Do Work

This picture is at the aquarium. There was a cutout in the middle of the tank. I am not in Hirsh's lap, but it really looks like it.
The fish on the right is Pikachu.


I thought I would give a brief update about Odac.
The people are very kind, but the workplace is quite interesting. My work is research-based, so I spend most of the day reading and writing.

Side-note: being assigned to find out what the access to information law is in the DRC is particularly difficult, as there is no detectable law of any sort in the DRC. Two quotes describe the state, and the (smarminess of the editors).

1: At the time of independence, no transitional arrangements had been made by the Belgians, after a century of control. They left the new nation with seventeen persons, out of a population of 20 million, with university degrees and not a single officer in the armed forces or police. Even by the abysmal standards of Africa, "No colony had ever faced independence so ill prepared"

2: "The official name of the former Zaïre is the Democratic Republic of the Congo. It is, of course, neither democratic nor a republic. Possibly in a normal distaste at using meaningless adjectives to denote the different Congos, we append the names of their capitals, thus Zaïre and Democratic Republic of the Congo is now, for your editors, simply Congo (Kinshasa) and the Republic of Congo is Congo (Brazzaville). Until 2003 there was, in our opinion, little to report concerning legal institutions in the Congo or even of general legal developments."

The people in my office, however, are on the telephone all of the time. Everyone in SA speaks English, but whenever they receive calls they will often switch to another language. Four of them, the middle-management group, speak in isiXhosa whenever they gossip with each other. That language has clicks, and it is very hard to adjust to those when they occur. They all speak English with different accents, so they all start talking a little louder to each other. Even when they speak to me, they will use Afrikaans and isiZulu words often. Plus, they use a different vocabulary than we do, similar to but distinct from the English. The internet system is hilarious. There are random switches and wires everywhere. They fired the IT company today. It was intense.

In unrelated news, fill out your World Cup Brackets! And Jose Torres is from Longview: http://www.socceramerica.com/article/38325/jose-torres-makes-east-texas-town-proud.html