/life/Dairy
So, I'm currently experimenting with a dairy-free diet. Why, you ask?
Well, when I was in Morocco, I had a bona fide asthma attack. There was no denying what it was. It took a fair bit out of me, and though I think I would have been alright without it, I was more than glad to take Clare's inhaler, which cleared things up right away.
The symtoms have been growing steadily, and are primarily of a sort of congestive nature. Kind of like after drinking a nice tall glass of milk. I've cut way back on sugar (which is incidental -- there was relatively little in Morocco, which has made me want it less and diswant it more), and (also incidental, happened just before Morocco) dropped fries ("chips") on account of the fact that, if someone sat down to design a food that would be more disruptive to human health for more people, they'd be hard pressed to do so.
So, amongst all these allegedly incidental dietary changes, I was hard-pressed to order at the pubaurant that we were hard-pressed to find amongst the Friday evening pubularity in Dublin. So I ordered lamb stew. Weird.
There's a host of things that have changed as part of moving to Dublin. I think my lungs are not one of them, at least inherently. I'm told that environmental particulate standards are much weaker here, and there's certainly more diesel engines on the roads. And then there's food -- a slow slide away from a strict vegetarian diet, with increasingly common dabblings towards dead animals. More junk at work. And lots more beer, of course. And whiskey. Surely that's good for you, though, right?
The weather is different, of course. As are the housing standards, heating standards, and air exchange standards. My current place is fairly damp, with black mould growing if we don't work hard to air the place out, which is difficult because it's ground floor and street-facing, so we can only open the windows when we're around. This would be the obvious candidate, except that things were reasonably bad last winter, before I had moved in here.
So, there's plenty to try over the next few months, as I try to avoid medicating the symptoms away. Asthma's symptoms -- closure of the lung's passage ways -- seem fairly reasonable to me as a reaction to toxins. Paul's suggestion to wear a face mask at least when commuting seems like a reasonable second try. I went around trying to find a Peak Flow Meter, which gives a metric on lung health (around both a personal baseline and published expectations based on height, gender and age) to try and lend some actual validity to my efforts, but neither of the two pharmacies I found had the right thing in stock.
So for now, out with dairy. Which is in a lot of things. Between sugar, dairy and fries -- and by the same argument, crisps/chips, but that one is a bit harder to maintain since I like them more -- there's almost no snacks at work I can eat. Oh the travesty, free luxury snacks not varied enough.
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/books/The State of Africa
So, I've finally finished The State of Africa: A History of Fifty Years of Independence. It was one of the most eye-opening, gap-filling books I've ever read. It's something that should be read by everyone who donates money to African causes, or goes to protest concerts or considers aid issues when they vote.
It's big, and it's heavy. Meredith doesn't shy away from any of what happened, and presents Africa's recent history as a series of somewhat-interlocking narratives. It's heavily fact-based, and light on the editorializing.
There are three big things that totally changed my perspective on Africa. The scale of the corruption went (and continues to go) beyond anything I had previously understood. Many of the "Big Men" leaders in Africa shot anyone who opposed them. The more civilized ones just tortured and jailed them. Few survived the end of their reign, so they had little motive to leave anything in working order. Foreign reserves (the result of trading with other countries) were routinely transfered to offshore accounts, completely debilitating the ability of these countries to trade. Votes were suppressed, rigged, then ignored. Racial tensions were exploited as distractions, or to sow fear. Aid was stolen, diverted, or skimmed. There were no lengths to which some of the despots would not go in protecting their power and gutting the wealth and hopes of their fiefdoms.
The second, which in many ways comes first was the utter lack of educated personel in the countries as they all cascaded into independence in the late 50s. Some of them had couple dozen university-educated natives in the whole country. It's no wonder these countries collapsed in on themselves. Despite what was no doubt the immense political popularity of African independence amongst the intelligentsia at the time, colonial governments almost certainly chose an immoral path in letting these countries run themselves so quickly, though they may well have not known it at the time.
The third big surprise was France's participation, aid and abetting of the Rwandan genocide. Their diplomatic support for the Hutu leader, provision of guns, and general tunnel vision in supporting a pro-French leader really shocked me. They clung on, denying the ongoing genocide very late. Along similar but less surprising lines, I hadn't realized how much the Soviet Union and the US waged proxy battles in Africa during the cold war. It was an explicit policy of the US to try to drain Soviet resources in Angola.
