sticks and stones.

A research team from the University of Texas, Arlington, has some bad news: students at schools implementing anti-bullying programs actually were more likely to have been physically, emotionally, or sexually harrassed by peers than at schools without such programs.

The study used retrospective data from the 2005-2006 Health Behavior in School-Aged Children study, a quadrennial WHO initiative across 43 European and North American countries, plus Israel ("membership of HBSC is restricted to countries and states within the WHO European region").  It's a robust set, 7,000 students strong, but there's little but speculation that we can make of the reasons why we'd see more bullying in schools with prevention programs.

 Quoted in the UT-Arlington News Center, co-author Seokjin Jeong said,

“The schools with interventions say, ‘You shouldn’t do this,’ or ‘you shouldn’t do that.’ But through the programs, the students become highly exposed to what a bully is and they know what to do or say when questioned by parents or teachers.”

Definitely a hypothesis worth exploring, Seokjin.  Especially when fueled by the insight with which you closed your paper:

Furthermore, given that bullying is a relationship problem, researchers need to better identify the bully-victim dynamics in order to develop prevention strategies accordingly.

The blog that led me to this study (catchily titled "Why anti-bullying programs are written by dishonest fools") agrees, proposing that anti-bullying programs reinforce the sense of bullies' power and targets' weakness, perpetuating cycles of violence and shame.

Although the article itself is unfocused at times (and links off to material on quantum physics), I appreciated the author pointing to the emotional and physical traumas that can contribute to bullying: we need to erase the causes of aggression as much as the conditions of suffering it.

To close out, some sense from Mr. Einstein:

No problem can be solved from the same level of consciousness that created it.

If curriculum designers write with Bullies and Victims in mind, they are scripting those roles for the kids (and teachers) who use them.   What might change if programming showed all children respect for their strengths and grace for their weaknesses?

29 Sept 2011.

The blue plastic of my camelback tube makes all 2 litres of my water taste like weak, fizzless rootbeer. Can this be healthy?

3 Sept 2011.

Spent exactly seven minutes stretching this morning – I wouldn’t call it yoga, but the two did share something in common. My not doing yoga here is part of the same silly small fears that I have about too many other things: when I don’t do it, my body gets out of practice, stiff, difficult. How can I start again when I’ve gotten so bad? What would be the point? Especially frustrating when the whole reason I love yoga and dancing is that it’s a low-stakes challenge. The sun does not rise and set on whether I can bind in Marichiasana D.

The past couple of days have actually been really positive. One day we had three great successes. First, a man in the villages said that he could tell we really care about ending guinea worm, because we’re actually coming out to the village regularly. Then, when looking for a new water source, a stream that had filled temporarily, a group of little boys took us out into the bush to show us where it was. Finally, on our way out, passing through another village, we stopped to talk to the elders. There were no requests for tobacco, clothes, food – one man just said, We’re glad you’re here. Head on out and keep doing this important work. I glowed.

Last night we came to one of my favorite villages, one that’s had three cases. The owner of the compound welcomed us, pulled aside the thorn fence so we could bring the vehicle inside, and shared a meal with us without saying a thing about medicine, tobacco, clothes, food. The kids played with me, us each imitating what we hear - them my English, me their Toposa. Kept us in stitches.

On my way back into the compound after taking a bit of a wee in the dark, one of the girls sprang out from behind the gate. YA! she shouted. I jumped a mile. We laughed and laughed, and then she pulled in the thorn gate and we went together to sleep a happy sleep.

18 Sept 2011.

South Sudan is a place where, I’m ashamed to admit, I pop my collar and peg my pants. I never do this in the States! I justify to other TAs – It’s just because of the sun! The mud! Thank goodness there’s no one around the villages to snicker at me for looking like a MA candidate in comparative literature, c. 1986.

This morning the sky is so dark the sun didn’t wake us at 6:15. Even the roosters didn’t kick in until 6:20 or so. Surprisingly, I’m starting to develop the habit of waking up before my alarm goes off, though that may be an artifact of going to sleep at 9:30 every night. My parents have both always had the ability to get up early – my dad will actually set himself like a clock, and get up at 4:45 for a road trip. Freakish, I’ve always thought. Maybe it’s a skill that develops with age, or urgency of purpose. Must get out to the field. Must not be that lazy TA who gets up at 7.

I’m flagging in my resolve to train new guys. Teaching is hard, when the people you’re working with don’t especially speak your language, and went to high schools where the standards aren’t particularly high. My supervisor ~criticizes me for repeating myself. Make them listen to you the first time, he says.

The thing is, he ain’t wrong. I *do* repeat myself, talk in anecdotes, I try to speak simply, but need to simplify even further. Clear and concise, the assistant director wrote to me. Clear and concise.

But isn’t my unclarity and blatherness what people like so much about me? Last night I had the luxury of a skype chat (words only – video is the straw that breaks the tenuous internet’s back, even on an international NGO’s compound). Dear friend in Kathmandu, who had just posted news of the 6.8 earthquake that hit KTM after Sikkim. La. As we wrote, our shared doubts about where on earth we’re headed came up. People all around the world love and support you, he said. This echo runs through me every day, sometimes painfully – so many people I feel like I’m letting down by (yet again) failing to be a rockstar. They love you because you fully appreciate the moment, he said. It buoyed me, his kind words, but I was left with the taste of vague dissatisfaction under my tongue: is that skill of mine helping me, helping the people I’m supposed to be helping, here?

