Academic Nostalgia

Being a recent graduate who happens to love being in an academic environment, I have to find ways of keeping my mind active. Not an easy task with my work schedule, this often involves researching interesting topics, reading the news, and browsing articles on wikipedia. At times, I happen across articles that, while fairly serious, strike me as funny for some reason. One such article that I recently found was entitled "Playstation 2 component incites African war". My first response to this was "WHAT?! I have got to read this..." The article went on to discuss the role of coltan, a metal ore used in many electronic devices, in the bloody conflicts of the Democratic Republic of the Congo a.k.a. the DRC [a name which belies the complete lack of democracy to be found in the nation] The mining of coltan funded weapons etc. for the conflict there. This metal is also apparently used in the Playstation 2 which means that Sony singlehandedly increased the global price of coltan from $49 a pound to $275 a pound and thus brought a great deal of revenue to militant resistence groups not only in the DRC, but also in Uganda, Burundi, and Rwanda.

Now, as obscure as it may seem, I actually had a decent amount of previous knowledge concerning the DRC and the role of coltan. In fact, my final semester in college I took a political science class that examined the links between environmental degredation and conflict in which I actually presented an article from an academic journal on this very topic. On top of this, all semester coltan was a running joke amongst the students in the class. This was partly because coltan is a fun word and partly because none of us had ever heard of it before. Coltan quickly became our go-to response. For instance, what are key resources that can be linked to conflict? Diamonds, water....and coltan! If you were the leader of a militant resistance group, how would you fund your movement? Take over coltan mines of course, along with the usual diamond and drug smuggling... And of course, nerds that we are, we found it rather hilarious. Clearly these are all very serious issues, but when global tragedy is all you ever study, you have to find some things darkly humorous.

All this to say, I laughed out loud when I found a legitimate article on the subject of coltan and felt the need to forward it to a couple other previous members of the class. Ah academic nostalgia... Sony of course claims they have ceased to use coltan derivitives and sidestep the problem of the DRC by stating that the coltan they did use came from mines in a number of countries. *cough*

Restlessness

There are certain activities and experiences that the all-knowing "they" say that once experienced, whet one's appetite for a lifetime. I would tend to agree with this as I've been the victim of it lately. My particular affliction happens to be the desire to travel. Yes, I've definitely got the "travel bug" as people like to call it. It's been over a year since I've been outside the U.S. and I'm itching to leave again. I've been a couple of places, but the most sigificant time-wise is Egypt. I've been there twice for a total of 6 1/2 months and I miss it terribly.

It's funny, whenever I mention to people that I've lived in Egypt, the first words out of their mouths invariably have something to do with the pyramids and camels. I can't help shaking my head at the sad reality that a place of such rich and varied history, culture, and people has been reduced to a single architectural structure from centuries past in the minds of most Americans.

I miss the energy of Cairo, a beautiful city that feels as if it's literally bursting with life. I don't know if there's anywhere else in the world of such variety and seeming contradictions. Modern cars driving beside carts pulled by donkeys, men in flowing galabeyas walking alongside men in business suits, women completely covered in black with women in western clothes and many other women wearing hijab covering their hair in a rainbow of beautiful colors. A whirlwhind of movement and light, people, horns sounding, street vendors calling out their wares, the layered scents of spices, trash, sun-warmed fruit, grilling meat, and thousands of people. I remember sailing at night in a faluka along the Nile. The city lights reflecting off the water as a cool breeze pushes us along in relative silence, distant from the busyness of the city. The banks of the river so lush with vegetation...

So here I am now, in East Texas of all places, getting excited when see a woman in hijab or hear someone speaking Arabic. In truth, anything remotely connected with the region gets me excited. In fact, yesterday at a mall I struck up a conversation with a salesman at one of those booths that sell hair-straigteners because he looked very Middle-Eastern. It turned out he was Israeli and our conversation about goings on in the region only fed my recent restlessness. Inshallah I will soon be able to scratch this itch, but for now I'll have to settle for relating my thoughts and experiences to whomever will listen, or read, as the case may be. But for now, ma salama.