. I had spent so many long days and nights in silent contemplation and feverish creative output that I was like a horse out of the gate, furious in my ambitions forward. By moving straight to New York City, I hoped to achieve a few things.

First, get the girl. I had been pining for the same one for a long time, ever since college. The proverbial dream girl. The one with the magic smile and the cool taste in music and the eyes like turquoise atom bombs. The college DJ's greatest fantasy. The one that everyone's been writing songs about. She had already traveled the globe and was friends with what seemed like our entire campus by sophomore year. She was the most outgoing, worldly, life-affirming person I had ever met. Naturally, and as I had met her when I was an impressionable nineteen-year-old, I was smitten. She was the one who I thought would validate me. The one whose approval I sought and whose attention I wanted more than anything else in the world. The one who - because I thought it would prove I was worthy - made me take the plunge and join the Peace Corps. I think it was partially all the songs and novels and shows and movies that I had consumed over the years that had warped my mind into romantic mush. But whatever. I had fallen in love and there's no use justifying or quantifying it. I just had to go through it in my own weird way. My only apologies are to every single friend or family member who's ever had to listen to me carp about this over the years. You should've slapped me.

But as I reconnected with her in New York, it was clear that she still wasn't into it. Totally get why, too: I was like a fawning little puppy dog around her. Who would want to date that? I don't know, maybe I was out of my league but it was also annoying because I would revert back to being nineteen every time I saw her, as if every cool thing about me that had emerged in years since was wiped clean from my persona. I put way too much stock in getting her to see the real me, so much so that I failed miserably at that very goal. But I finally got the picture and even I know when to stop beating a dead horse. It was okay. I was okay. We're still friends. She really is a great person. But now what?

Snapping back to my senses, I sucked it up and moved on. I couldn't give anyone (who?) the satisfaction by leaving the Big Apple just because some girl I knew from college wasn't interested in dating me. So I focused on the next task: Start pre-production on the screenplay I wrote while in Cape Verde. Well, long story short, I accomplished a good amount. In Brooklyn, in late October, I held a table reading of the script using friends and family as stand-in actors. It went well enough, more importantly leading me to make some big changes in the dialogue and plot flow. Later, in December, my partner, a friend of a friend who has some directing experience, hooked us up with a line producer. She went through our newly re-drafted and re-formatted script with a fine tooth comb and, for a fee (thanks again, Mom and Dad), produced a fully functional working budget for our film. That said, if anyone has around $4.5 million just lying around, let me know. You can be the proud executive producer of, what I feel, is indie flick gold. The name of the movie, by the way, is My Priscilla, and if you're a fan of the Coen Brothers, Polish or Korean people, Chicago, the Cold War era, or Elvis Presley, I think you'd enjoy it. It's a fun story with a lot of heart.

So the movie didn't get made. But it certainly still could be. I'm proud to say that I took what was once just a half-baked story outline, gathering dust in the mind of my gloriously ADD uncle, and turned it into an actual workable script. And it only took me three years to do it! I'm a writer, though, not a filmmaker. I feel like my work is pretty much done. I just need to sell the thing now. Any takers?

I should mention that in the meantime, I was working as both a temp and a moving man's assistant. Neither paid very well nor was there ever enough work for me to dream of supporting myself and paying $1,000 a month to live in Hell's Kitchen, on Manhattan's west side. The approximately $6,000 I received from the Peace Corps as readjustment allowance was gone by November. But by that point I had found a subletter for my room and headed back to Chicago for the entire month. All in a row I had a wedding, my parents' divorce, a christening, Thanksgiving, a bachelor party, and other such events where it seemed like either a violent brawl or another round of drinks was about to flare up at any moment.

If you like what you're reading stay tuned. To be continued.

I once read in a college textbook that, in America, being "white" simply means you are someone who is "not non-white." What? I thought. So this definition is defined wholly on what it is not? Kind of a mind-bender. But then I thought about it some more in terms of my own experience as an American.

I am, as far as I know, considered white. I usually check the "Do not wish to disclose" box on forms asking me what I am. But I like to think of myself as a realist. And since all of my ancestors came from Europe, the motherland of whiteness, I guess I have to concede that, yes, I'm white.

I am from the suburbs. This is not necessarily a direct corollary of my whiteness, but there certainly seems to be a general preference among many Caucasians to dwell in such places - near a city, but not actually in it. I was born in downtown Chicago, Illinois. Soon later my family lived in Wilmington, Delaware, where my father was a surgical fellow at the DuPont Institute. About a year after that, we moved to Kansas City, Missouri, where my younger sister was born and my father had his first position as an attending physician. Just before my fifth birthday, we relocated again to Glenview, Illinois, just north of Chicago. Glenview is fairly affluent, but not the most affluent of the northern suburbs. And, since it does not abut Lake Michigan, it is technically not part of what's known as the North Shore, bastion of rich whiteness in the state of Illinois. But it's certainly a place where you can find some very nice houses and a top-notch public school district. Ironically, North Shore Country Club is located in Glenview too, an institution so steeped in "tradition" that even Mr. Michael Jordan himself could never even dream of becoming a member. Although he did play golf there as guest, I'm told.

As my father quickly rose in his status as a well-respected and sought-after pediatric surgeon in Chicago - the medical Mecca of America - we pretty much fit right in there. At least on the surface. I went to Catholic grade and high school with the children of Chicago's titans of industry. My high school was one of only two in the state to offer rowing as a club sport. The point is, I had a relatively very privileged upbringing. I could try to make excuses about other factors that might exempt me from the more negative connotations of "the suburbs", but I'm not going to do that. I grew up in the suburbs. It is what it is.

When I think about how white I am or am not, I always think about how I also have a sense of ethnicity, and how many white people that I know don't think about themselves in those terms. My mother is 100% ethnic Italian. And although neither she nor her parents speak the language, celebrate more than a few stalwart customs and holidays, nor really identify as anything other than "American", I still feel like I'm slightly less "white" than, say...See, I can't even think of someone who is so Anglo and lily-white that there's no doubt about their whiteness. And herein lies the affirmation of that at-first baffling definition of whiteness mentioned above. Is being white really just the condition of being unable to be classified as anything but white? What kind of identity is a non-identity?

During college I also once read in a book that once they first started to flood the U.S. in the mid-19th century, Italian immigrants were in fact not considered white, but their own variety of "Latin". As more and more Italians started to assimilate themselves in the major cities, filling vast economic niches and branching out into the nicer neighborhoods and suburbs along with the Jews, Irish, Germans, Slavs, and various other peoples of European origin, it seems that the status quo began to accept them as simply "white". So much so that when I brought this up to my mother, she seemed perplexed and said, "We're white."

Part of me wants to cling onto this badge of ethnicity, as if it relieves me from any possible claims of accessory to injustice. As if it makes me this plucky, slightly swarthy, brown-eyed man of the people. Someone who could just as well be Brazilian or Middle Eastern. I don't think of myself as close-minded when it comes to these things. But maybe that's a luxury in itself? When I think about it, I find that many Italian-Americans (especially those who self-identify as only Italian-American) are among some of the most racist people that I know. Maybe the fear is still there that we'll somehow be re-categorized with the non-whites and lose our place at the table of plenty that is Rich America? That we better be careful and not mingle with the wrong crowds? (If you don't know what I'm talking about, see the Spike Lee film Do the Right Thing).

But now, it seems, the tables are turning, at least in terms of sheer number. Today I read this article in The Economist about the results of the latest U.S. census. That data clearly show that in the last ten years, the growth rate of "Whites" has barely broken into positive figures. Among those currently under 18 years old (aka "white kids"), the rate has dropped 10%. And everyone else? Blacks: 11% growth among all age groups. Hispanics and Asians, both around a whopping 43%. That brings the total number of minorities in the United States to 111.9 million, quickly trailing the Whites' 196.8 million. That corresponds to a 36/64 split, respectively.

I have to be brutally honest here: At first, my reaction to these figures was one of slight anxiety. Lest you think I'm a racist, please allow me to explain.

I believe that each of us, as an individual, cares about other people in this order:

1. Self;

2. Significant other/children;

3. Immediate family (parents, siblings);

4. Close friends (possibly tied with immediate family);

5. Extended family;

6. Work peers, acquaintances, friends of friends, etc.

7. Strangers

I don't think too many people would dispute me on this. It's almost painfully obvious. But with that hierarchy in order, it stands to reason that if people who I am not related to and don't know socially have something that I want, regardless of their background, their likelihood of helping me get it is pretty much going to be based on one thing and one thing alone: money. That's how a market functions. Since most of the people I know are white and a subset of those white people have also been either directly or indirectly responsible for the livelihood that I try to remain perpetually grateful for, you can forgive me for having an instinctive pang at the prospect of a changing of the guard. But of course I'm not so myopic as to actually go on living my life based on knee-jerk white anxiety for longer than a few seconds...

Now, to get things back on track and to complete this risky line of thought, extreme social exclusion is something that minorities have been dealing with since before this country was a country. The Native Americans felt it first, quickly and brutally. Let's face it: An entire race of people was literally decimated; that is, their numbers where reduced to literally less than a tenth of their original population. As for Blacks, slavery - next to outright genocide the most horribly inhumane practice imaginable - was a backbone of our economy for hundreds of years. As for other, more recent groups, they have been spared the unspeakable horrors inflicted by the majority White population in earlier years, but they certainly have not been given anything easy, either.

Lifestyle clearly plays a large role in the changing face of America and this hits pretty close to home. Let's face it: (Many) white people don't have that many babies anymore, and when they do, the couple is usually over 25. Statistically, this is simply not the case among minorities. I will avoid any value judgments of these kinds of trends (who am I to pass judgment?). But when you break down the fact that, on average, whites simply make much more money than members of any minority group, the latter is becoming - again, on average - younger, more in number, and not necessarily any better off financially. So where does that leave white people? As the Village Voice so adeptly explains in this article from September of last year, they are still rich, but as a group are getting older, more bitter, paranoid, and, apparently, clearly "losing their minds."

My anxiety about a world wherein I wouldn't have as much precious clout as I currently cling to subsided when I thought about a few things. First of all, I thought about how important race really is. Actually, first I thought about the old Richard Pryor bit: "There's a shortage of white people. What happened? Y'all stop f***in'?" And then I laughed and told myself to relax. But then I thought about what race means and how it doesn't need to be considered as important in the grand scheme of things, even though, of course, it is important. And as someone who likes to think of himself as a realist but also an idealist, I tend to believe that people are people and good things happen to them for being good at something useful and kind to others. Sure it's simplistic, but why not hope for the best?

Secondly, things change all the time and have so over the entire course of human history. Read enough books on shifts in politics, language, and culture and I think anyone will come to the same conclusion: Things simply can't stay the same and those who can adapt, survive. (Or else they go down in a fury of angry confusion, as many in the aforementioned article are currently doing. But who wants to die angry?)

Thirdly, I know a few and know of many more in the whiter circles of this country who have a lot trouble with the idea of "minorities" and what should be done about such people. But really, this idea of "minority" is a construct that is based on, among other fairly arbitrary things, skin color. And unless you really are a racist, you know that the presence or absence of pigment is not a corollary of personal merit. And, okay, so Spanish is becoming more prevalent. Deal with it.

In sum, I have to believe that there's some truth to what this nation was founded upon, namely, "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness." We've come a long way, but clearly there are some serious discrepancies in access to education, housing, healthcare, jobs, and overall quality of life. Maybe it's for the best that this current economic downturn is shaking things up a bit, making us really think about what it means to be of value in society. I think something good can certainly come from that kind of reassessment. I just hope that the old, angry white people of the world don't ruin it all for the rest of us.

Last weekend I submitted this idea to the website Kickstarter.com. It was rejected due to not being a "right fit" for that particular organization, but I still think it's a viable project. So here it is. Feel free to get in touch if you're interested in being a part of it somehow.

CategoryNonfictionFunding Goal$20,000+ (mainly travel costs)Project DescriptionMy goal is to write a travel narrative exploring the "Lusosphere" - the 8 nations and several territories spanning the globe where the Portuguese language is spoken. Considering Brazil in particular, the Lusophone world is a burgeoning bloc in the world economy. From Brazil to East Timor and all stops in between, the Lusosphere is culturally and ethnically diverse yet bound by a common official language and a maritime history dating back to the 15th century.I plan on bringing to the rest of the world a better understanding of these countries' histories, peoples, economies, and futures by traveling extensively in them and then producing a well-researched and accessible work. There is currently nothing like this on the market, but I plan to change that. Obrigado!LinksHere is an excerpt from the draft on the chapter regarding Cape Verde: http://ihavemakeanofficial.blogspot.com/2009/10/in-footsteps-of-darwin-encounter-with.htmlAnd here is some information about the Lusosphere: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lusosphere

So long, NYC! It's been a pretty fun few months, but I best be moving on. Although...it's tempting to think that if I hold out just a little longer I could become even remotely as sweet as this guy (click on the image to zoom in)...

This is a little ditty I wrote just before leaving Cape Verde for America. It's supposed to be a duet, with a woman singing the first verse and chorus, a man singing the second verse and chorus, and then the two of them joining together on the third chorus. It's possibly the most light-hearted song I've ever written.

Well I'm a boy

and you're a girl

Or wait, that came out wrong

'Cuz I'm the girl

and you're the boy

that's why I wrote this song

We may just be little kids

just running along

But if you say it's okay

I'd love you all day long

You may be the one for me

and I might be the same

If you gave your hand to me

we could learn this brand new playground game

My mom said that little boys

will do what boys will do

Your mom said that I'm no good

and your dad said so too

Teacher said that class was over

and freed us from this zoo

But I'd stay in school forever

just to be near you

You may be the one for me

and I might be the same

If you gave your hand to me

we could learn this brand new playground game

(repeat chorus)

Here's a perfect example of why I was brought in to Cape Verde as a celebrated English professor:

Cape Verdean person writing on Facebook: "you is that they do well,i had a lot to cape verde in order to drink a few glasses with you,and evening to go to dance steps and draw some new..i loty Ny you and more......"

And back in America? I am a celebrated bar-back!

