Hail to the Chief

"Until all nations and peoples become united by the bonds of the Holy Spirit in this real fraternity, until national and international prejudices are effaced in the reality of this spiritual brotherhood, true progress, prosperity and lasting happiness will not be attained by man."

- `Abdu'l-Baha

I have been having some really weird dreams about Tanzania. Last night I had a dream about returning to Tanzania. I guess the premise was that I'd only returned to the U.S. for a short period of time like I did in August and now I was returning to my service post. For some reason I thought I was supposed to return on January 29th but then someone told me I was supposed to have gone on January 23rd. I completely tore up my room in a horrible panic looking for the ticket and then when I finally found it, the ticket - for AtlanticAir, does that even exist? - said January 23rd. ThenI woke up!

A few nights ago, I dreamed I was elected the President of Tanzania. Apparently there was a national sensation about a mzungu (white person) being elected to the presidency. I was busy going around Dar es Salaam visiting the homes of the Baha'is trying to figure out if I was allowed to be a Baha'i and president at the same time. I remember visiting so many of the friends. Some of them were happy about it, some of them were upset and others were just flat out yelling at me, as if it were my fault I was elected.

Anyway, while I was in Tanzania I tried to keep up with the countries and states of origin of the people who were visiting my blog. It was interesting and encouraging to me to see how many "international" visitors there were because I know first hand how much of a change in attitude toward the world you can have just by exposure to people of different cultures, even if it is through personal thoughts and other sorts of exposure that blogs can provide. You can also draw a lot of conclusions by looking to see which countries visitors came from - most were in the developed world or countries where there is an emphasis on information technology (India, China, etc.). There are huge gaps when it comes to Africa, the Middle East, Eastern Europe, South America and Southeast Asia. An explanation could be that the blog is in English or something to that effect, but still I think it's interesting to see what might be construed as the lack of diversity in the diversity of people who visited!

I've made some little maps here of the countries and U.S. states of origin of a lot of the people who have visited the blog. For those of you who are uncomfortable with the idea of trackers and what not, don't worry! It's not like it tells me who you are. =P It just says what country of U.S. state/Canadian province you're from and the town you're in. That's it!

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Adjust Your Vision

"O Man of Two Visions! Close one eye and open the other. Close one to the world and all that is therein, and open the other to the hallowed beauty of the Beloved."

- Bahá'u'lláh

Well, I'm feeling considerably better about school now. I met with the new coordinator of my degree programme last week, and I feel confident that he's going to actually take the department places. Before, everything lacked the sort of energy, optimism and forward movement that he's been able to bring. His classes are engaging but more importantly I can tell already that he genuinely cares about the students in the programme. We've already basically remapped my degree to be more in line with what I want to do, and we're working on some programmes to where I'm not limited to the very limited language offerings at my university to satisfy the fairly hefty language requirements for my degree. The fact that he's helping the students focus themselves on creating a degree that will offer practical assistance when we get into the "real world" is one of the best things that can be done at our university with so many non-traditional students, and I'm really pleased that he's securing money for us to study abroad and attend various conferences around the country on relevant topics.

I'm going to be concentrating on education and development for my degree, and I'm seriously thinking about a minor in Middle Eastern studies. I imagine that will take me to the Middle East at some point for study abroad. The coordinator is in the process of studying Arabic, which I think would be a fantastic if complicated language to pick up. I'd much rather learn Persian, but I think the opportunities for that are fairly limited since it's probably not safe for me to go to Iran, not least of which because I'm an American and a Bahá'í.

Speaking of which, just as important to me was the professor's respect for me as a member of the Bahá'í Faith. He has included "activism" as part of the requirements for the class, which sent up a red flag for me because we're not supposed to get involved in these sorts of political charged debates and activities that seem to dominate "activism" on college campuses. After he listened to my reasoning, he explained that I didn't have to participate in anything that would put me a position I wasn't comfortable with and that the activism of the class wasn't politically oriented.

In addition, when I introduced myself to the class, he encouraged me to identify myself as a Bahá'í (I'm still a little shy to do so after returning from a country with such a large and sometimes hostile Muslim population that it wasn't always safe or appropriate to do so) and explain the Faith to the class when he discovered that so few of them had ever heard of it. He encouraged the same thing during our Model Arab League/Model United Nations team meeting this evening and asked me to specifically highlight my year of service in East Africa and my reasons for doing it. It's important to me that he's so enthusiastic about exposing the students here in the traditionally religiously conservative South to something that's different from what they've heard and seen not just because more people know about my religion now but also because it helps broaden the vision in a place where vision tends to be quite willfully narrow.

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The Struggle

It's 2:45 AM, and I can't sleep. Unfortunately I'm very poor at regulating my sleeping pattern. There's always something that keeps me up late and then I end up sleeping in late, which throws the whole schedule off the next day. It's a vicious cycle.

Every Martin Luther King, Jr. Day there's some depressing story plastered across the washingtonpost.com website, which serves as my home page. This year it indicated that something like 15% of college students think that Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.'s "I Have a Dream" speech is about abolishing slavery. Maybe 15% isn't a very large number of students, but should we have anyone going into college without knowing what that speech is about? If they've managed to live 18+ years of their lives without that fairly simple piece of knowledge then it makes me wonder what else they don't know.

At any one given time at my university there are probably more remedial writing and mathematics classes than the entry-level writing and mathematics classes themselves. It's just mind-boggling to me how people have gone through at least 12 years of education without gaining fundamental writing and mathematics skills. And I do mean fundamental - it doesn't take a Faulkner to get into Composition I or an Archimedes to get into College Mathematics. What's more there are three levels of remedial classes and apparently people have had to take all three of them before being able to take the actual class itself. The obvious exception to these sorts of things is people with a learning disability, but there aren't enough people with a learning disability to account for all of these remedial classes.

Speaking of university, it's amazing how much we have to spend on textbooks. I've spent at least $250, which is cheap because some of the books I already had because my university's professors are too lazy to use updated material and stay on the cutting edge, preferring instead to use the same transparencies (not even PowerPoint) for at least a decade before realizing that information changes. I understand that some Virginia congressman is trying to create something like a digital database of textbooks, which I suppose is a good idea. What would be better would be policy makers finally recognizing the value of college education and putting enough money into helping students get there, giving them a proper foundation before they get there and insuring that there are high standards for the quality of education at the institutions themselves. I know a few tenured professors who need the boot!

I have honestly struggled to go back to school this week. I don't know if it's because sometimes it seems like an exercise in futility or I'm afraid to go back after taking the Africa break or just downright disillusionment or something else along those lines. Mitra's advice was to take the bit between my teeth and show them who I am, which really seems to be the best way of going about things if only I could find that necessary "oomph" to get going. I keep trying to remind myself of all the African friends I made who wanted so desperately to attend university, but there's just some sort of intense malaise that's settled over me that prevents me from getting fired up about anything.

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