Adam Hooper (the blog)

I was planning another blog post today about New York, but with the world the way it is, I cannot bring myself to write it.

1. In Democratic Republic of the Congo, a new French word is born: reviolé. Rebel forces plunder all they can from the villages they attack (with an insinuation of the word plunder more evil than most people can fathom). Government soldiers, defeated, extract everything they can from the people they are paid to protect as they retreat. Atrocity rates are so unfathomably massive that women who have been raped in several, unrelated incidents is becoming a nonzero demographic. The Congolese government looks in the other direction while its own employees commit atrocities; the UN peacekeepers (the largest UN peacekeeping force in the world) cower in impotence, other international bodies are powerless to interfere, ordinary Congolese men are brushed aside, and Congolese women have no recourse: they must suffer, repeatedly, disgusting humiliation I can scarcely imagine.
2. Not to be outdone, a 13-year-old rape victim in Somalia is stoned to death on adultery charges by one of the many groups hoping to become a government, in a stadium packed with a thousand murderous men.

My heart goes out to the victims of this most base, evil, vulgar, and despicable crime: especially those women honest and well-meaning enough to shed their dignity and publicize their suffering. I am sickened by the existence of masses of men in the world who are so unmoved as to lower themselves to rape and murder... and by the fact that I have something in common with them.

I wish I could chop theirs off.

My website, for whatever ludicrous reason, comes up as the #1 Google Search result for Kisambaa.

Since I am now considered the authoritative source on Kisambaa, I should explain a bit about it: it is the native language of the Sambaa people in Tanzania, who live east of Arusha and just across the border from Kenya. How are you? in the afternoon is onga mshi, and the correct response is tiwedi. I do not know the formalities for morning, nighttime, thanks, or farewells. In fact, I know practically nothing about Kisambaa.

I found a website called Ethnologue Report which says 664,000 Sambaa people exist. I would take that website's information with a grain of salt, however: its entry on Swahili suggests that Kiswahili only has 540,000 mother-tongue speakers, while in reality Zanzibar alone accounts for 1,000,000 Swahili people and I expect a significant subset of the younger population of Dar es Salaam (population 3,000,000) also speaks Kiswahili better than any other language.

Factoid: most native Kisambaa speakers know Kiswahili as a second language.

Factoid Number Two: Since I am writing English, I should really be writing Sambaa instead of Kisambaa (for the same reason I would write French instead of Français); but if I had done that to begin with my website never would have been the #1 search result.

What does gambling mean to you?

To me, gambling is a lark. Last night I won sixty cents on a horse named Pacific Flora: my tactic was to select the horse with the slowest-sounding name, and after searching the big book of small numbers in vain for a name along the lines of Bro-Can Leg, I decided seafaring algae might be comically slow as well. Pacific Flora somehow managed to evolve its way to first place.

Then I saw the slot machines.

Insert $1 to $100.

I inserted $1; I pushed a button a few times; I eventually lost every penny; and I went to a different machine.

I inserted $1; I pushed a button a few times. This time, I did not even bother looking at the screen. I already knew how the story would end, and the flashing lights and electronic sounds were distracting me from a conversation I was having. Sure enough, after pushing the button a few times, the machine diplomatically encouraged me to pay up or leave, refusing to illuminate its bet button.

Bored, I decided to walk around.

But I could not walk: I could only swim in a sea of slot machines. I came to realize I had been gambling at the fringe of a venture 5,000 machines across. As I delved deeper into the building I lost sight of all landmarks: only row after row of blinking lights and losing betters greeted my eyes, stretching to infinity—a financial infinity for those shrewd enough to design it.

I got lost.

Twice.

Ordinary people devise systems to beat these machines: simultaneous bets, fluctuating antes, and strict, superstitious mathematical formulas, hopelessly created to compete with mathematical formulas which (and you would think committed gamblers would pause to consider this at some point) are invariably designed by smarter, more educated, wealthier people who themselves do not bet with their creations.