As you can guess, demand for my teaching and translating services as a native English-speaker was fairly high in a developing non-English-speaking country. (I recommend that anyone feeling the pains of our current turd of an economy go abroad to teach English. There's no lack of jobs there, that's for sure.)

I honestly don't mean this to just make fun of someone's incredibly crappy English. If I had written the equivalent in Portuguese or any other language I would honestly hope that a native speaker would call me out on it. Maybe there's no point to me having posted this other than my fascination with the way the whole world has taken at least some ownership of the English language without necessarily having learned it properly.

I replied to the above post (which was itself a reply to another Cape Verdean friend's much more lucid message) as follows: "Folks, I don't mean to spoil the fun, but there are some major problems going on with your English here."

And here's what a fourth-party observer replied: "F**** YOU".

You'll note that the "F****" has four stars in it, perhaps implying emphasis in the form of a second "K". Or maybe a second "F", as if the word were being spoken in slow-motion.

Again, not trying to be mean or insensitive. But in general I think that non-native speakers of English need to respect English as a Foreign Language more. Just because it's a humongous whore-monster of a globalized phenomenon doesn't mean you have to use it like one. I know it's really hard to learn a foreign language, and that English is totally wacko bonkers in many ways, but that's no excuse to be lazy. Students of English need to recognize that this language also has its social context in places like the U.S., the U.K., New Zealand, Australia, South Africa, etc. and if you've never been to those places, you might be out of your element contextually and culturally. Just like I was at first in Cape Verde.

Conversely, a vast majority of Americans need to stop being so horribly bad at every single other language on Earth.

This kind of thing is inspiring me to go into the field of linguistics; the thing is, people know why they should study language (work, travel, romance, etc.), but they don't know how to study it. Linguistics is the science of language. It can help us understand what is going on in a given language as well as on a universal level. I am no linguistic genius, but having studied linguistics as a subject gave me a lot of tools to be a much better learner.

That was my rant for the day. I hope you liked it. Please don't be offended if you are Cape Verdean and reading this. It was just one example but could've been from any number of countries where English is not prevalent. My Creole and Portuguese have both been thoroughly mocked (much less sensitively as I have done here) as I was learning them. I never took it personally and instead used those moments as stepping-stones to improvement. I will now shut up.

See, the word about sharks is if they stop, they die. Now that's what I call a good traveler.

Got an idea brewing in the ol' brain barrel. More to come...

This is a list of all the books that I read during my Peace Corps service in Cape Verde. That is, from July 2008 to September 2010. Also included below it are books that I read considerable portions of. Most in that category were not really meant to be read in one sitting anyway, if you ask me, but are all definitely worth checking out.

In retrospect, I'll just say that I had a lot of distraction-free time on my hands during those 26 months. And that reading is awesome if you can find the time.

1. Island, Aldous Huxley

2. Disclosure, Michael Crichton

3. The 55 Rules, Ron Clark

4. Breaking the Language Barrier, H. Douglas Brown

5. You Shall Know Our Velocity, Dave Eggers

6. Lonely Planet: West Africa, Tim Bewer, Jean-Bernard Carillet, Paul Clammer, Emilie Filou, et al.

7. The Selfish Gene, Richard Dawkins

8. It, Stephen King

9. Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, John Berendt

10. A Social History of English, Dick Leith

11. Sociolinguistics, Richard A. Hudson

12. Empires of the World, Nicholas Ostler

13. The Language Instinct, Steven Pinker

14. Mutiny on the Bounty, James Nordhoff and Charles Norman Hall

15. Men Against the Sea, Nordhoff and Hall

16. Pitcairn's Island, Nordhoff and Hall

17. Into the Wild, Jon Krakauer

18. Banandog, Brian Newhouse

19. The Conquest of Happiness, Bertrand Russell

20. The Power of Babel, John McWhorter

21. One Hundred Years of Solitude, Gabriel Garcia Marquez

22. O Alquimista, Paulo Coelho

23. Kitchen Confidential, Anthony Bourdain

24. What You Can Do for Your Country, Karen Schwarz

25. Madame Bovary, Gustave Flaubert

26. Sting: Demolition Man, Christopher Sandford

27. Hot, Flat, and Crowded, Thomas Friedman

28. A Year in the Merde, Stephen Clarke

29. Stuff White People Like, Christian Lander

30. Selections from Walden, Henry David Thoreau

31. The Tipping Point, Malcolm Gladwell

32. The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, Junot Diaz

33. Unaccustomed Earth, Jhumpa Lahiri

34. And Here's the Kicker: Conversations with 21 Top Humor Writers on Their Craft - Mike Sacks

35. The Post-American World, Fareed Zakariah

36. The Hotel New Hampshire, John Irving

37. Miguel Street, V.S. Naipaul

38. Middlesex, Jeffrey Eugenides

39. Infidel, Ayaan Hirsi Ali

40. The Razor's Edge, M. Somerset Maugham

41. Darwin em Cabo Verde, Filipa Vala

42. Blink, Malcolm Gladwell

43. The Omnivore's Dilemma, Michael Pollan

44. The Road, Cormac McCarthy

45. Bird by Bird, Annie LaMott

46. Eaters of the Dead, Michael Crichton

47. Stitches, David Small

48. Moby Dick, Herman Melville

49. Eating the Dinosaur, Chuck Klosterman

50. Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue, John McWhorter

51. Ad Infinitum: A Natural History of Latin, Nicholas Ostler

52. Darwin, His Daughter, and Human Evolution, Randal Keynes

53. A People's History of the United States, Howard Zinn

54. On the Death and Life of Languages, Claude Hagege

55. The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin

56. The Greatest Show on Earth: The Evidence for Evolution, Richard Dawkins

57. Confessions of an Economic Hit Man, John Perkins

58. The History of Love, Nicole Krauss

59. The Mission Song, John le Carré

60. Wrath of God, Edward Paice

61. The World without Us, Alan Weisman

62. Song of Solomon, Toni Morrison

63. In the Heart of the Sea, Nathaniel Philbrick

64. The Botany of Desire, Michael Pollan

65. Youth in Revolt, C.D. Payne

---

1. On the Origin of Species, Charles Darwin

2. The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Edward Gibbon

3. The Essential Chomsky, Noam Chomsky

4. O Profeta do Castigo Divino, Pedro Almeida Vieira

5. The Basic Writings of Bertrand Russell

6. The Lusiads/Os Lusíadas, Luis de Camões

7. Language Evolution, Salikoko S. Mufwene

Greetings from lovely Duluth, Minnesota, where the temperature is currently 18° Fahrenheit. There's about 5-6 inches of snow on the ground and it's still November. Everyone hunts deer and drives pickup trucks and collects agate stones. Bluegrass music fills the radio airwaves.

I love it here.

After living on a tropical island for two years, recently people have been asking me if I now hate the cold of the northern U.S. On the contrary; I love the cold and can't tell you how much I missed the Midwest winter while I was away. Seeing snow for the first time in about two years as I left the Duluth airport yesterday to be picked up by my old friend Adam, I breathed in the cold wintry air as deeply as I could. And then I hopped in his pickup truck. First task of the day: Get me some long underwear.

A little about my friend Adam. He's a PhD candidate in Clinical Psychology. He also is one of the funniest, most interesting, and most down-to-earth people that I know. We met at school in Madison and I always looked up to him as a kind of mentor and role-model (he's exactly two years older than me to the day). We've had a lot of great adventures over the years, including psilocybin-assisted spirit journeys (more on this seriously profound topic some other time), a road trip to New Orleans (pre-Katrina), countless cans of the world's best cheapest beer (Mountain Creek), and even more countless discussions about life, love, happiness, spirituality, and why farts will always be funny. He is a great man and I'm extremely happy to have stayed in touch with him over the years. And even more so to count him as a good friend.

Adam described Duluth to me in this way: "It's about 50/50 granola-eating hippies and gun-toting rednecks. I fall somewhere in between." Adam's girlfriend Kayla is a great example of why Minnesota is the best of America: When she's not on call as a traveling x-ray technician, she's hunting deer and grouse with her dog, the sweetest pit bull I've ever met, or collecting agates and other gemstones. She was raised as a freethinker in a small town on the north shore of Lake Superior and is about as kind and unpretentious of anyone I've met. Adam and Kayla are both examples of why this whole red state/blue state thing is a gross and ridiculous over-generalization of America and Americans.

This morning Adam and I went to his gym and spent a good while sweating it out in the sauna. At one point there was a lean, 40-something-year-old guy in there with us. As Adam and I were leaving the locker room, he pointed out that the drummer from Duluth's-own Retribution Gospel Choir had just come in. (It's a pretty small town so everyone knows who everyone else is.) That guy, I had noticed, had been talking to the same guy who was in the sauna with us. Then I put 2 and 2 together: The guy in the sauna with us had been Alan Sparhawk, the frontman from Low, a band I really like, who is also in Retribution Gospel Choir.

So yeah, today I saw Alan Sparhawk in the nude.

On top of that, I have also eaten the following venison products made from deer that Adam and Kayla have hunted themselves: 1.) jerky and 2.) soft-shell tacos. I listed them because I am pretty certain that there will be several more food items that I eat here made from deer meat. How do I know? Because Adam has a dead dear carcass hanging in his garage that he accidentally hit with his car and then brought home to be butchered. I have a photo of it, but I can't send photos from my phone because my cell phone service doesn't work up here. Which leads me to another reason why I love Duluth: No cell phone service!

I've been really loving singer-songwriter Ray Lamontagne a lot lately. Particularly these lines from the song "Jolene":

A picture of you

holding a picture of me

in the pocket of my blue jeans

I still don't know what love means

I still don't know what love means

Happy Thanksgiving!

Another one from my temp days three years ago. Just the right amount of creepy and sexy.

1. Limp - Fiona Apple

2. First Orgasm - Dresden Dolls

3. Bird Gerhl - Antony and the Johnsons

4. Too Much Time on My Hands - Styx

5. Sunday Sun - Beck

6. Human Behavior - Björk

7. The Empty Boat - Caetano Veloso

8. Let It Die - Fiest

9. Corpus Christi Carol - Jeff Buckley

10. Chicks and Dicks - Junior Senior

11. Sex Changes - Dresden Dolls

12. Wuthering Heights - Kate Bush

13. Cue the Strings - Low

14. Parasite - Nick Drake

15. Fairest of the Seasons - Nico

16. Let's Trade Skins - Great Lake Swimmers

17. Creep - Radiohead

18. The Delicate Place - Spoon

19. Innocent When You Dream - Tom Waits

20. Ambulance - TV on the Radio

21. Lonely Nites - Vic Ruggiero

22. The H.I.V. Song - Ween

23. We Suck Young Blood - Radiohead

24. I Remember When I Loved Her - The Zombies

25. The Crying Game - Culture Club

Apparently I had great musical taste in 2007. Now I'm just kind of old and confused.

[First compiled Summer 2007 while temping at Mesirow Financial as a file clerk]

1. Rise and Shine - The Cardigans

2. Never As Tired As When I'm Waking Up - LCD Soundsystem

3. One Cup of Coffee - Bob Marley and the Wailers

4. It's a Beautiful Morning - The Rascals

5. Welcome to the Working Week - Elvis Costello

6. Train to Skaville - The Soul Brothers

7. People in the City - Air

8. Elevator - Hot Hot Heat

9. This Place Is a Prison - The Postal Service

10. Everything in Its Right Place - Radiohead

11. Making Time - Creation

12. File Me Away - Badly Drawn Boy

13. White Collar Boy - Belle and Sebastian

14. Step into My Office - Belle and Sebastian

15. Bright Future in Sales - Fountains of Wayne

16. Power Lunch - Har Mar Superstar

17. A.M. 180 - Grandaddy

18. Information Error - The Slackers

19. A Day in the Life - The Beatles

20. Death of a Salesman - Low

21. Freedom - George Michael

22. Away from the Numbers - The Jam

23. Coming Home - John Legend

24. Free Time - The Aggrolites

I think...I think, yeah. I just woke up from the coma of an eight-year unrequited love.

So...hi, everybody.

I would be bitter and say it was a colossal waste of my time if not for the approximately 8,467 things I learned about life from trying to fill the hole in my heart that it caused.

Stranger Cole sang, "Life can be beautiful." It can. And it will.

Some Returned Peace Corps Volunteers (RPCVs) travel the world after their service. Some go straight home and live with their parents. Some go back to school. Some (miraculously) get good jobs.

I moved to New York City.

Why? Well, there are a lot of reasons, really. Most of them are fairly romantic and involve getting into the arts in a serious way. I don't want to reveal too much, partly because talk is cheap and conjuring up dreams for the masses (ha!) is not only a bit tacky, but also somewhat unlucky. Especially when you have your sights set on several dreams at the same time. You may say I'm a dreamer...

But I also have wanted to live in New York City since I first came here at age 15, so in a sense this was just one of those gut feeling things that I felt compelled to do while still in Cape Verde. There's a real energy here that everyone of course always talks about but is also actually the way it is. There's something about walking down the street and hearing six different languages within earshot, delicious food from all corners of the world, art and music and comedy and business and crazy, schizo everything else at once that screams: "Be here!"

Anyway, I like it here a lot. I'm living with an old friend from grade and high school, which has made the transition from my Peace Corps life not only easy, but downright pleasant.

When I got off the bus just 8 days ago at the Port Authority and walked myself and all my worldly possessions over to this place, I would be lying if I said I didn't feel a swell of hope, excitement, and just plain freedom. I deserve this time for myself. I'm in a position in my life where I am not only wholly unencumbered, but also open to whatever feels right. I want to say "yes" as much as I can to the people and the opportunities that I meet. This is a feeling that I've never quite felt so strongly before, so I have to take it as a sign that I'm on the right path. I realize that I will also have to hustle and fight for my dreams, but I am 100% willing and able to do this.

Stay tuned.

Robert SarwarkSector: EducationCape Verde

After a competitive application process and intensive training, Robert Sarwark was invited to serve as a Peace Corps Volunteer in the West African nation of Cape Verde. Mr. Sarwark began the requisite 9.5 weeks of Pre-Service Training on July 17, 2008. During this time he lived with a Cape Verdean family, which facilitated and expedited his cultural integration and enhanced his understanding of life in the country. He swore in as a Volunteer on September 20, 2008.

