i just biked 60K to post a blog

The more time I spend with people, the more our conversations break the “How’d you sleep? How’s your health? How are the kids?” framework. Everyone has a story. Certainly everyone in the US has a story, but its generally a variation in frequency or degree of the same: divorce and remarriage, loans or debt, cancer or heart attacks, eating disorders, etc. Here the ingredients are more like polygamy, malaria, poverty, malnutrition, lack of health care, lack of education, etc. I’ve been fortunate (or unfortunate) enough to hear many stories. You learn more about the people, the lifestyle, the struggles, but it doesn’t make for easy sleeping at night.

My favorite topic is voodoo because people get so animated. It’s considered more of a culture than a religion, though many say they ‘leave God at the door’ when entering a voodoo ceremony (they also do this for abortions). Everyone has a story about a spell put on them or their friend, what they had to do to break it.

I recently learned that if a woman does not have any male children, and her husband dies while she is still relatively young (not that uncommon), she is evicted from the house by her late husband’s family. Property rights go to men alone. Also, I learned that in some cases of polygamous households, the first wife will actually go looking for a second wife for her husband. The mentality is if you know he’s going to get one eventually, it might as well be someone you get along with.

Some of the funniest conversations I’ve had about life in America include topics such as plastic surgery, liposuction, life expectancy, Michael Jackson, divorce, dieting, and greek life.

Random: I saw my first nomad last week. It was maybe the coolest thing I’ve ever seen/will ever see in my life. It was a man and a little boy-dressed in rags, skin incredibly black from the constant sun exposure- and about a dozen cows. They had travelled down from the North since the South has greener pastures this time of year. This is especially cool for me because I spent much of my last year of college studying conflicts between nomads and pastoralists in sub Saharan Africa (my senior thesis was on climate change conflicts in SSA). And as part of my job right now I’m asking village chiefs what their environmental problems are, and a couple have brought up nomads taking up decreasing amounts of land and resources. Unfortunately I think my thesis conclusion was something like “can’t we all just get along?” so I actually have no solution to offer.