It's no wonder the continent is as fucked up as it is, and sadly, having read this book, I don't have a lot of hope for its future.
Good book. Heavy reading, but an excellent summary of what's going on in Africa, and why.
/travel/Morocco
On Wednesday, I got back from Morocco. It was a short trip, just 4 days. A terrible abuse of the necessary flying. We flew into Marrakech via London Gatwick, uneventfully.
Marrakesh was pretty cool. There was a large square with lots of little
stalls, and snake charmers and story tellers and musicians. It was very
much a part of the local life, it seemed; the stories were in Arabic, and
only a small amount of what went on seemed particularly targetted at
tourists.
Nearby there was a large area of tiny, windy streets filled with people and mopeds and donkeys and the occasional car creeping slowly through. There were shops of all kinds: clothes, cloth, food, mirrors, dishes, etc. The haggling was friendly but intensive, and not surprisingly they were much better at it than I was.
The country was poor, but things seemed to be fairly functional. While it's much lower on the Human Development Index than Ukraine (124 vs 78), things seemed less broken, perhaps simply because there wasn't the obvious contrast of how things "might have been" or "nearly were". The people seemed honest: willing to take your money, but not trying to scam you out of it. I was much more edgy about being scammed than I needed to be, I think.
Given the short time (Clare and the two friends we were with stayed on for a total of a week, so they're just back today) we took a ready-made trip to the near Sahara. It was about 6 or 7 hours of driving, with a few stops along the way. Our minibus had us, two slightly overwhelmed Americans, and a pack of six gap year (between high school and uni, so about 18) Australian gals. They were fun, if slightly loud.
We arrived to Zagora just around sunset, and then rode camels for about an hour and a half into the desert, in three lines of four camels, each lead by a Berber. Luckily, unlike horses, it turns out I'm not allergic to camels. We camped in a traditional Berber tent, each on a thin foam pad.
The desert is a desperate, rugged place. We weren't really into the Sahara...the sand dunes were small, and there was parched gravel ground that they flowed on top -- it wasn't "sand all the way down" as it is deep in the Sahara. It's dry and oppressive in a way that's hard to convey. On the drive, some of the landscape was completely barren, and lots of it was barren but for a few rugged, wispy shrubs clinging to the earth. I couldn't get the notion of dying of thirst out of my head. It's an expression we use lightly, but it seemed all to real there. One of the camels was acting up (we guessed he was too young to be carrying people) and so I opted to walk for the last half hour or so, partly to see what it was like. I drank a lot of water, and felt funny later, presumably due to lack of salts.
The food was alright, but veggie options were not always available, and they were virtually always fairly plain couscous or stewed veg dishes, so I had a few meat meals, which were more tasty. Constantly being paranoid about food ("peel it, bake it or boil it") is a bit tiring.
The country is a former French colony, so my french was very handy. It was nice to give it some exercise. They seemed to understand me fairly well, and only a few of them spoke better English than French.
Every few hours (starting at just after 5am) there was a wailing call to prayer, no matter where you were. Both male and female tourists are admonished to cover knees and shoulders (and everything in between, of course). There was no alcohol to be had, at least easily, since drinking in public places is illegal. I kinda liked the lack of alcohol. It was replaced with simple mint tea (made with fresh mint leaves and a healthy dose of sugar), which they drank morning, noon and night. And when you checked into a hotel. And pretty much any other time. In the mornings, there were mopeds stacked with giant mounts of tea leaves cruising around, making deliveries. Others were loaded up with giant wicker baskets full of who-knows. In the countryside, women were seen carrying big loads of branches and stuff on their head, presumably to keep warm in the cool desert nights, or perhaps just to make a roof. Kids would run up to us, certainly to ask for money (often in exchange for "gifts" of small folded-grass animals), but it seemed also just to see us and say hello. Again, most of them were very friendly, though a couple seemed a bit aggressive (which I can't blame them for, really.)
I've very nearly finished reading The State of Africa, which is an excellent, eye-opening perspective on Africa. It changed most of what I think about the source and solution to the problems that Africa faces. I hope to review it more properly soon, but who knows if I'll find time. It was good to have read so much of it before stepping foot on that continent.
