March 3, 2020

Today I woke up and contemplated going back to sleep and skipping my Intro to Ecology class because god damn I was tired. I managed to move but I forgot literally everything: breakfast, putting on sunscreen, brushing my teeth. I don’t know how I remembered to put shoes on my feet, but they wound up there. My mycology class then got canceled because no one else showed up because everyone in that major skipped mycology to study for another microbiology test that was coming up later that day. Guess what that means? Naptime bitches.

After taking a nap and eating some lunch I got picked up for my internship and continued data entry for a few hours before taking a binder of data points back to the dorm to finish over the course of the rest of the week because I had decided that I couldn’t stand the mindless monotony of typing numbers on a spreadsheet. To give some perspective, there are 2500 subjects in this study, 2000 have already been entered, each subject has about 30 measurements which I have to enter individually for 500 subjects. It’s a lot of low-intellect work, but thankfully it’s only a small piece of the work. Once it’s entered I get to start playing with the statistical analysis and creating norms for physical data for Namibian and Southern African children, after that there will be psychometric testing for all of the kids that move on to Phase 2 and then Phase 3 will consist of interviewing parents and while that’s happening I’ll be working on writing and editing a lab report on the entire experiment.

When I got back to Emona in between my internship and choir practice I worked on my blog and social media management. It’s something that’s been giving me a creative outlet that makes me happy, though sometimes it can be a bit stressful because in order to experience growth on any platform you have to post on it consistently and I’m not always the most consistent and dedicated with my content. And I know that when I’m consistent and push myself to produce the kind of content that inspires me I see the growth which validates my hard work, it’s just that finding the time and energy to continue to do it week after week is in itself exhausting.

Anyways, at six I went to choir practice, which started off rather strange. There was a ROP (a Rich Old Person) there that was giving me weird vibes. The vibes only got worse when she got up and started talking. This is the woman who funds the arts department at the University of Namibia and I think she said the words “out of my own pockets” at least five times. I’ve mentioned the fact that I am the token white person in this choir, and the entire rest of the group is black. And it really put me off to hear this woman with her superiority complex telling this group of kids, the people who have all of the talent and spend at least as much collectively of their own money and raising money outside of this woman’s ‘pockets’ being told that this choir’s very existence rests on her shoulders. I wanted to shout to get off her high horse but knew it wasn’t my place because for everyone else in that room her white savior complex was working and her attitude, and the response it produced, honestly disgusted me. And here’s the kicker, she let everyone know how much money she gives which funds the entire arts department: N$120,000. Now, that may sound like a pretty penny, but that’s only US$8,000. For her to be acting as if she’s Midas turning the choir to gold and then say there’s no more money in the budget, we’ve used it up, but come to find out she spent less than most people in America spend on their first lemon? Here’s at all the white people that don’t see what’s wrong with this: if you go to Africa, or even just are white, and act like you are the reason why black people have what they have, like you are the reason for their existence, their happiness, their opportunity, you are racist. Fuck off with all your white supremacist bullshit and hop off your throne of lies, you have done nothing but oppress them and your attitude is the continuation of their oppression. Peace.