Mr. Sarwark successfully completed 25 hours of instruction in Cape Verdean Creole (national language), 85 hours in Portuguese (official language), 100 hours of technical training, 29 hours of cross cultural training, 15 hours of health education, and 6 hours of safety and security training. Mr. Sarwark was chosen to be the chairperson of the Volunteer Advisory Committee (VAC) for his group soon after swearing in. He also served as Administrator of his post’s Volunteer newsletter, which showed marked improvements under his editorial guidance. During Pre-Service Training 2009 and 2010 and In-Service Training 2009, he facilitated training sessions in the areas of Teaching English as a Foreign Language (TEFL) and Teacher Training. During Pre-Service Training 2010, he served as Trainee Orientation Liaison during the incoming group’s first days in country.

Mr. Sarwark was placed in Praia, the capital of Cape Verde. As both a Teacher Trainer and TEFL Volunteer, he worked at the country’s national public university, Universidade de Cabo Verde (Uni-CV), which was founded in 2006. There he performed various tasks in the capacity of both a faculty member at the English Studies Department and as English Language Consultant at the University’s central office. He taught courses in the areas of sociolinguistics, linguistics, and practical teacher training. Regarding the latter, he observed and worked closely with six Uni-CV student teachers at the Escola Secundária Constantino Semedo in Achada São Filipe, Praia. There he focused on heightening his interns’ professional capacity and overall abilities as current or future English teachers in Cape Verde. At both the University’s central office and main campus, he tutored University staff in basic and intermediate English. He translated various documents and interpreted meetings and conferences between English and Portuguese. He coordinated and served as liaison to many of the University’s foreign exchange programs, in particular with Bridgewater State University (Massachusetts), which maintains scholarship agreements at both the undergraduate and graduate levels. In this capacity, he assisted local students in all aspects of selection, pre-departure (including the visa application process), and other logistical and travel considerations. Mr. Sarwark worked diligently and led by example, which encouraged his local colleagues to participate and take ownership of their organization’s successes and failures.

In both 2008 and 2009, Mr. Sarwark participated in Uni-CV’s World AIDS Day events, including a very popular t-shirt design contest, distribution of HIV/AIDS information, free condoms, and a film screening on the topic of prevention (2009).

In 2010, Mr. Sarwark also coordinated a Peace Corps Partnership Project. He raised funds, selected inventory, placed international orders, and organized a small English-language resource library for Uni-CV students and staff. The resources chosen included language learning software (Rosetta Stone), periodicals, textbooks, and workbooks.

On his final Language Proficiency Interview (LPI), held in Portuguese, Mr. Sarwark was rated with a score of Advanced High. Throughout his service he conducted all professional conversations and presentations in either Cape Verdean Creole or Portuguese and composed all written correspondence in Portuguese.

Pursuant to Section 5 (f) of the Peace Corps act, 22 U.S.C. Paragraph 2504 (f) as amended, any former Volunteer employed by the United States Government following his Peace Corps Volunteer service is entitled to have any period of satisfactory Peace Corps Volunteer service credited for purposes of retirement, seniority, reduction in force, leave, and other privileges based on the length of Government service. This is to certify in accordance with Executive Order 11103 of April 10, 1963, that Mr. Robert Sarwark served successfully 24 months as a Peace Corps Volunteer. His benefits under the Executive Order extend for a period of one year after termination of Volunteer service, except for that the employing agency may extend the period for up to three years for a former Volunteer who enters military service, pursues studies at a recognized institution of higher learning, or engages in other activities which, in the view of the appointing agency, warrants extension of the period.

If you’ve ever tried to learn a foreign language as an adult, you know one thing for sure: It’s hard. Though indeed capable of amazing feats of cognition, when it comes to language there are some constraints on what the human brain – and especially the adult human brain – can achieve.

For starters, one important factor is exposure. If exposed to only one system of human language throughout a lifetime, a person will not learn another. That’s the main reason why (most) Eskimos don’t speak Tagalog. This much is pretty obvious. But another important limiting factor is that of age.

Both intense scientific study and empirical common sense have confirmed time and time again that after the onset of puberty, several significant changes take place in the human brain that reduce the ability to master a foreign tongue. Even among fluent non-native speakers, the age at which they picked up their second language is oftentimes imprinted in the form of interference from their native language. Take Henry Kissinger’s German-accented though otherwise flawless English. That’s a textbook example of a bright student who learned a new language as a teenager.

As we advance in age, it’s safe to say that our language-learning capacity decreases inversely, especially if we’ve never had much foreign language exposure during our formative years.

During two years as a Peace Corps Volunteer in Portuguese- and Creole-speaking Cape Verde, West Africa, my apartment-mate, a well-educated retiree from Florida in his early sixties, never managed to learn more than a few words and very short phrases in either language. In my mid-twenties, I myself never became what I would call “fully fluent” in either language. But the difference between my elder colleague and the rest of us mostly twenty-something Volunteers is clear. In simplest terms, I can talk to our laundress when she comes over for our clothes; he can’t.

It turns out there’s some serious scientific truth to that staid maxim about old dogs and new tricks…at least when it comes to teaching those dogs a new way to bark.

There have been, of course, countless numbers of people over the course of history who have managed to master multiple languages, especially in multi-lingual regions where such skills are simply a way of life. A personal favorite example – though it appears in a work of fiction, it’s entirely plausible – is the character of Bruno “Salvo” Salvador in John le Carré’s 2006 novel The Mission Song. The product of a brief tryst between a Northern Irish missionary and a Congolese peasant woman, he grows up to be a much sought-after interpreter, fluent not only in French, English, and Swahili (East Africa’s lingua franca) but also various smaller tribal languages such as Shi, Lingala, Bembe, and Kinyarwanda. As a direct result of his unique linguistic toolbox, he becomes intensely embroiled in a multinational scheme to exploit the eastern Congo’s precious mineral deposits.

Then there are cases of displacement and complex immigration patterns, producing such amazingly multi-cultural and -lingual individuals as the controversial Somali-born human rights activist and writer Ayaan Hirsi Ali. Having lived in Somalia, Ethiopia, Kenya, Saudi Arabia, and the Netherlands all before the age of thirty, she fluently speaks Somali, Amharic, Swahili, English, Arabic, and Dutch.

Personally, I’ve always dreamed of being able to speak (and understand, and read and write, for that matter) as many languages as I could get my hands on. But as it stands, I’ve never strayed much farther than intermediate levels in Spanish and Portuguese, with a bit of (Portuguese-based) Cape Verdean Creole thrown in for good measure. That’s three genetically closely related languages, all basically distant cousins of English. But there are currently around 5,000 languages spoken in the world, give or take a thousand, depending on whom you ask, all of those spread among a few dozen or so genetically separate families. Sometimes it’s daunting just to know where to start.

For those of us native English-speakers, our mother tongue is undoubtedly growing in its hegemony as the world’s lingua franca. This can come as an easy excuse to many of us for remaining monolingual. But with global politics constantly and rapidly in flux, I would argue that, at the very least, being somewhat familiar with a foreign language is as important now as it ever was.

****

Growing up, I was a huge fan of the original Star Wars trilogy. Though not my favorite character (way too much of a weenie), I always had a soft spot for C-3P0, the skinny golden robot classified as a “protocol droid.” “Threepio” could, for all intents and purposes, perfectly speak any language in the known Galaxy, from Jawa to Huttese, to the various droid languages, to plain old English (“Basic” in the Star Wars universe). My favorite moment came in Return of the Jedi, when he regaled a crowd of Ewoks about the recent adventures of Luke Skywalker, Han Solo, and Princess Leia, fluently in their exotic (and adorable) native tongue. (Incidentally, I always wondered why C-3P0 never spoke to Chewbacca in Wookie.)

Where can I get me one of them fancy droids?

Another intriguing moment in linguistic fiction appears in the more recent film Synecdoche, New York, savant writer/director Charlie Kaufmann’s beyond-meta study of narrative and parallel realities. In one scene, the protagonist, theater director Caden Cotard, played by Philip Seymour Hoffman, communicates with his estranged, German-only-speaking daughter on her deathbed. This is done through a microwave-sized machine that produces instantaneous, fluent translation, ostensibly in the speaker’s own voice. It’s a freakily amazing moment in cinema, at least from a linguistic perspective.

What power to wield, to be able to fully and instantly communicate with any other human (or robot) on the planet. Just imagine what you could do with that power; among other things, you would be perhaps the most powerful diplomatic liaison in the world.

Nowadays we have fairly effective language learning software such as Rosetta Stone and the recent Google Translate online app. And of course there are still also skilled professional translators and interpreters, as there have been ever since members of different language groups started meeting diplomatically.

But Rosetta Stone is still, in many ways, just a very interactive (and expensive) primer – an introduction to a language, ideally to be supplemented with years of real-time use.

And Google Translate (http://translate.google.com/) is instant but by no means perfect – often hilariously so. Essentially, it works using a probability algorithm that “merely” matches words and phrases found in archived diplomatic texts on the Internet. But this means that the results can be variable, to say the least, considering the dearth of mutual source material between certain pairs of languages. Case in point: My sister recently used it on the text of a Finnish friend’s Facebook posting to try and figure out what on Earth he was on about. Here’s what it came up with: “Noi faces is yes legendary! Language and point of i’s on.” This was the caption of a picture of two bulldogs cuddling, by the way. Yes…legendary!

And wait, then there’s just plain common communication breakdown even between speakers of the same language. Men and women; the old and the young; jocks and nerds; liberals and conservatives; sometimes even best friends. One time in college I thought a guy was calling me a hog when he was really calling me a hoss, which apparently is Coloradoan for “cool dude.” Kind of a big difference in perceived meaning there.

Can anyone really communicate? There’s so much emotionally- and culturally-charged nuance to the way we express ourselves linguistically. Any given dialogue in real-time is hardly just two talking heads perfectly swapping data.

****

It looks like none of us is going to acquire, much less become, a human protocol droid, fluent in over six million forms of communication, any time soon. Even the British linguistic polymath and writer Nicholas Ostler admits that his own working knowledge of twenty-six languages is a bit of publishers’ hyperbole. “I’m not averse to learning the odd language,” he told me via e-mail last year, “– but 26!? Ah well, at least it gives me a level of aspiration.” I like to believe that though he was being humble and is indeed functionally familiar with so many idioms, common sense dictates that he’s right: complete mastery of 26 languages would be an unprecedented feat of human genius.

So C-3P0 is a very clever invention of George Lucas’ curious mind. Charlie Kaufmann’s squawk box seems a little more technically feasible, but still far off. Even John le Carré’s more plausible Salvo would be an extremely rare find outside of fiction. In the meantime, we’re going to have to learn new languages the old-fashioned way: as early in life as possible with plenty of exposure and daily necessity, or, barring that, with a whole lot of perseverance, study skills, and humility.

"Yeah but the shirt is ugly." -- Mom

Okay, so by now things have possibly gotten a little out of hand. I've spent a large portion of the last two weeks collecting photos, conducting surveys, and writing these posts. Friends and family have started to get annoyed and possibly genuinely concerned. As for these postings themselves, whether anyone besides Annie actually enjoys them is up for hot debate. I even went so far as to create a pie chart. A pie chart! That's a first for me. "Hasn't this whole orange shirt business just been one big waste of time," you might ask?

No! Shut up your face and keep reading.

As the Saga of Ol' Orangie began to come together and its narrative unfurled, I thought it wise to remove myself from the somewhat static domain of the Internet; I would take it to the streets! Fortunately, Cape Verde is a land in which "the streets" is synonymous with beach parties, a national drink strong enough to shock a grizzled pirate, crazy pick-up truck rides, slumber parties, and, yes, those furry, banana-eating beasts known locally as macacos.

Speaking of grizzled pirates (and their monkeys), my friend Andrew Vernaza recently closed his Peace Corps service here and returned to the U.S. He spent his two years teaching electrical theory, fixing broken electronics, installing solar panels, and supervising the maintenance of his town's lamp posts and other light fixtures. On top of being one smart and upstanding fellow, Andrew is also what you might call, in the parlance of our times, a savage. What this means is that this fool knows how to party down, fight a bear, have a laugh, and grow a man-beard that would put Fidel Castro to shame, all in a day's work.

See what I mean? A man among men. And monkeys.

So it was only fitting that when it came time for Mr. Ver-Nasty to depart from the Land of Morabeza that he do so in true filthy style. With several vehicles-worth of wild young vocational students in tow, a steel drum full of food, and a green monkey named Txiku, we sought to give our pal a despedida to remember.

The night before, a group of us stayed at Andrew's house in a town called Pedra Badejo. I knew that if I presented Ol' Orangie to my friends in person, that they would have a better chance to react honestly with their feelings about him. For example, Andrew himself immediately responded, "That shirt is awesome!" The man knows style. As for the others in attendance, frankly I couldn't keep Ol' Orangie off of them.

Jon, for starters, found Ol' Orangie to be supportive and stylish. For the record, those armpit sweat stains were difficult to attribute to anyone in particular. They in fact added to the night's spirit of tropical exuberance.

Next, Rachelle applied her powers of creativity to reimagine Ol' Orangie as he might have appeared in the classic film Risky Business. Or Flashdance?Elyse added some of her Virginia charm to the mix in what I like to call "Orange on Dirty Blonde".

The next morning, after a slight delay of three and a half hours, we hit the road with the aforementioned gang of reckless youths for Praia Baxo, on Santiago Island's west side. When we arrived, so did the party.

I wanted to spread the power of Ol' Orangie around. First, to Txiku the Monkey. He sniffed him. For some reason or another, though, he refused to actually wear him.

Then, the little scamp bit me on the hand. Not a good sign.

So I moved onto more humans. Cape Verdean humans! Branco here needed some convincing at first, but eventually he agreed to give Ol' Orangie a try. Under one condition...

That I wear his favorite shirt, "Azulinhu Bedju". That's "Ol' Bluey" to you, Yankee.

Manuel and his animal friends seemed to heartily approve of the switch. After this photo was taken, Txiku fortunately restrained his primate rage enough to not gnaw on my face.

Ol' Orangie rules.

