Exorcism at the office

I usually don't blog about work, but what happened today is too bizarre not to share.

I arrived this morning around 8:30. After chatting with my co-worker for a bit, I headed back to my office through my usual shortcut that passed through the boss's office. I noticed a criss-cross smear of oil near the top of her door, and at first I thought that maintenance did a poor job greasing the door hinge, since I couldn't think of any other reason why oil would be at the top of a door.

A few moments later, after my co-worker entered her office, she called me and said, "this crap is ALL OVER my office!" Sure enough, there were little and big oil smears on her chair, on her desk, by her phone, and on her door. And with more smears to observe, it became clear that they were in the shape of the cross. Then we noticed oil crosses on all the doors in that section of our office, and even on the doors of the adjacent offices in our neighbor's office. 32 in all. Apparently the cleaning lady went wacko and felt a need to exorcise our office.

If such behavior can be explained, the instigation was the co-worker's cheap-o souvenir voodoo doll from New Orleans that was sitting in a shot glass from Mexico on one of her shelves. We know this was the spark for the behavior because the voodoo doll was doused in oil, and we know the cleaning lady did it because no one else had access to the office after COB yesterday (and, she confessed shortly before she was fired).

Anyway, the exorcism generated a LOT of interest on this slow Friday, with all the appropriate offices conducting their own official and unofficial investigations and inquiries.

Sadly, because my office is not adjacent to my co-worker's and is instead separated by my boss's office, it was not exorcised. And we all know what a hotbed of sin and evil my office is. The whole thing is somewhat amusing, but also quite creepy. I was so traumatized that I had to leave work early this afternoon and take a nap at home.

Not Blogazon's Peace Corps...

Blogger had a link to the blog of some Peace Corps Volunteer in Togo. On it, he posts videos of his experiences in the market, the classroom, driving through town, etc. And he tells a touching story about how a young villageoise discovers that black skin is the same as white skin.*

Watching the videos brought back some memories of my time in the Cradle of Our Fathers, especially the video from the classroom. But then I started thinking...

This guy has wireless internet access in his village, not just en principe?** And he has a laptop to upload photos? If you look on the right column, he also has email (obviously), a phone that apparently works that you can call him on, and Skype. He also has the nerve to ask for care packages (in padded envelopes, please). Why not just order from amazon.com?

There are so many things wrong with this situation that I don't know where to start. I could go on about how my life was much more difficult and how my experience was more authentic and the global village blah blah blah, but suffice it to say that I had none of those things.

The PCV-PCV bush taxi note sent via your student's-friend's-cousin-the-taxi-driver has died an unglamorous death and been replaced with a text message.

I bi di suffah sotay!


*Excuse me while I barf. I'm not sure I would have let the little bearer-of-giardia touch me, but if I did I would have yelled BOO! right as she did, making her scream and her mom laugh. And then I would have thoroughly washed my hands before eating the BBQd snails on a stick or sliced pineapple in a plastic bag.

**Franglais for "in theory," which really means, "we don't have it."

Leaves

I did a lot of yard work today. I cleaned out my gutters, raked and mulched leaves, added them to the compost pile, mowed the lawn and then swept.

Raking leaves is kind of dumb. More will fall or be blown into my yard, and I don't want to do this chore again this season. Really the only reason I did it was because, as the slacker on the block, mine was the only yard that wasn't raked. So my unkempt yard had become the source of infection for others.

But now I have a giant compost pile, so I guess it was worth the effort.

Crazy delicious

I made houska today. Such a project is not to be taken lightly. I spent the morning making the dough, and then had to let it rise - twice - before I could braid and bake it. But at least my fantastic mixer came in very handy. My favorite part about houska, other than eating it, is punching the dough down because you get to punch dough and smell the yeasty air escaping.

Although I've made houska several times, for the first time today I read the photocopied handwritten recipe from my great-grandma (or Grandma, not sure who wrote it) all the way through. At the end, I noticed a paragraph in Czech. Apart from "pivo" (beer), I don't speak any Czech. All I could make out was "doble recepi," and right afterwards, in English, "it is good."



I made a "doble recepi" because making the bread is such a pain in the ass, but eating the sweet bread for breakfast and sharing it with others will definitely be very good. I wonder if that is what great-grandma Koudelka was making note of at the end.

And now for some sadder conservation news

My last post addressed a hopeful development about a new park system in Pará, a state in northern Brazil. And today I'm posting about a more depressing story: Ebola has killed thousands of western lowland gorillas in northeastern Republic of Congo and threatens the species with extinction.

The area of activity is shown in the map, but the species (which is distinct from the more famous "gorillas in the mist" of Uganda, DR Congo, and Rwanda) is found all over the Central African lowland tropical rainforest, including parts of the Cradle of Our Fathers.


After a little research, I found that this development has been going on for a few years, but apparently it hasn't been as bad as it is now or commanded such attention.

Given the 90% mortality rate and continued pressures from habitat destruction and the trade in bushmeat, I'm fairly pessimistic. It is only a matter of time before the Ebola virus jumps to the eastern lowland populations, or, given our close kinship with gorillas, back into the human populations in the area. Especially if people keep eating them.

New park system in Brazil

The Brazilian State of Pará created nine new units of conservation in its densely forested and lightly populated north. Together, the new state and federal parks and “sustainable use” areas cover 16.4 million hectares, or an area larger than the State of Alabama or the United Kingdom. The Brazilian press notes that two of the motivating factors for the creation of the new parks are the hopes that they will prevent land invasions and frontier violence.

The new areas form the largest connected system of protected tropical forest in the world. The biological connectivity is augmented by the adjacent legally distinct indigenous areas, shown in light brown.

Imazon, the NGO I worked at last fall in Belém, does a lot of satellite mapping of the Amazon and assisted in the delineation of the new parks.

The brunt of deforestation takes place in the southern Amazon, so unfortunately this development does little to address the problems of land invasions, cattle ranching, and soybean cultivation other than send a signal that conservation is important, too.

While I’m not naïve enough to think that paper protection = real protected area + happy people living there, this is definitely a start. You can’t work to save something that doesn’t exist.

Cachoeira Santo Antonio, on the border of Amapá and Pará

and likely just outside one of the new state parks

Flying over the Guyana Shield at dawn