3 June 2011.

How on earth do people do this blogging business? Three weeks have dissolved under my tongue – still have the taste, but my hands have been too busy with other work (and our compound too without electricity) for me to write.

For those of you who *haven’t* heard my crazy story from a few weeks ago…. We were at one of the clinics we operate. It’s not a full medical clinic: only cares for patients with guinea worms. We were taking care of records, running in the endless wheel of paperwork that rolls when you work in the field, when O, one of the clinic staff, came to me and said, A woman is having a baby in the bushes outside – let us go. Yow! Yow. Not only two yows, but three! Yow! We go to the bushes. This is the place where our patients sometimes sneak out to go to the bathroom – the latrines have been flooded, and lots of folks from our villages don’t trust latrines anyhow. (You know those latrines; they’d sell their grandmother for an easy Sudanese pound.) We smell the shit as we are walking. And there, under a tree, surrounded by a small group of women and curious kids, is a lady squatting over a bloody sheet. Between her knees is a tiny, blue head. O is a trained nurse, and has put on his white coat. Bring gloves! We say. And soap, and clean water, and a clean sheet, and bandaging gauze. O sits by the woman and strokes her belly. This helps with the contractions, he says.

Here it is! This is the scene in the comedy movie, when the hapless hero/heronine has to deliver a baby. Thank goodness l am the only hapless one – O has delivered many babies in the past. Also the baby is allegedly all the way out. O pulls on the head and shoulders, and the woman shifts in a way that *might* be like a wince, to a badass woman who goes off to have a baby in the bushes. In any event, after this the baby is… all there. Out! (This is the term we use for worms, that they are “completely out,” and so I feel odd, applying it to this baby.)

[O told me to tie the cord three times with bandage gauze, and then to cut inbetween the first and second. Insurance against blood loss on the baby's side.] We take him and wash him gently with water (no harsh antibiotic soap for you, new little man). [A kid from the CCC comes with a clean, new bedsheet,and I wrap him up. His skin is so delicate I'm sure the cloth and my clumsy hands must hurt, but he keeps quiet, eyes shut. The ladies think it's hilarious that I'm bouncing him, shushing him. I think about my dad singing me to sleep when I was young. I sing to him. Summertime, his first song.]

[My container, my own container on my compound, has perhaps the greatest logo I've ever seen. When I first saw it, I actually thought I might get it tattooed on my shoulder. These days I'm thinking more about a little scar instead, but O.S.K. Moru Lines needs to be shared with you-all.]

As described by someone on Flickr named imbrettjackson:

"Look at his eyes - focused, alert, worried. He's got to get this beauty out of here and back to the swamp A f***ing S A P.

And then there's that smile: shit. Is this really happening? Oh s**t - Crocky, old boy YOU'RE SET FOR LIFE! Gotta get home. Gotta get home.

I DO believe he'd defend that package to within an inch of his life. And really - you'd want "crocodile tenacity" in your overseas cargo haulage."

[Our croc has had a few less espressos - no bags under his eyes - but he's still burly and anchor-inked and ready to haul tail with his big silver box. Good things for the girls and boys waiting on the other side of the ocean.]

4 May 2011.

Truth is the best of the intoxications.

J'ai tres envie d'essayer ca. Learn French By Podcast gives this example if I were watching someone surf: I have a lot of envy of trying that.

John, who will be the manager [at a GWD treatment center], catches me practicing my weak French and asks what state I am from. I put away the headphones and we start to talk about where we're from. He grew up in Jonglei, a state in South Sudan that is still seeing a lot of conflict these days. When the war started, he went to Ethiopia, he says, and then to Kenya and Uganda. On foot? Yes, by footing. With your family, I ask? No - he was a torab. No word for it in English; in Arabic it means someone who someday will help the state. When the war started, in 1987, he was seven years old, and along with all the other young boys he was taken by the government to go to school, to grow up to be old enough to join the army. Walking all the way to Ethiopia took two months, and it took all the skin off his feet to do it. We had hunger, we were tired. Oh! It was very hard, he says. John was one of the lost boys. But there is no bitterness when he talks about it. What kind of question can I follow this with? How did that feel, when you were a boy? Was it frightening? No.... when you have a brave heart, nothing is hard, he says. There was a bishop who would come to see us, bringing a little clothing, a little food, and to give us encouraging words. He would say, Hope, says John.

Antonella [the clinic manager, a nurse, general badass] is one of ten children, from a family where her mother was one of four wives, all best friends. Her mother's two brothers both died of snakes, one killed by a python in the fields and one bitten by a puff adder. Her mother promised to give her firstborn girl to her mother, Antonella's grandmother, so that she would have company, but it took two tries, Antonella's two older brothers. Antonella moved in with her grandmother at the tender age of three months, and she suckled until her grandmother gave milk. She grew up thinking of her mother as an aunt, calling her by her first name. Do you want to know why I went to school? she asks me. Naturally. Once, she was out tending to the smallest baby goats, she says. But she was willful and left them to go play. At the end of the day, when she came to fetch them - ha! Like that! All 60 lying on the ground, their throats... all the blood sucked out by a leopard! You are no good at this, her grandmother said. I am sending you to school. [Anto tells tall, taller, towering tales. I love every one.]