THE END

Disclaimer: No monkeys, dogs, Cape Verdeans, or Peace Corps Volunteers were harmed in the writing of this blog.

I thought I'd take a quick break from the silliness that is the "Saga of Ol' Orangie" to make sure you all know that your US tax dollars aren't being completely wasted.

So, back in July my Peace Corps Partnership Project, "English Language Resource Library", was fully funded. This was thanks to three very generous public donors and either one or several very, very generous anonymous donors. He or she or they contributed upwards of $900, which was a very large portion of the total partnership grant request. I really wish I could find out who that was. Anyway, I'll just say this now to all of my donors: THANK YOU.

The total amount made available was (approximately, due to fluctuation in currencies) $1,410 USD from US ("partnership") donors and $520 pledged by the University of Cape Verde (the "community donor"). This comes to a grand total of about $1,930.

I'm now in the process of implementation. In my case, this mainly means ordering and managing books and other materials. It's amazing how complicated ordering things from the US, UK, and EU to Cape Verde can be, I'm realizing. I've had to explain more than once exactly where I was calling or writing from to perplexed sales associates. Apparently lots of folks have the tendency to confuse "Cape Verde" with "Cape Town". Add to that a dose of homegrown, post-colonial bureaucracy and things end up taking a bit longer than you'd expect. No complaints from me, though. Things are really coming together nicely as of late. I should be able to get everything ordered and accounted for by the last weeks before my COS ("close of service") date, which is Thursday, September 23rd.

This will be a very small "library" at first, but hopefully will be expanded by future and current Volunteers also posted at Uni-CV. The idea was to very strategically choose resources aimed at helping adult, professionally-minded English learners to help themselves learn and take ownership of their own education.

With that in mind, here's how the inventory list is shaping up:

Books

504 Absolutely Essential Words

ESL Guide to Business English

Idiomatic American English workbook (2)

Let's Speak Business English!

Writing for Academic Purposes

Software

Rosetta Stone: American English, Levels 1-3

Rosetta Stone: American English, Levels 1-5

Furniture, etc. (TBD)

Dry erase board (2)

Dry erase board easel (2)

Bookshelf or cabinet

Dry erase markers (2 sets)

And now, here's a photo of me hard at work trying to manage my budget and keep track of all this incoming gear. Thanks to my friend and colleague Chissana for taking it.

"Orange, a close relative of red, sparks more controversy than any other hue. There is usually strong positive or negative association to orange and true orange generally elicits a stronger 'love it' or 'hate it' response than other colors." -- www.squidoo.com/colorexpert

On Thursday, July 29, 2010 a friend took a photo of me wearing Ol' Orangie in the town of Assomada. Unfortunately, due to technological limitations, I have been unable to acquire this particular photo to share with you today. But take my word for it that I didn't look too sharp. I looked so absurd, in fact, that the image haunted me throughout the day and I had trouble sleeping that night. Is this what I really look like? I thought, over and over again.

Lest you think me vain, I'll remind you that you know the kind of picture I'm talking about; we've all taken them at least once in our lives. It was the kind of picture for which the "remove tag" button was invented on Facebook.

Like most of my crackpot ideas, a fresh one came to me in such a fit of insomnia. I grabbed my notebook and scribbled down some thoughts. Maybe, I pondered, just maybe Ol' Orangie had something to do with me looking like a circa 1973 Milwaukee bus station loiterer.

The next morning, I e-mailed Annie to ask for specific details on why she disliked Ol' Orangie so much. Within the hour, here's what she replied:

Subject: An open letter to orange shirt

Orange shirt, where to begin. I guess with...I hate you.

You not only offend me with your cut and color, but I genuinely dislike being around you. Looking at you makes me angry and fearful. Angry because you elicit a certain sense of curiosity about your origin and purpose when the last thing I want to do is look at you AND think about you. And fearful that there are more out there like you.

Although I am tempted to admire you for your hue - which I'm sure is impossible to reproduce - I wonder if maybe this is because there is no other article of clothing in the world that would wish that upon itself.

You appear to maintain a certain level of dirtiness at all time, yet never appear to be clean. This is intriguing to me. And that makes me mad. STOP making me think about you, shirt.

Your sleeves are too long, making the wearer's arms appear too short. This is unfortunate when the wearer also happens to have hands in the likeness of a child's drawing. On the other hand, it can be argued that your sleeves are entirely too short, because short-sleeved button downs are for old men, perverts, and gang members. All of which I am pretty sure your wearer is not.

If I didn't happen to know your one and only friend, I would think he was some kind of sexual deviant. Not necessarily anything too serious, I mean, I wouldn't cross to the other side of the street, but eye contact would definitely be avoided.

And this leads me to my final point. There have been others that have owned you before. They obviously came to their sense and gave you away or sold you to a homeless person. But they did make the decision at one point in their lives to purchase you and bring you into your homes and that is something that will live with them forever. After all, it is our actions that define the type of person we are. This means that there are other ambiguously menacing orange shirt wearers out there, making the world a scary and threatening place where no vacation picture is ever safe, first dates are sabotaged, and little children are taught to stay away from strangers.

Signed,

Anne

Chicago, IL

Well let's see...

Old man?

Yeah, but a really stylin' old man.

Pervert?

Okay, maybe she's onto something.

Gang member?

Don't you know I'm loco?

Gang member who's also a pervert?

Uhh...

And what's all this about sabotaged first dates? What about fifth dates, which was, about four years ago, the first time Ol' Orangie was revealed to a certain ex-girlfriend?

Everything was going great at first. At this point in the night my sweater almost entirely covered Ol' Orangie's blazing glory...

But then things got weird...

He couldn't be contained. The sweater came off. By the end of the night, I admit that I most certainly did look like "some kind of sexual deviant"...

"I don't have the heart to tell him, but I think Rob is about to get cock-blocked by his own shirt."

I never saw that girl in person again. About a week after these photos were taken, she dumped me like a bag of dirt over the phone. The day after Christmas!

Maybe you're onto something, Annie.

****

In the spirit of true scientific research, I thought I'd elicit the opinions of my peers as well. I posted this short survey on Facebook soon after receiving Annie's letter.

What are your thoughts on this shirt?

a.) I love it.

b.) I hate it.

c.) Meh.

d.) I have no idea why you're asking such a random question.

e.) both a.) and d.)

f.) both b.) and d.)

g.) Goddamn it, Rob, shut the f*** up already.

h.) (fill in the blank)







The responses:



Jeanine: I'm going to go with d.) and g.) because honestly I just don't give a s***. And I much prefer men's shirts to be in the blue family as a general rule.

Andrew: e.)...lol

Steven: h.) Stop having your sister pose as your girlfriend.

Laurie: c.) all the way.

Peter: b.) I opt for destruction.

Tricia: h.) At least the pervert shades match the pervert shirt.

Andrea: c.) The color washes you out.

Ashley: h.) I see you're trying to show off some chest hair.

Kelly: h.) You must be at the end of your PC service with nothing to do because school is out for the summer. I guess this is one way to pass the time.

And in pie form (click on image to enlarge):

Just as I suspected: The results are inconclusive. And it appears that squidoo.com was absolutely right about the color orange. Some people hate it. Some people love it. One thing's for sure: It makes us all crazy.

What will become of our hero, Ol' Orangie? Check back here soon for the shocking conclusion!

"Orange is the happiest color." -- Francis Albert Sinatra

Like I mentioned, I don't remember exactly when I found Ol' Orangie. Or, perhaps, when he found me. But I'm fairly certain it was sometime around the turn of the millenium. This would also be around the time that I finished high school and started college.

My clothing issues were, then as they are now, troubled. Part of the problem stems from a severe aversion to shopping. Another from the fact that I very well might be an eighty-year-old man trapped in a twentysomething's body. So ever since becoming an adult I've managed to hide my shame and weather the elements primarily through scavenging. During this era, my brother John's closet in our childhood home in Glenview often proved to be a dependable source of vintage styles.

I think the initial attraction to Ol' Orangie came from what I like to call the "cabana-wear factor". This is to say that a certain article of clothing would well accompany the lifestyle of a salty, bearded castaway on a desert island. In this sense, Ol' Orangie's appearance in my life takes on added meaning as a distinct foreshadowing of my time spent as a Peace Corps Volunteer on a certain arid, African archipelago.

But I digress. I agree with Old Blue Eyes about orange being a very happy color. But I was soon to find out the other emotions that it evokes. The cut and style of my new find - later to be revealed as a discarded component of John's last Halloween costume ("old man") - suited my self-perceived dynamic nature. It appeased my second-hand nostalgia for the mid-century while also fulfilling my burgeoning sense of laissez-faire, pseudo-intellectual pretense. Thrift store chic was my M.O. and I thought it made me look like some kind of funky beatnik. Okay, yeah. So I was kind of a douche. Give me a break; I was eighteen.

Neverthless, a bond was quickly formed between us. I look back fondly on all the times I've had with Ol' Orangie. He's been with me through thick and thin.

Here's us at Brat Fest 2006 in Madison, when we entered the "I Wish I Were an Oscar Meyer Weiner" jingle-singing contest...

And while on a Midwest roadtrip later that year with my good (human) friend, Lunkes...

When I was going through Peace Corps training in the summer of 2008, my homestay mother, Ivete, graciously mended my old buddy when he lost a couple of buttons...

Here's us more recently with Cape Verdean pop star Tó Alves and his ukulele...

And here we are on vacation in Portugal last summer...

I loved Ol' Orangie very much. Our mutual admiration was all-engrossing. And so it came as a complete surprise when, on this same trip to Lisbon, my sister commented, "God. I hate that shirt, Rob."

"What? Why?" I responded, shocked at her ire.

"I just hate everything about it. I hate the sleeves. I hate the color. I hate the way it hangs down in the back. I hate it."

"I love this shirt, Annie. This shirt is awesome," I retorted. "Shut up."

"Okay. Sorry," she said, clearly not wanting to offend me further. "Whatever. I don't really care. It's fine."

But the damage had been done. Her true feelings had been expressed. Clearly, this element of my life that had become so integral, so loyal and steadfast, was beginning to - or perhaps already had - come between me and at least one of my loved ones.

Things had changed.

Stay tuned for the next exciting installment of our saga...

"The clothes maketh the man." -- Ancient Roman proverb

I've often wondered about the topic of perception. More specifically, the perception of the self versus that of the collective masses. But I don't want to get too abstract or philosophical here. I'd rather focus on the fact that humans are very much visual creatures; more often than not, we do judge a book by its cover. I know I do. I mean, why would a good book have a crappy cover?

It's also been said that there's no accounting for taste. But what if certain things really do just inherently suck? And, more importantly, what if for the last almost decade I've been regularly wearing a shirt that makes me look like an absolute, complete a-hole?

****

Yesterday, like almost any other weekday morning, I rose, washed myself, and got dressed.

At the moment, I'm really broke and can't afford to buy clothes that often, even at cheap African market prices. I could probably be much better at budgeting, but to be honest, with less than two months to go here I don't really care.

So my wardrobe is paltry, to say the least. Only the most robust of garments have survived the weekly onslaught of old-style board and basin washing by my empregada. My shoes are constantly breaking down against the elements of cobblestone and sand. Nor do I own an iron. What has resulted over the last two years has been an ever-shrinking rotation of shirts and pants that can somehow resist not only wrinkling, but also food stains, becoming completely threadbare, and just falling apart. I've often considered foregoing the stress and trouble of it all and just donning a loincloth everyday instead.

My pickings were particularly slim yesterday due to the recent breakdown of three of my most cherished cowboy-style, long sleeve button-downs, so I opted for an old go-to. He goes by the name of "Ol' Orangie," and he's the short sleeve number you see in the photo above.

Me and Ol' Orangie go way back, more than seven years, I reckon, but his vintage must be much greater than that, stretching back to perhaps the early 70s, if I had to wager a guess. Ol' Orangie and I have been through a lot since we first crossed paths, but his fate is now uncertain.

Submitted for your consideration is the forthcoming story - the saga, if you will - of the rise, fall, and ultimate demise of one of the world's most controversial semi-casual garments.

Stay tuned for more.

Other Places Publishing, which exclusively employs Returned Peace Corps Volunteers (RPCVs) in writing low-impact, pro-social travel guides to some of the world's more exotic and under-represented destinations, has just released its guide to Cape Verde. It was written over the course of the last two years by RPCVs Callie Flood and Brittany Kuhn and very well might include a little somethin'-somethin' from yours truly about the Cape Verde-Charles Darwin connection. (I honestly can't 100% confirm this since I haven't gotten a hardcopy yet, but you should buy one nonetheless.) Lots of other contributions from returned and current PCVs are included as well.

Check it out: http://www.otherplacespublishing.com/cape_verde.html

I wrote this piece a couple of months ago. I was originally going to submit it to our post's Volunteer newsletter, but at the last minute decided against it. But I figure that it's a pretty accurate portrayal of how I've spent some of the quieter, more contemplative hours here in Cape Verde, so here goes...

I’m thinking now, here in the darkness. As I begin to type, it’s just after 10 on a Friday night, May 14, 2010 to be exact. Pretty much a normal Friday night for me lately. There’s not too much excitement on my social radar here in Praia, mostly just a lot of time spent listening to This American Life podcasts, reading, and playing the guitar. And actually, I’ve been enjoying it. I think that it’s okay. There’s exactly four weeks until I get on a plane and go to Chicago for my big brother’s wedding and I have to admit that this has had something to do with my recent apathy towards upholding the Peace Corps directives of “integration” and “intentional relationship building.” I’ve been waiting lately. Waiting, waiting, waiting. My mind has often been elsewhere. I’ve come to think of this period of the second half of the second year of service as akin to “senioritis” back in high school. I have mixed feelings about this x-ing off days on the calendar, though I don’t think I can stop doing it.

But for now, at this moment, I think it’s best to say that I’m just thinking. Well, writing this piece too, of course. But ultimately just enjoying the darkness. Even though the power is on (for now) and I could have light if I wanted, I leave it off and the laptop’s glow suffices.

