On My Own

Yesterday Jess left and I started organizing all the computer work I have to do for GFW, WBP, and 晶. I was a little uneasy – what am I doing by myself just wandering around Africa? I tried to tell myself that I’m awesome for doing this, but there was a big part of me that says “Hey you slacker! Get back to work!”  The grass is always greener I suppose… After some emails to friends at home and some met on the way, I feel better about traveling. I’m not the only one, you know! There’s a bunch of people like this!

Washed some clothes that needed it, and boiled some water to kill all the junk growing in our towel.

I moved in to a single-occupancy room from the double Jess and I were sharing. Its about 8′ x 7′ square, with the bed taking up 40% of the room, the desk and chair taking up 15%, and the “closet” taking 10%, leaving an interesting maze that I’ve got to navigate through depending on what I’m doing – sleeping, computer stuff, or stretching.

On the way home from the internet café last night, I got stopped by an Indian and a Ghanaian. Both insisted that I was the richest of the three because I had dollars. I promptly informed them that while 1 dollar was more than 1 rupee or 1 cedi, what was important was how much we each had. That seemed enough to get off the topic for a while. The Indian has traveled here with a relative, a movie producer in India, who turned out to be quite a funny guy. He explained what he did as simply gambling. I had to push him to furthur define the role of producer, because at this point I was thinking of a guy sitting in a Los Vegas casino all day, so he did so by deciding to organize a book that I was going to “write.” He told me that I was the author of this book, and that I needed to say only a few sentences, and hire a translater who would then elaborate on that, hire a secretary to type everything the translater said, and hire someone to come up with a good title (he could provide this for $20,000) and some good illustrations ($30,000) for the cover. Then he’d put my name on the book, and try to sell it. So even though I wouldn’t have actually written the book, I organized and funded all the necessary pieces of it, and therefore I would have produced that book. And since you’re putting all this money up front without knowning how people will react to the book, its a lot like gambling. Makes sense now?

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