At the corner of the complex, adjacent to the exit, sits a small, underused row of counters labeled REDEMPTION. It lent a biblical tone to the evening: with deliverance so convenient and well-advertised, evidence suggests the vast majority would prefer to sacrifice money, time, and sometimes souls to mechanized thieves and their devious designers.

What does gambling mean to me? In this instance, it means the aggregation of poor people's money in rich people's pockets.

But I am still missing a sense of scale. In the coming year, Yonkers Raceway will triple its number of machines, effectively tripling its ability to accept $1 to $100.

People are different across streets and alike across oceans.

Though I have not spent much effort recreating my old website, one small accomplishment is my "My Code" section. This lets you view some source code I have written for school projects and pet projects. It is ideal for university students and people interested in learning to program. Most of the code was written in C, Java, and Python; and at the time I write this, all of the code was written at least two years ago.

Check it out at http://adamhooper.com/code.

<p>I am busy rebuilding my website. The new version is better. It is built using <a href="http://rubyonrails.org">Ruby on Rails</a>, which deserves a plug. The hacker in me couldn&#8217;t resist writing a blog engine from scratch.</p> <p>Don&#8217;t mind the mess. Not all links behave as they ought to, and I will be putting more content in soon. I figure a website like this is better than one of those animated &#8220;Under Construction&#8221; websites from the 1990&#8217;s.</p>

My adventures and frustration at slow Internet made me leave my blog by the wayside for the past few weeks.

I am now back in Canada, and I have uploaded a photo album online. It is massive, only because it squishes eight action-packed months of my life into a mere 70 megabytes.

Here it is: My photos of Tanzania, Malawi, Zambia, Democratic Republic of Congo, Burundi, Rwanda, Uganda, Ethiopia, and Switzerland.

• Cargo ship captain: stays out of the way after charging the boarding fee.
• Cargo ship crew: become more and more friendly, even calling Adam by his name towards the end of the five-day journey.
• Ex-refugees: populate the village of Moba for roughly a year before Adam's arrival. Tell interesting stories. Are very poor.
• Burundian passengers: take Adam under their collective wing on Adam's trip to Bujumbura (Burundi).
• Congolese workers: load the boat at Moba, chanting to gather strength and resolve.
• Congolese passengers: board in massive numbers at Moba and sleep absolutely everywhere.
• Congolese port officials: collectively extract over $30 through cons and bribes.
• Congolese Important Official, Uvira: swears to get Congolese port officials fired and phones ahead at the Burundian border to allow Adam passage and special treatment.
• Adam: experiences all of this rather passively.

• See Victoria Falls
• White water raft below Victoria Falls
• Go on a cruise above Victoria Falls
• Fly in a micro-light over Victoria Falls
• Defy Africa by crossing from Victoria Falls to Mpulungu, at the complete opposite end of Zambia, in under 24 hours.

I spent five nights in Malawi. This was enough for me to make several oversimplified comparisons to Tanzania:

• Local food: nsima and relish (same as ugali and mchicha in Tanzania).
• Local languages: many, with English the common tongue. As in other African countries, language barriers are probably still a contributing factor of tribalism and discrimination. Tanzania, with its near-universal Swahili, seems more cohesive.
• Roads: fantastic.
• Scenery: stupendous. Mountains tower above Lake Malawi from both sides, resulting in spectacular sunrises, sunsets, days, and nights.
• Backpacking: Malawi is a superb backpacking country. Rates are cheap, people speak English, roads are good.... If you want to visit Africa, Malawi is a great place to start.
• Business: it may just be a feeling, but I get the impression Malawi revolves around South Africa whereas Tanzania revolves around Kenya.
• Politics: when I left Malawi, parliament was dissolving. No difference from Tanzania there.
• In general: I would need to stay much longer to understand Malawi.

Next up: Zambia and Victoria Falls.