There are the same familiar yet annoying sounds from above and below my apartment window. The fluffy frou-frou dog barking up on the roof, perpetually tied there, its poor idiot voice echoing down to my unit through one of the quintals. The middle-aged men down below at the watering hole of Dona Tê-Tê’s garagem, seemingly also tied there, by habit, their jolly but argumentative Creole with nowhere to go but straight up to me, bouncing between the surrounding buildings’ walls and completely incomprehensible by the time it reaches my ears. The incessant whistling of questionable young dudes trying to get my teenage neighbors’ – their friends’ – attention. (No, they can’t come out to play.) The soft drone of crickets and wind and cabs prowling. These are my normal night sounds. It’s a mixture of calming, heartbreaking, frustrating, (still) (very) foreign, and, yes, by now familiar.

****

Last night I went to an event at Uni-CV’s business school, organized by Daniel, the U.S. embassy English Language Fellow. This small panel discussion brought together the consular officer from the embassy, the head of the Millennium Challenge Account here in Cape Verde, and Hank, our boss. In English – as this was programmed in part as a chance for the students to practice their skills – all three panelists introduced themselves and then answered questions about their respective agencies and roles here. It was nice, I thought. It was what I think people want to know in a small country like this; that America isn’t only a fantasy or a behemoth or a machine. That what it really comes down to is people. Or at least that’s how I like to think of things.

Hank brought a six-minute movie to show on what the Peace Corps is and does, one that I had already seen once before because it’s included on the Partnership Program CD. In a way, this video stole the show for the Peace Corps. The audience watched intently. Everything positive about our kind that one could possibly put in six minutes was there: the idealism, openness, friendliness, both street and book smarts; the worldliness, leadership, sticktoitiveness, and frank sensitivity. This film makes us look like superheroes that most certainly will change the world.

And so I felt very proud, naturally, to be a part of it, to remember that, Hey! I’m technically one of those people that this very inspirational promotional tool is making direct reference to. That I’m a descendant of the idea that being a good citizen doesn’t stop at America’s borders. I am a good boy!

But residual Catholic guilt will still always haunt me, I fear. In a way, like many of my Italian forebears, I’m a born fatalist. Oh sure, I thought, those people they picked to be in the movie are superheroes. That’s why they made they cut. Meanwhile there’s people like me, who’s not sure that he’s been doing things to the fullest over the last almost two years. Or if he was really even cut out for it in the first place. What if I’ve been, in fact, a plain bad volunteer? After all, I don’t currently have a smiling local child perched atop my shoulders.

I’m exactly 43% serious here.

I think where I’m going with this, though, is about how none of us is perfect and, in our daily lives as Peace Corps Volunteers, we face the fact that we have to spend every single waking hour of our lives with, well, ourselves and our own perceptions of what it means to be a PCV. And that’s not to mention the scrutiny and expectations we come under from almost all other sides. So that’s where I’m going with this: What does the Peace Corps really look like from the inside perspective of each of us as an individual? What if our service ends up looking nothing like we had imagined?

For me, one of the hardest things, regardless of the place, is meeting new people. I just feel weird, especially if there’s no pretext. It’s not that I don’t like making new friends. I really do. And I have here. Let’s just say that I’m a bit cautious to let new people into my life. Or maybe I’m just kind of awkward. Or a snob? Who knows. I know people who can make friends with complete strangers, seemingly in minutes, and it completely awes me. How do they do it? How do they know the other person won’t steal their identity and start buying L. Ron Hubbard books in bulk on Amazon? (Now I’m just making myself look plain paranoid.) In my case, it helps to be introduced by a mutual friend, but, as my mom says, I’m “a little slow to warm up.” (She’s one of those crazy/amazing stranger befrienders, by the way.) Once I do warm up to someone, though, I like to think I’m an extremely loyal and involved friend, one that will pick you up from the airport because, honestly, I just need to see you in the flesh as soon as possible so we can catch up. I might even write you a little song if you play your cards right. One thing that I am incapable of doing, though, is making a friend just for the sake of making a friend. Herein lies my lingering sense of guilt, because ideally, I should be friends with every single Cape Verdean citizen that I meet, right?

But here in Praia, not just a Peace Corps post of course, but a city in a country in the world, I have had trouble breaking through the final frontier. Language is one obvious constraint, since no matter how functionally fluent I’ve become, I’m still not really me in a foreign language. I’m not even Creole Me or Portuguese Me, like most truly bilingual people have that fully-formed and distinct alter ego. I’m just me, the guy who knows enough to get around but isn’t funny or really all that interesting, normally. And of course along with language comes its inexorable twin, culture. There are certain things that I don’t think that I’ll ever understand or embrace here (see the aforementioned pastime of incessant window whistling). I also have no interest in futebol or Akon. Then there’s the fact that it’s Praia, the big city, the Manhattan of Cape Verde. There’s tugis ("thugs") here, and casubodi ("cash or body", read: "muggings"). There’s polite standoffishness even among neighbors. You have to play it cool, moç. And finally, there’s the professional distance of my job at the main office of Uni-CV. My coworkers are all very nice people, but let’s just say I don’t normally hear them calling me to txiga ("come on in") for a plate of katxupa at their air-conditioned office space.

And so this brings me back to my feelings of – to put it in less fatalistic terms – the figurative plateau that I reached very early on in service (incidentally coinciding with the literal downtown plateau of Praia that I have commuted to almost every day for work). I find myself with feelings of receio, of holding or being held back. The words and motions come out okay. I know where I’m going. I have my friendly faces around town that I’ve grown to know a bit. I get what I asked for. I do what I think I’m supposed to be doing. Once I even dated someone from here. But am I living up to the Peace Corps ideal?

What I really want to say, though, is that it’s not necessarily good or bad, just how it was for me. How it has been for each one of us. I think that sometimes we all need to acknowledge that things are never a nonstop barrage of suspense and rapture, especially not once you get into any sort of routine. Life is not a six-minute promotional video. It’s life, just one that’s been transposed to another continent. And that’s okay. In fact, it’s great. What I think really matters about this experience – one that half of us are about to conclude – is that we really did put ourselves out there. We taught and learned and mixed it up every once in a while, occasionally did a little island-hopping, and maybe even made some good friends at site, bridging the gaps of culture and geography. And that’s not to mention the deep friendships forged among us Volunteers.

I do have some feelings of regret about the amount of effort that I’ve put forth with my neighborhood community, but maybe this is just that good, old-fashioned Catholic guilt come back for more. Ultimately, I think I’ve changed for the better throughout my almost two years here. In fact, I think that it's impossible not to have gained some truly valuable perspective from this kind of experience.

And so as I lately daydream of being reunited with the family that I appreciate now more than ever, of potential love, of career and life prospects, all waiting like specters across the great sea, I have to remember how things go sometimes. That once I’m back there, smack dab in the noisy middle of something I can point to as my life, that I know I’ll often stop and remember my time as a quiet, lonely American living on a strange little island in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean, surrounded by tranquil and heartbreaking sounds. And I’ll think to myself, Hey. That was something.

To any dog lovers in the Chicagoland area:

Bindi is my Peace Corps colleague Dacia's dog. Dacia found her on the street and raised her from a tiny puppy here in Cape Verde. Since Dacia will be travelling after her service ends, she recently sent Bindi back to the U.S. to live with her mother, but is having trouble adapting to U.S. life in a house with other dogs. She would be great for a small family with no other dogs, especially one with people who can spend time with her. She has all her shots and paperwork. Please let Dacia know if you're interested in either fostering or adopting her - dacia_davis@hotmail.com.

Thanks!

I was just approved to start raising funds for a Peace Corps Partnership Program. The goal is to help support my host institution, the University of Cape Verde, with a small English-language resource/reference library. Check out the details of the project plan below. If you can support this in any way that would excellent. My goal is $1,374.63. Thanks a million!

GO HERE: English Language Resource Library.

Good ol' Bert...fighting the good fight for us packrats and collectors of strange items.

If you know me, you probably know that I geek out about a few somewhat random things. Charles Darwin, foreign languages, shipwrecks, world geography, and mid-20th century Jamaican music are among them. But you might not be aware of the fact that I also love bottlecaps.

Yes, I go crazy for 1" circular bits of aluminum, aka "garbage" in most people's eyes. Maybe it has something to do with the fact that being a packrat is in my blood: My Grandpa P.J. has been a collector of records, musical instruments, and other great found objects for years, which his career as a Chicago garbage collector certainly didn't discourage. His basement is a wonderland of vinyl from the 50s to the 80s. On the other side of the family, my dad is actually a pretty serious neumismatist, which is to say that he's a big time collector of American coins. But I don't know where this particular affinity for caps comes from exactly.

I can remember that I liked them as far back as when I was five. I recall playing in a sandbox in a park near my new house in Glenview after my family had moved there from Kansas City. Some teenagers must have been partying there shortly before because after a little digging around I came across a whole bunch of Budweiser caps buried there in the sand. I remember I just liked how small and concise the things were, almost like coins, but more colorful and, unless rusty, shinier. It was always weird to me that they got thrown away so readily. So I started collecting them.

Now, over twenty years later, I've amassed a pretty decent collection from both the U.S. and my travels abroad, also with the help of some friends who've collected for me on their own travels. I must have about 200 or so at this point, I figure, but I haven't done a count in quite some time. In my constant musing and daydreaming while counting down the clock 'til the end of my Peace Corps service, I've started thinking about what I can do to take my geekdom for "crowncaps" to the next absurd level.

The below mosaic by Michigan-based artist Adam Kempa has particularly piqued my interest. I recently got in touch with him about doing one of my own and he was amazingly helpful in giving me tips on how to get started. The real trick? Collecting metric f***loads of bottle caps of the right colors.

This is of his younger brother, who had passed away a few years before. It uses 2,635 caps and measures roughly 6 by 4 feet. It took over three years to complete. As you can see, to get any kind of resolution, the final product needs to be pretty big. But the pay-off is something grand and cohesive that comes from many, many small and disparate items. I like the thought of that. Anyway, I just think it's really cool and I really want to do one of my own.

SO in the meantime, I've been poking around the streets of Praia looking for interesting caps. There are really only a few brands on sale here sold in bottles - Coca-Cola, Sprite, a few varieties of Fanta, a couple of Strela beers, and Super Bock. Plus several brands of malt beer, which I find disgusting but Cape Verdeans absolutely love. If you happen to be in a foreign country where glass bottles still abound, I'd be much obliged if you could hold on to them for me. Even if you're in the U.S. that would be great too. Who knows, your findings might make it into my future mosaic masterpiece.

Last week, as committee administrator, my team and I put out the latest issue of Nobas di Korpu di Pas, Peace Corps/Cape Verde's volunteer newsletter. Not to toot my own horn, but I think it's the best one that I've seen since being in country. In addition to the quality submissions and crack editing, the final product is especially great thanks to the ace formatting and photography work done by Josh L. out on Fogo Island. Today I got an e-mail from PC acting Africa Regional Director Lynn Foden, who also agrees that it's "awesome." Here's a link to the pdf version if you want to see it and judge for yourself: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/3814165/newsletter_2_-_final.pdf.

In other news, the ball is really rolling on my plans to do a world map mural project in the community of São Francisco, just outside of Praia. This is the site of 1st year volunteer D Jan. I'm looking forward to getting outside and doing something more typically Peace Corps-ish during my last three months in country, which will be from June 29th to September 26th or so. (The rule says you have to stay at site for the last three months of service and since I'm going to Chicago for my brother's wedding in mid-late June, I have to stay here later than most of my colleagues.)

Below is a sample of the world map mural, which has been a staple of Peace Corps secondary projects since the late 1980s. There are two ways to do it: either by grid or by overhead projection. D Jan and I have to meet to discuss which will be the most feasible. The one below is pretty good, but my goal is to make ours even awesomer. More as it develops...

On the Wall (2007)

Over- and underwhelmed by

stars in their own hidden daylight

keeping the synnergy while

you're overwhelming me

Robins are calling me so

I'll open up this old window

Songs for my humbled outside

linger and mark where my youth died

On the wall

On the wall

I'm on the wall

and I dropped the ball

on the wall

Tinder and kindling wood burns

quick as the tide of the day turns

somewhere; it's not so warm now

but that's how the sun keeps its head down

On the wall...

Slipping on rocks in rivers

waters grow deeper and shiver

until the depths that go nowhere

then force me ashore with a dead stare

Darwin is haunting me here

guarding his heart from his last fear

X marks the spot while I tremble

and note all the stones I resemble

On the wall...

Waiting on the Day (2009)

You're not letting me down

if I'm still standing

crawling back to my senses

digging up from the ground

Picket fences

fruit and wood

Threadbare cloth we'll have mended

and swear it's for our own good

What's certain in my dreamtime

is it feels like home

So wonder in your meantime

if it's something you'd consider

albeit unknown

So name a figure

on your well-bred love

I won't dare pull a trigger

loaded up with a dud

What's certain in my dreamtime

is it feels like home

So wonder in your meantime

if it's something you'd consider

albeit unknown

Waiting on the day for you to realize

that I'm holding my breath 'til I might die

Banking on a way that I could somehow be your prize

and I'd be that for you if you'll be mine.

Dreams (2010)

I thought that I might

cuz I thought I'd done right

Days, days after days

all of my cheap imitations were just such a waste

But now that I know what I do I'm sure

and now that I'm fat off the land land land

shipwrecking has its allure

but this is out of hand

Dreams are just what they seemed:

meaningless hallucinations that no one can glean

You might think I'm wrong

but I've got the guitar so that means that I've got the song

(doop doobie doo)

But maybe I'm wrong and for once you're right

and maybe my thorns are a tease

and maybe your dreams are out of sight

so much that I'll never ever

see what you can see

But I know, I know what dreams may come

and that you're there in every one

and in the back of my mind

you're keeping time

you're keeping time.

Eminent Domain

here upon the mountain

both fire and the night.

will it be forgotten

when i held you to me till the morning light?

are you free now?

can you say how?

i'll awaken when and only when it's real.

down here on the islands

held captive in a dream.

harbors beckon sweetly

more nowadays than we have ever seen.

these titles pull no water

just the weight of their parchment

so soon turned to dust.

who's the hero?

what's a villain?

alter egos caught between good deed and sin.

what is godhead?

where does time end?

old dominions lost to eminent domain.

Mercenary

I am cold and dark,

come sing me to sleep.

I have played my part,

this is not mine to keep.

The sea that surrounds us

flooded by tears.

the mercenary found us

been coming for years.

YOU CAN'T GO IT ALONE.

Surrenderers, Informants, Sneaks, and Spies

We can work together,

we can war and thieve,

we can take forever,

we can make believe.

Why can't I recall

the whites of my enemies' eyes?

Turncoats we are all,

surrenderers, informants, sneaks, and spies

betrayers of our own

Friends that once surrounded

beggars for empathy

in countries left unfounded

claimed by you and me.

let's make the rules,

let's make a flag

and keep things pure till they go bad

well we can always dream.

Why can't I recall

the whites of my enemies' eyes?

Turncoats we are all,

surrenderers, informants, sneaks, and spies

betrayers of our own lies.

damn your eyes tonight.

Leaving Losing Lost

hey lady

you're a hummingbird

you're a golden child

take warning

I've lost control

you drove me wild

your glory days

are not with me

you get a horizon

in simple tasks

I thought we'd do

not a single one

you slip between my fingers

and you're gone

your scent no longer lingers

in my room

I almost don't believe

you ever were

You must think you're

clever, coy, demure

leaving losing lost

leaving losing lost

heads we split the difference of the cost

tails we play the coin as it gets tossed

leaving losing lost.

Pretty fast turn-around on this one.

RIYL: morna, goodbyes, islands, or possibly also the band Beirut. Very likely to be debuted in its musical form during my group's upcoming COS (close of service) conference.

In the Hour of Fond Farewell

Dream with me

of islands in the sea.

They're not exactly what you'd think

and they might be on the brink

of anarchy.

So now it's time for leaving.

We knew this day would pass.

And though all our hearts are grieving

you know I must go on believing

that if you don't go you never can come back.

CHORUS

We've been through limbo not hell

just long enough for us to tell

that these stories we've earned might not sell

if we stay in the hour of fond farewell.

And for the longest time I hated

how your loss cut like a knife

and in letters clearly stated

but neither post-marked, sent, nor dated

that I need you back here in my life.

REPEAT CHORUS

From back in November, post-pikena. I admit she still makes my heart beat at about a 94 tempo.

Native Tongue (me)

Ease it away

but come back.

Come back so we can fall apart again.

It's so innocuous

to have no words to say

that I'm in love with an abstraction in your eyes...

And they're looking distant now to me

now that you are back within arm's reach.

I just forgot the perfect tense to say

that I wanted you -

that I'd have wanted you to stay.

You're so mysterious

with your life,

O with your native tongue.

And we were delirious,

so high on young bluffs,

but yours were younger and all the air was trapped within your lungs...

And you're sounding distant now to me

now that you are back within arm's reach.

I just forgot the perfect tense to say

that I wanted you...no -

that I'm wanting you...no -

that I've wanted you...no -

that I'd have wanted you to stay.

A E I owed you a chance

to tell me that it's over

but my ear's weren't

keen enough to hear drums breaking.

So if you want to speak your mind

speak slowly so I'm sure

and you won't hear my voice again.

Am going to lunch in about 40 minutes with two American college kids that Misty, Jon, and I met lest night at Café Sofia and then invited over for spaghetti dinner. They're sailing around the world doing research on how much plastic garbage there is in the Atlantic Ocean. Apparently plastic has been called the "devil's resin" for good reason. I'm going to take these two lads to Casa Bela, the Plateau district's finest (and only) bistro. Delicious, relatively cheap food, Billie Holiday, an old rusty tenor sax on the wall...where I go to start almost all of my lunch breaks this year, followed by reading under a tree in Praça António Lereno. Best part of my day.

T-minus: almost exactly three months until the start of John and Jessi's wedding season and my visit to Chicago. That means I have my deadline for finishing the first draft of my screenplay, which, if you don't know already, is called My Priscilla. Story by Patrick C. Panico, aka Uncle Pat.

After that, from late June to September, Mr. D Jan, PCV of São Francisco, and I are planning on doing a world map mural project. The idea is to mobilize his community to help us paint the whole world on a local wall. With luck, at least some Cape Verdeans might discover that China is, in fact, not located within Japan. Also, Cape Verde might actually be somewhat smaller than Brazil.

We finished another PCV newsletter last week and, thanks to Josh in Fogo, the formatting is incredibly professional looking. Misty and Chase did a stand-up job with the editing the large harvest of material too. Waiting on the bossman for final approval. With me as administrator, that means two newsletters down, two to go.

I need a camera! Anybody? I also want weird bottlecaps that you might find in your current location. Unrelated requests but both came to mind. They actually might be related, on second thought, as I figure out what I'm ultimately going to do with those bottlecaps, which would then probably result in some kind of photo documentation. A world map made out of bottlecaps from around the world?? Yeah, that ties this whole post up quite nicely actually.

Dearly Beloved,

So I currently know...let's see here...according to my most recent tally, I currently know 10 couples that are engaged. That's 20 individuals between the ages of 24 and 28 bound for holy matrimony. Nuts, right?

Before about six months ago I was always wondering when the great wedding season of my twenties would begin, and now I have my answer. What sucks is that I am going to miss a couple of the upcoming ones because of Peace Corps, but I'll try to swing as many as I get invited to after that. Party!

First up: Brother John and Jessi, June 19th, 2010. My capacity: BEST MAN. See you in about three months, Chicago!

Since learning how easy it is to use (Obrigado, Ricardo de Deus!), I've been spending a lot of my free time using GarageBand to record music in my apartment. Also, thanks to Dropbox software, I've been able to share these files with my brother John, who is adding his own touches of glory from across the great sea. It might be a little while until I think these demo tracks are ready for the public since they're missing some important elements, like bass guitar, for example. And drums that aren't fake drums. But I've also recorded some "solo" material that has turned out fairly decent. I wanted to share it with you, should you happen to miss my unschooled caterwauling.

Follow the links to listen. The first is a cover of a song most famously sung by Cape Verde's very own undisputed queen of the morna, Cesária Évora. It's called "Beijou Roubado," which means stolen kiss. Normally she sings in Creole, but this one's in more or less standard Portuguese because it was written by a Brazilian.

The second song I present to you is one that I wrote called "Cowboy Island." It's an instrumental and its melody came to me from inside a little seashell that I found one day. Thanks, seashell. To answer your question after you've listened to this song: Yes, my favorite parts to record were the claps 'n' snaps.

Here's my translation of the lyrics of the first song (I swapped the genders for my purposes as an homem!):

"Beijo Roubado"

(Adelino Moreira)

They say that a stolen kiss,

Even if out of love,

Is a crime on Earth;

In Heaven, it's a sin.

And each man

is a criminal and a sinner.

To me, that's all wrong;

A stolen kiss has got more heat.

How many kisses

have I gotten from my love?

I never counted.

Neither did she.

But not one of those kisses

was more of a kiss than

the first kiss,

which I pretended to deny

and she stole.

I actually got a chance to meet Cesária for a brief moment last year when she was dining at the same restaurant as me and the rest of my PC colleagues after a training conference. Here's a picture of her with some of my pals. Note the way she is intently staring at Adeyemi, who is Trinidadian-American, but she couldn't believe he wasn't Cape Verdean. She's a character. And one cool lady. If you have the chance, check out her new album, Nha Sentimento. It should be available in the U.S. by now and is the bomb.com/awesome.html. Highly recommended listening.

In other news, I'm going to be published! My friend Callie, a Returned PCV, has been writing a travel guide to Cape Verde for Other Places Publishing over the last year or so. She has graciously decided to include a shortened version of my Darwin article from this past October, and for this I am very excited. Not to mention that the whole book should be awesome since it was written by someone like Callie, who knows Cape Verde and understands both its intricacies and beauties. It'll be out in late February or early March, she tells me. Find out more about it here.

!!!!

Those of you who are regular visitors to this blog may have come across one of the three links down yonder on your left-hand side. No, not the Peace Corps or the World Factbook on Cape Verde. Those are pretty self-explanatory. I'm referring to the other one, CouchSurfing.

If you know me, you might have heard me ramble on and on about this website before. Or perhaps you already knew about it without me and for that, I commend thee. But for those of you not privy to those particular honors, CouchSurfing.com is a non-profit online community based on, you guessed it, "surfing" or crashing on people's couches. "Sounds like a bum's dream come true!" you might say, you grizzled old codger you. But actually it's pretty legit.

How it works is that once you set up a profile and show the whole community that you're more or less on the level, you can request to "surf" another member's couch, floor, extra bed, hammock, pile of hay, or whatever. This would most likely be in a fairly distant place where you otherwise would have to shell out big bucks for a hostel, hotel, or other lodging. The idea is that if you don't know anyone in your intended travel destination, there are plenty of people out there that would be happy to meet, greet, host, and, in some way or another, introduce you to the wonders of their specific homeland. What a concept, right?

You might still have doubts; I can tell by that look on your face. I'll get to those in a second.

According to ancient Internet lore, many moons ago the site's founder was planning a trip to Rekyavik, Iceland. Not knowing anyone there personally, he didn't think he could get to know the place very well just by staying in a hotel and wandering around town with his face in a tourist guidebook trying not to fall into the ocean. (For the record, before CouchSurfing, I have been such a guy.) Somehow (and I imagine this part might be related to his mastery of the webly arts that later produced CS), he somehow got a hold of an e-mail list of students at a local university. Like a mighty blue whale in the open sea he sent out the call to the youth of fair Iceland. He simply asked if anyone would be interested in hosting him and showing him around from a native's perspective and, to his surprise, he received dozens of responses. He ended up staying with a wonderful host who showed him the real Rekyavik. None of those boring cod fishery tours for that intrepid wanderer! And voila, through a modern-day Viking saga CouchSurfing was born.

On the site's main page, the statistics show there are currently over 1.57 million members on the site, with over 1.6 million surf or host experiences. Most heartwarmingly, 113,875 "close friendships" have also resulted. Aw. Kinda makes you feel all warm and fuzzy inside around this time of year to think of all those new pals across the globe, all united under the simple philosophy that hospitality is universal. I know I can count at least a dozen new friends - both American and international - that I've made as a result of my membership.

So to address those doubts you may still have lingering...I know, I know. Letting a stranger into your house? To sleep?? Why would anyone want to even hang out with a stranger, much less, house them? I can actually think of at least a couple of close friends of mine who I know would rather burn their house down than let a stranger sleep in it. But the system is more or less self-controlling, I've found. OK, so say you sign up. What next? Well, the first thing you can do, after putting up a picture and filling in some info about yourself, is become my friend. You can find me at couchsurfing.com/deejay_rigo. Then, if we know each other (and I hopefully like you in that case), I will gladly write you a reference to state some or many of your positive qualities, keeping in mind your potential role as both a host and guest. After awhile, especially if you actually go out and break your CouchSurfing cherry by hosting or surfing, you will start to both give and accumulate enough good feedback to really not have to worry about being considered a sketchball. Conversely, you'll know based on their many positive references (not to mention interests, personality, and other considerations) that a person requesting to surf with you will in no way, shape, or form try to molest your housepets, sniff your undies, or anything even remotely creepy. If you get really involved, other people will start to vouch for you and after you receive three vouches, you can start giving them out to people you deem worthy yourself. There's also a feature that confirms members' physical locations by sending a confirmation code through the snail mail.

Another great thing is that you don't want to or simply can't host anyone, no one will oblige you to do so. For example, my status is currently "available for coffee or a drink," which means "I can't give you a place to stay right now, but I'm more than happy to meet you and show you around." Cape Verde being a little tricky to navigate for some foreigners, this is something I actually enjoy doing. No pressure, no worries.

Needless to say, there are much more dangerous ways to go about traveling the globe.

The only caveat that I would give to a would-be surfer is that sometimes hosts and guests, like anywhere else, can be a little much. As the saying goes, two things begin to really stink after three days. And I'm not talking about the halibut. For example, not long before joining the Peace Corps I hosted a very friendly, very outgoing, and very present young lady. She was in Chicago from out East checking out grad schools, but she didn't really know the city that well so signed up with CouchSurfing and threw in her lot with me. Now, her weekend-long visit was just fine, albeit a bit intense, but I would be lying if I said I wasn't at least a little happy to see her off on Sunday afternoon. Her seeming a-OK with basing a close friendship on one weekend, she stayed in touch, so much so that she even got me to agree to planning a roadtrip together. Me being a sucker for fast-talkers, I went along with it. I figured it would help subsidize the costs of the roadtrip I was already planning with my best friend, whom I've known for over a decade. Why not, right? Roadtrips, CouchSurfing? New friends, old friends? Same hippie-dippie gravy train, right? Well, I can now safely say that going on a cross-country roadtrip with someone you hardly know is akin to somehow being called in to perform open-heart surgery after your first week of biology classes as a pre-med. It just won't work out. Trust me. As a result of our close-quartered ordeal with that psycho hosebeast, my best friend and I are even closer. A very positive spin, yes, but the truth is that if I hadn't been about to commit myself to two years of governmental service overseas, the Oregon highway system would've had one very ornery hitchhiker on its hands.

But other than that little glitch, I highly recommend this weird little experiment in cutting out the middle man while traveling. Since I joined in 2005, I've been a host (in Madison, Chicago, and here in Praia) much more often than I've surfed (only three times, in Winnipeg, Boise, and Kansas City), but I look forward to staying involved and getting as much out of this as possible.

I won't say much else, since if your interest has been piqued by my endoresement you should just go ahead and sign up. Then you can get the details of my many great experiences from my profile. Don't forget to leave me a good reference.

Happy holidays and surf's up!

After reading some other Cape Verde PCV's amazing blogs, I'm realizing that my own postings are much too few and far between. I guess that it's in my nature to kind of binge and purge - in the sense of binging on experiences and then purging in long, detailed articles (see the Darwin post) - but I still want to keep friends and family in the loop, as it were. That said, I'm going to try to write shorter, more frequent posts on this badboy.

So what's new with ol' Robjob? Things are going fine here in Praia, though there have been a couple rough patches lately.

Firstly, my girlfriend and I split up about a month ago, on Halloween actually, though I like to think that didn't have much of anything to do with it. Or did it...? That damn Frankenstein is a wily bastard. Reasons? Well, sometimes things just run their course, especially when two people are in very different points of their life and, what's more, separated by pretty huge gaps in language, culture, and future plans. That's the most adult way to put it, I guess. Overall though, I'm just grateful for having had the experience dating such a sweet, beautiful person, not to mention the fact that it was a relationship conducted entirely in Creole. That was a challenge that I'd never encountered before, and I learned a lot in the process. As a language geek, I felt like a hero, to be totally honest. And clocking in at about six months, I now have my world record length in relationships on the books. Go team!

Another sad thing that happened soon later was finding out that my family's last living cairn terrier, Maggie, had died. She was my favorite of all the 5 dogs we've ever had because she was such a character. I'll miss her a lot. Thus ends the Sarwark family's 20 years of owning members of that particular breed of small, strong-willed goofballs. Here's a picture of her cute, smelly head, taken by my sister not long before she passed:

R.I.P. Margaret T. Dog-Sarwark, 1997-2009

After a few days of being pretty bummed by these things, I decided to snap out of it and stop being such a sadsack panty-waste. So I did what I do best - hang out with myself and enjoy the company. What I mean by this is that I started to channel those not-so-pleasant feelings of "what just happened?" into my creative and professional work. As a result, I'm proud to say that I've completed and/or contributed to the following:

1. A very admirable and comprehensive World AIDS Day program at Uni-CV (more on that soon)

2. At least 4 completed new songs, with more in the works

3. A revival of work on my screenplay, which I started in May 2007 and swore I'd finish during my freetime in Cape Verde

4. The latest PC/Cape Verde newsletter, of which I'm the administrator

5. A business plan for my hypothetical company in Chicago

6. More progress on the Kriolu-English phrase book project, though I've more or less handed the reins over to an RPCV (Returned Peace Corps Volunteer) who now lives and works in Cape Verde and isn't constrained by PC regulations

7. A pretty decent beard

8. Making sure (mainly using "I" statements) that my roommate and I can make it the rest of our service without resorting to blows

I've learned that if you have any kind of emotional pain inside you, the best thing to do is to get it out through good works, be they creative, physical, social, intellectual, or whatever else contributes in some way to the world around you. There's no use to sitting around brooding about things and becoming more and more bitter as time goes by. Just like having a bad case of the runs, your body is telling you that there's a change in need, a catharsis that you must embrace (tee hee). Thus, in a manner of speaking, in times of turmoil or challenge, you better poop or get off the pot, buddy.

And that, my friends, is how you go from talking about a break-up to using poop as a metaphor for better living. Ta da!

More soon.

A little back story: This is a recipe that was passed on to me by my mother. Despite her Italian ancestry, I think it’s actually more Midwestern than anything. It was, in turn, passed on to her by her own mother so I guess you could call this an heirloom dish. It was nameless until recently, when I thought I’d honor both of my forbears, as well as our semi-famous relative of the same name.

Frank “Porky” Panico, or “Uncle Porky”, was married to my grandma’s first-cousin Claire. Coincidentally, both cousins married men with the last name Panico who were both professional musicians (my gramps is himself quite the accordion god). Porky was a celebrated jazz trumpet player, composer, and arranger in Chicago, active throughout the 40s, 50s, and 60s. I actually own a cassette tape of him playing, most notably, alongside a very young Wayne Newton in the early ‘60s. No joke. He was absolutely brilliant.

But let’s get back to the food. When asked about the recipe’s ultimate origins, my mom always says, “Umm, Grandma says it’s Japanese or something.” Maybe on account of the rice? This seems unlikely though, unless Grandpa P.J. somehow picked it up and then brought it home to Grandma from his tour of Okinawa during WWII. Either way, this was the first dish I ever learned to make by myself while in college, and I’ve found it’s very doable here in Cape Verde as well. Obviously it’s not for the veggie set, but I think all you carnivores out there will really enjoy it. Try it and let me know what you think. Make Uncle Porky proud.

Ingredients:

3-4 pork chops (costeletas de porco)

2-3 cups ketchup

1/2-1 cup water

5-10 drops Worcestershire sauce (molho inglês)

2-4 drops lemon juice

1 pinch salt

pepper to taste

1/2 medium white onion, sliced

1-1.5 cups mushrooms, sliced or whole

1 tbsp salt

1-2 cups rice OR 3-4 cups egg noodles (either one is equally tasty)

To make the sauce, in a separate bowl mix the ketchup, water, Worcestershire sauce, lemon juice, pinch of salt, and pepper. Put this to the side. Slice the onion into strips. Prepare the mushrooms to taste. Put to the side.

Lightly salt a frying pan, just enough to cover the bottom. On medium heat, place the pork chops in the pan. Add the onions and mushrooms. Flip the pork chops when lightly browned. Sautee the onions and mushrooms lightly in the juice from the chops mixed with the salt. When the chops are browned on both sides and the onions and mushrooms are sautéed, cover the contents with the pre-prepared sauce and bring the heat to low. Let simmer for 30-40 minutes. Stir regularly to prevent pork chops from sticking to the bottom of the pan.

While simmering, put a pot of water to boil. Add the rice or noodles. When they reach your desired tenderness, drain the water (you know the drill). Place the pork chops, onions, mushrooms, and sauce on a bed of rice or noodles. Garnish with a sprig of cilantro and enjoy, you hungry so-and-so!

An encounter with the famous naturalist's descendants rekindles a small nation's sense of historical significance

Young Darwin: Journeyman

Since the start of 2009, the world has been celebrating two very significant and related events: both the 200th anniversary of naturalist Charles Darwin’s birth (1809) and the 150th anniversary of the publication of his groundbreaking treatise on evolution, On the Origin of Species (1859). Here, 375 miles off the coast of West Africa in the small island nation of Cape Verde, the observation of the International Year of Darwin takes on a certain degree of additional resonance. In 1832, the young Darwin visited the principal island of Santiago at the start of his famous five-year voyage aboard the HMS Beagle.

This early point in his career marked where Darwin began to formulate many of his ideas on natural selection and the theory of evolution, which came as a direct result of his first-hand observations of the plants, animals, and geology of the many places he visited. Over the course of the worldwide journey, he began to note the crucial relationship between organisms and their habitats, most famously in the case of various species and subspecies of finches found throughout the islands of the Galapagos archipelago. What is also clear is that as a result, Darwin came to more fully grasp the vast diversity of life on Earth, otherwise a difficult conceptual task for someone constrained in his or her knowledge of only one ecosystem or climate. The voyage would ultimately be Darwin’s only time spent outside of Britain.

Under somewhat different circumstances, I arrived in Cape Verde in July 2008 as a trainee in the U.S. Peace Corps. By September I had sworn in as a Volunteer in the education sector and had moved to Praia, the nation’s capital, on Santiago. In the midst of settling in to the rhythms of a new and foreign environment, I failed to recognize what 2009 would mean in connection to Darwin. Not long after the New Year though, a friend casually handed me an article that had appeared in the national weekly newspaper A Semana.

“Here,” he said, “You’re into Darwin, right?” I remembered Darwin’s connection to Cape Verde. To be honest though, I only skimmed the text. But it had a lot of great old pictures and drawings too, so I hung the two-page spread on my bare apartment wall, where it remains. We Peace Corps Volunteers are masters at interior decorating on the cheap.

Around this same time, in the weeks following Darwin’s birthday on February 12th, various programs including lectures, presentations, publications, and other activities were also announced for the year. The vast majority of these have been organized under the aegis of the University of Cape Verde. But groups as varied as local primary and secondary schools, the municipal chamber of Praia, and the Brazilian and Portuguese cultural centers have also joined in the observations.

Banner announcing 2009 as the International Year of Darwin, on the façade of the University of Cape Verde’s main campus in Praia, Cape Verde’s capital.

Back in March of 2008, when I was invited by the Peace Corps to serve in this country, I read Darwin’s account in The Voyage of the Beagle. Almost immediately, Cape Verde, then a sleepy outpost of the Portuguese Empire, takes center stage in the narrative. It was the ship’s first port of call. The 22-year-old aspiring naturalist arrived at the Port of Praia on January 16th, 1832, only sixteen days after leaving Plymouth, England. He goes on to speak of a dry, rather forbidding place, one that, “viewed from the sea, wears a desolate aspect”. Hoping to find more encouraging remarks, I read on. He soon steps back from first reactions and puts things into perspective: “The scene, as beheld through the hazy atmosphere of this climate, is one of great interest; if, indeed, a person fresh from sea who has just walked for the first time in a grove of coconut trees can be a judge of anything but his own happiness.”

I was intrigued by this sense of contradiction, as I am still today – part tropical island oasis, part volcanic desert, Cape Verde is anything but easy to categorize. Due to close links with Portugal and the lack of tribal conflict, the islands have always fared relatively well. Today, only 34 years after independence, Cape Verde by far boasts the highest standards of living of the West Africa region. In 2007 its status was raised by the United Nations to “developing country” from that of a “least developed country.” Nevertheless, now, as it was in Darwin’s time, there are still severe limitations on the nation’s growth potential due to the lack of natural resources and, thus, employment. The Cape Verdean diaspora is considerable and far-flung as a result. For example, about an equal number of Cape Verdeans lives in the United States as in the entire archipelago itself (around 500,000).

Darwin further describes a visit to the village of São Domingos, north of Praia. He notes “the scenery of St. Domingo (sic) possesses a beauty totally unexpected, from the prevalent gloomy character of the rest of the island.” Indeed, as you ascend to the island’s rugged interior, the volcanic wastelands give way to verdant mountains and valleys. There he also witnessed and remarked on a form of dance and singing performed by the local girls and women: “As soon as we approached near, they suddenly all turned round, and covering the path with their shawls, sung with great energy a wild song, beating time with their hands upon their legs.” Although unnamed by Darwin, this was undoubtedly an example of the still very popular style of batuku, a quintessential element of Santiago’s traditional culture.

In a place so overlooked both in Darwin’s time and at present, even these brief comments gave me valuable perspective on what would soon be my reality. Reading more about his adventures, my vague wanderlust became more focused. I found that his sense of seeing things as a part of a whole, as a part of the intertwining cosmos of both the organic and inorganic, would be an important notion to hang onto.

Darwin’s Legacy

The main part of my assignment is at the reitoria (“dean’s office”) of the University of Cape Verde. Here I’ve often found myself in the role of liaison between the Portuguese- and English-speaking worlds. What this means is that in addition to tutoring, interpreting, teaching courses in linguistics, and corresponding with other institutions, I also translate some of Uni-CV’s online news bulletins into English for wider readership. In early September, as I read through a new batch of Darwin-related events, an obscure Portuguese word made me do a double-take. Its root, neto; “grandson” or “grandchild”, was familiar, but its specific meaning was unclear. I consulted my dictionary. Tetraneto; “great-great-grandchild”. Two of Charles Darwin’s direct descendants were en route to the islands, and Uni-CV would be there to receive them.

I knew that I could be of help to whatever was planned for the two of them – Randal Keynes and Sarah Darwin, both of London. I was not explicitly assigned to do anything, so I made my availability and interest clear. I sent an email to a colleague about it and she quickly put me in touch with the point-person, a Uni-CV biology professor named Ana Hopffer Almada.

“Who will be acting as interpreter?” I asked, knowing that fluent English speakers (outside of the English Studies Department) are few and far between. This seemed to strike a chord and I was given the OK to meet Ana and Mr. Keynes at a local elementary school on the following day, Thursday, September 17th. Keynes would be there with her to make his first stop and visit with the young students.

Randal Keynes is the author of the book Annie’s Box, which details the important relationship between Darwin and his youngest daughter, whose early death shook his religious beliefs before the publication of On the Origin of Species. It was adapted for the screen and just recently released in select countries under the title Creation. Keynes also holds a chair on the Darwin Trust and lectures extensively on conservation and the life of his famous ancestor. As of late, he’s become the de facto ambassador of the extended Darwin clan. He is deeply interested in forming a bond with places like Cape Verde as well, he says, in the form of an international network of schools in countries that Darwin visited. “But we want this to be open to all students, everywhere in the world too, of course,” Keynes announced to the children of Nova Assembleia primary school. “We want every student to have the chance to explore his or her world through science.”

Ana Hopffer Almada and Randal Keynes study a calabaceira, the fruit of the large baobab tree in the background.Later that day I met Sarah Darwin, Keynes' distant cousin. A biologist herself, she is currently circumnavigating the globe on board the Dutch clipper ship Stad Amsterdam. A collaboration between a Dutch and a Belgian T.V. station, the project is following Darwin’s route over the course of this year and filming a documentary series in the process. The goal is revisit Darwin's stops and take note of what has changed and what has remained the same since his time.

I helped translate – I hope not too amateurishly – for Mr. Keynes over the course of his two days here. I assisted Ana in introducing him to Cape Verde in general. I joined him and Sarah as they visited and measured the very baobab trees their forebear did at a village called Trindade. I met Sarah’s two young sons, who drew colourful pictures of the same. We literally walked in Darwin’s footsteps.

On the second day, Friday, Mr. Keynes, Professor Almada, and I made our own visit to São Domingos. Unfortunately we couldn’t stay long enough to seek out some batuku dancers, but he did have a chance to speak to the faculty of the local high school. He spoke about the town’s importance to Darwin’s visit, and the importance of science education.

It had rained recently and the hills were a bright green as we quickly made our way back to Praia. “It’s a shame he couldn’t have seen how lush it looks in the wet season,” Keynes commented. Darwin had only seen the landscape during the dry season that dominates most of the year.

“This is the time when Cape Verde [‘Green Cape’] actually lives up to its name,” said Professor Ana, through me.

“Well, at least the ‘green’ part,” I added. Due to a historical fluke, this country’s name has almost nothing to do with its actual characteristics. Think about it: How can an archipelago also be a cape? Such is Cabo Verde.

“This is an interesting place, isn’t it?” said Mr. Keynes.

Footsteps

As I witnessed the whirlwind of classroom visits, field trips, and interviews, I felt compelled to take a step back and consider the implications. What does Charles Darwin really mean to a place such as Cape Verde, one of many lands that he visited and commented on between 1832 and 1837 – over 170 years ago? Should the average Cape Verdean, for example, be expected to care about this whatsoever? What should educators or administrators try to impart about him in particular, if anything? And, moreover, what does Charles Darwin really mean to the world of 2009? In sum: Why should we care?

Much of this came to light on that Friday evening, the 18th, at the inauguration of a street dedicated to Darwin’s visit to Praia. In true West African style, the event began about 45 minutes late, but the mood was loose and lively like a block party, perfect for an early Friday evening. Some women and a throng of small children mingled as the Cape Verdean Army band assembled, enjoying the festive ambiance. Semi-stray dogs poked around, on the perpetual search for scraps. As the band began their fanfare, Randal and Sarah finally arrived from another excursion. They gathered around the covered blue signpost with a few local dignitaries, including the Vice-President of Uni-CV and Praia’s mayor. The veil was drawn and the simple, unassuming placard was revealed to a round of applause. Everyone looked happy.

But once the local news reporters and photographers had captured their sound bites and snapshots, I felt a nagging impression of a disconnect, that the local people, the residents of this humble neighborhood, would be looking up at this sign for years and years to come, possibly with only the slightest notion of who this Charles Darwin person was. Add to that the rantings of a dreadlocked street preacher on the evils of this white man and his “racist” teachings, and I wondered if perhaps the sign was not long for this world. Professor Ana admitted to me that she felt that she had failed to properly inform the locals about the sign’s placement in their community and what it meant. But to her credit, she spent a good half hour after the ceremony talking to anyone interested, happily explaining a bit about Charles Darwin and why they should be proud to be a part of this slice of history. Sign marking the newly christened Avenida Charles Darwin. It reads, “He passed through the City of Praia in January 1832.”

Darwin and Keynes with local dignitaries and residents of Lém Ferreira, Praia, site of the sign.

Perhaps I’m just used to Darwin’s name alone sparking caustic debate in the U.S., but I hope that the right impression is imparted here, be it in the schools, through the media, or by word of mouth. He was not a racist monster. He was not a soulless robot whose goal was the end of religion. Nor was he anything close to a nihilist or a fatalist. Above all, Charles Darwin was a beholder to the awe of nature.

After the unveiling, I headed to Quintal da Música, a downtown Praia restaurant famous for its live music. I sat down for the buffet dinner and a drink with the Dutch film crew, an interesting lot of chain-smoking thinkers and adventurers. Along with them was their own guide and interpreter, a middle-aged man who reminded me a bit of a Cape Verdean Jimmy Buffett. I had met him the day before at the baobab trees, but I hadn’t caught his name, so I asked. “Munaia,” he said, which was his nickname. He told me that he was a SCUBA instructor and gym teacher. He also mentioned his full name, of which I honestly only caught one part, Charles. I remember this because I thought maybe he was translating the common name Carlos in order to make a connection to Darwin.

“My main interest,” he added, “is shipwrecks. I wrote a book about the ones off the islands of Cape Verde. They’re everywhere. You just have to know where to look.” I could see why he had joined up with the equally inquisitive Dutchmen; he was a lifelong learner and teacher, a man fascinated by his own country and its biodiversity, history, and culture. “I’ve always felt a connection to Darwin,” he said. “He always asked questions.”

I went home soon later. Before turning out the lights, I took a glance at the now months-old newspaper article on my wall. I figured that it was about time I read the whole thing. As I did, I thought about everything that had happened during the previous two days, about Darwin and nature and long voyages of discovery. I thought about Cape Verde and everything I’d learned about it in the last year. Everything that I’d learned about myself in the process. And then I noticed something for the first time: the name of the article’s author. It was the very man I had just been chatting with; Charles was, in fact, his middle name and not a translation. On top of everything else, he is also one of Cape Verde’s very own Darwin experts and, I recalled from our conversation, an occasional contributor to A Semana. I let out a chuckle of realization, smiled, and then turned out the light.

So does Charles Darwin matter to a tiny group of salty islands in the Atlantic? Does he matter to the average person? Absolutely. He’s available to anyone who seeks him out. He’s there for anyone who wants to broaden their perspective on this planet Earth. For anyone who wants to appreciate the diversity of life that exists and, hopefully, be a part of keeping it that way. His ideas are for anyone who wants to keep asking questions. And in a place just awakening from the shadows of colonialism and obscurity, now full of potential and possibilities, that kind of critical thinking can make all the difference in the world.

Here is another nice little article about the four students who today, after a decent amount of airport drama on Wednesday, are finally set to leave for a semester at Bridgewater State College near Boston, MA.

http://www.unicv.edu.cv/ltimas/estudantes-prometem-aproveitar-estadia-na-bridgewater-college-3.html

For the last few months I've been working with four Uni-CV undergrads on getting prepared to leave for a semester abroad at Bridgewater State College, near Boston. Here's hoping everything goes as planned for their departure tomorrow; I never realized how difficult it is to get to the U.S. for most foreigners, until now.

Check out the below article from unicv.edu.cv for all the details. Translation compliments of yours truly (with help from my new best friend, google.translate.com).

Uni-CV students to depart for study abroad programs at Bridgewater State College

Written by Arminda Barros, Gab/Imagem Uni-CV

Monday, 24 August 2009

Two groups of students from the University of Cape Verde - four undergraduates and three post-graduates in English Studies - will depart on Wednesday, August 26th for Boston, Massachussetts, where, at Bridgewater State College (BSC), they will attend a semester and one academic year, respectively.

Until December 18th of this year, the group of undergraduate students will participate in an exchange program with the American university, which is dedicated to specific courses for foreigners with the goal of the improvement of teaching English as a foreign language.

According to an American professor at Uni-CV, Robert Sarwark, this exchange is an opportunity for these students to live for an entire semester in an English-speaking country. This is the second time that undergraduate students from the Uni-CV will have benefitted from this program, which was first implemented under the cooperation protocol between BSC and Uni-CV. In 2008, five undergraduate and three post-graduate students participated.

At the master's level in English Studies, the Uni-CV is sending three students for an entire academic year. They will attend BSC with the purpose of improving their skills and knowledge in the areas of methodologies and new methods of teaching English as a foreign language. All are English teachers and will also take this opportunity to write thesis works.

As explained by Professor Robert Sarwark, the selection of these students followed certain criteria, namely having a very high level of performance in the English language, being an overall good student, good behavior and maturity, in addition to filling out an application form. Also in discussion are plans to bring U.S. teachers to Cape Verde to improve their skills in teaching the Cape Verdean Creole and Portuguese languages.

Bridgewater State College is one of the premier U.S. institutions in technology and higher education. It has allied itself with Uni-CV to help further develop its technology. Its president, Dana Mohler-Faria, is an American of Cape Verdean descent and a distinguished figure of the Cape Verdean diaspora in the United States. He is the only African-American among 11 presidents in the history of Bridgewater State College and is the second Cape Verdean-American to ever preside over an institution of higher education in the United States.

President Mohler-Faria visited Uni-CV as the head of a delegation from BSC at the end of March of this year. It was at this point that he signed and renewed the cooperation agreement which thus provided spots for undergraduate and postgraduate Cape Verdean students in education and computer science.

Quickly now, before they both disappear from the ether of world news coverage, here are two interesting articles regarding Cape Verde.

This one is about Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's visit to the CV island of Sal last Thursday and Friday:

A SEMANA: Hillary Clinton departs from Cape Verde enchanted - Primeiro diário caboverdiano em linha - A SEMANA

Fonte: www.asemana.publ.cv

And this one is about international piracy and/or the suspicion of piracy, wherin the involved vessel was found relatively close to the Cape Verdean archipelago:

NEW YORK TIMES: INTERNATIONAL / EUROPE August 18, 2009 Russia Says Ship and Crew Are Found Safe By MICHAEL SCHWIRTZ

It's been a good long while since I've updated this badboy, but now that I'm back in Praia and have internet access at work, what better time than now to fill you in?

After an 18 hour delay, I finally left dusty Praia, Cape Verde on the morning of Saturday, July 11th. Fortunately, the airline, TACV, had the courtesy to call me and alert me of this change in schedule before I ever left for the airport the day before. As is common here, TACV is notorious for their lack of punctuality. Apparently it was due to "bad weather" near Boston, the flight's destination, but upon checking the weather for the region it was 78, clear and sunny. I suspect it might have had something to do with the pilot just not feeling like leaving right then. I was happy to spend one last night with the pikena, though. I'm also happy to report that after a couple months of typical male commitmentophobia on my part that things are going very well between us. Unfortunately she'll be away on her home island of Santo Antão until mid-October, but more on that in a bit. Who knew that being in a relationship could feel so nice? Leave it to my twisted ass to take 3 months to realize it.

On the flight, an 8-year-old Cape Verdean kid was sitting between me and a nice young mother at the window. He was a little trooper, considering it was his first long flight. Amazingly, the young scamp stayed put and hardly complained at all during the entire seven hour flight. He never even got up out of his seat. Wait, that's kind of odd, don't you think? Now, don't even try to put this on me; window seat lady and I had repeatedly asked him if he had to go "fazi xixi", or at least stretch his legs a little. His guardians on the plane, by the way, were damn neglectful and seemed to be distant family members. They were, furthermore, huge dickheads for leaving this kid with us, total strangers, also by the way. But he said no the several times we asked, he did not need to go. What can you do? Force a kid to go take a leak?

We were so damn close though; only in the last ten minutes in the air did it finally begin. The squirming. The looks of pained discomfort. The tears. The desperate holding of the crotchal area. Just as we were landing at Logan, mere moments from the fasten seatbelt sign being turned off, it all came to a head. Seven plus hours of regular beverage service inflicted on one tiny bladder...

So we arrived in Boston sometime that same afternoon, around 4 or 5 pm, but I had missed my original flight to Chicago by several hours already. I made it through with only a cursory questioning from customs: "Ya comin' from Cape Verde [pronounced VEH-di in Bostonian], huh? You're not bringing in any of that tuna, are ya? None of that GROG? Ok, good." The Peace Corps-issued passport certainly helped expedite things as well. But I'd stop me too if I were a customs officer watching a planeful of Cape Verdeans getting their bags and out walks this possibly Portuguese-lookin' dude dressed like a 1970s backpacker.

Not being in any particular rush, I checked in on stand-by on the last flight out that night and then treated myself to my first meal on American soil in a year. I splurged on a Maine lobster sandwich and a microbrew at the terminal's finest brew-pub. Adding a touch of authenticity to the scene, a couple of genuine Massholes screamed at the Red Sox game on the bar's TV.

At last, I was back in the land of my forefathers.

More to come...

A very auspicious occasion. Check out this link to a recent article found on the Uni-CV website (it's in English):

http://www.unicv.edu.cv/ltimas/cidade-velha-declarada-patrim-nio-mundial-da-humanidade-3.html

First of all, I want to let the world know that I'll be back in States from Friday, July 10th until Tuesday, July 21st. Most of this time will be spent in Chicago, so if we're pals and you live there, make sure to get in touch so we can catch up, have an adult beverage or two, or just shoot the breeze. I promise not to bore you with pretentious tales of international adventure. Mostly I'll just be glad to see home, I figure. Wing me an e-mail: rmsarwark@gmail.com.

As for the month and a half since I last wrote on this blog, I've definitely been pretty busy lately. Some of this time has been spent dealing with pages and pages of Portuguese to English translations for an upcoming conference, sticking with tutoring obligations, working on developing international partnerships, and finishing up the semester with my linguistics class.

But speaking of the latter, one of the things that we've been doing as a part of the class is a project that you might find interesting. Below is the run-down. I'm hoping that it will continue into the summer and next year, as the preliminary results were very promising and constructive. Also, as I am pretty sure I won't be doing any more classroom teaching next year due to an influx of new teachers, this seems like a very strong candidate for a secondary project. More news on this as it develops...

English – Cape Verdean Creole Phrase Book Project

Objective: To research, compile, translate, and compose materials to be included in a handbook of useful Cape Verdean Creole phrases for English-speaking tourists, visitors, and resident foreigners in the Republic of Cape Verde. If possible, this work could be published for mass consumption.

Inspiration: For such a young and relatively small nation, in the past decade or so Cape Verde has seen much growth in development, tourism, foreign investment, and other contacts of an international nature (not to mention emigration/immigration). In order to harbor a deeper appreciation and understanding of Cape Verdean culture, people, needs, and other important considerations, resident foreigners in particular must be familiar with a more advanced level of phraseology beyond simple grammar, commands, or other basic linguistic items.

Due to the large population and cultural influence of Brazil in particular, Portuguese-language grammars and phrase books are readily available. However, as anyone who has visited and/or lived in Cape Verde knows, the “language of the heart” and furthermore that of day-to-day discourse of almost all Capeverdeans is their own creole tongue, Kriolu, and not Portuguese per-se. The current lack of existing materials in Kriolu phraseology at an intermediate/advanced level has heightened the demand for such a work.

Focus: Therefore, the focus of this work will be idiomatic expressions and pertinent phrases pertaining to events and situations such as:

- dining out;

- telling jokes;

- socializing (e.g., making friends, romantic situations, etc.);

- insults (user discretion to be advised!);

- maxims and proverbs;

- day-to-day needs (e.g., getting a hair cut, shopping, having a phone installed, paying bills, etc.);

- body language/other forms of communication;

- other useful real-world scenarios

Other considerations: As Kriolu is not yet a completely formally standardized language (although it is currently in the process), its variants exist on a dialect continuum throughout the Cape Verdean archipelago. As such, consideration will be given to these variations while also acknowledging the somewhat higher probability of users travelling, working, or living in the Sotavento (southern) islands due to the importance of the strategic location of Santiago Island and furthermore, the importance of Praia as the nation’s capital.

Execution: After covering the most important concepts of linguistics, we will effectively put them to practical use as lexicographers, dialectologists, and “phraseologists”, also keeping in mind the needs and expectations of the potential reader/user as well as the potential recipient (native speaker/hearer).

We will break down sections according to related situations and scenarios (see “Focus”) in which certain common phrases might come up. Each section will be assigned to a small group, which will work with me to isolate specific situations and then translate accordingly. The sections will then be edited and compiled in manuscript form.