Read Online The Dangerous Joy of Dr. Sex and Other True Stories by Pagan Kennedy - Free Book Online Page A
Authors: Pagan Kennedy
Ads: Link
home Smithâs point quicklyâliving at subsistence level requires enormous creativity. The African farmwoman who finds a way to make a scrap of land yield enough cassava root for her family, she, too, is an inventor.
Last year, at a lavish banquet, Smith pulled out crackers from her pocket and nibbled while colleagues feasted around herâshe was sticking to the $2-a-day assignment, in fellowship with her students. For Smith, the exercise must have been a snap. She had, after all, lived at the edge of the Kalahari Desert.
âI never got very good at the Bushman languages. My accent is really bad,â Smith says. âThereâs fourteen different clicks and I always did the wrong ones. So I used to click as I walked around, trying to get it right.â
In the late 1980s, as a Peace Corps volunteer, she was stationed in Ghanzi, a backwater of Botswana down a dirt path that could take as long as two days to travel. âNobody wanted to live there. You got sent there for punishment if you did badly in a job.â
Smith taught local kids math and science. She coached volleyball and ran the beekeeping club. To escape the stray cats that had taken over her bedroom, she slept outside her rooms, at the brink of the desert.
âI knew I wanted to stay in this country,â she says, even though a certain loneliness was setting inâthe loneliness of the nerd.
Smithâs father taught semiconductor physics at MIT; her mother taught junior-high math. At the dinner table, the family would chit-chat about ways to prove the Pythagorean theorem. In her first couple of years in the Peace Corps, she missed the kind of people sheâd known growing up in the orbit of MITâpeople willing to engage, for instance, in passionate discussion about the
innards of a motor. âIâd run into development workers who had no clue about engineering. They wouldnât understand that there was a way you could solve a problemâ for the Africans. And she wanted very badly to solve the problems for the people sheâd met, women ferrying water on their heads, grinding, washing, lifting, churning their lives away.
In 1987, she received word that her mother had died. She flew home to Lexington, Massachusetts. âWhen youâre deep in grief itâs harder to be tolerant of a societyâs excesses,â she says. Wandering through a supermarket after the funeral, she marveled at the lunacy of her own countryâan entire aisle just for soup? It seemed impossible to reconcile the two places she loved, to bridge the gap between America and Botswana.
About a year later, Smith was gazing out the window of her room, studying the expanse of the Kalahari Desert pocked by thorn bushes. Suddenly, she understood the arch of her life: she would learn how to be an engineer and bring her skills to a place like this. She sent away for applications to graduate programs. Fateâor rather, the kooky force that passes for fate in Smithâs lifeâintervened. âA cat had kittens on my grad application for U Penn. It was just covered with placenta stains, and I didnât feel I could
send it in. So thatâs how I ended up returning to MIT,â she says. âThatâs how life always works for me.â
Sometime after she got back, a professor suggested that she try to solve a problem that bedevils people who live in rural Africa. It involves the hammer mill, a no-frills, motorized grain mill that women use to grind sorghum or millet into flour. The hammer mill can do a job in just a few minutes that might otherwise take hours, which makes it a hotly coveted item in developing nations. But thereâs a built-in flaw: the mill uses a wire-mesh screen. When that screen breaks, it cannot easily be replaced, because parts like that are scarce in Africa and not easy to fabricate. So for lack of a wire screen, grain mills often end up in the corner of a room, gathering dust.
What was needed
Last year, at a lavish banquet, Smith pulled out crackers from her pocket and nibbled while colleagues feasted around herâshe was sticking to the $2-a-day assignment, in fellowship with her students. For Smith, the exercise must have been a snap. She had, after all, lived at the edge of the Kalahari Desert.
âI never got very good at the Bushman languages. My accent is really bad,â Smith says. âThereâs fourteen different clicks and I always did the wrong ones. So I used to click as I walked around, trying to get it right.â
In the late 1980s, as a Peace Corps volunteer, she was stationed in Ghanzi, a backwater of Botswana down a dirt path that could take as long as two days to travel. âNobody wanted to live there. You got sent there for punishment if you did badly in a job.â
Smith taught local kids math and science. She coached volleyball and ran the beekeeping club. To escape the stray cats that had taken over her bedroom, she slept outside her rooms, at the brink of the desert.
âI knew I wanted to stay in this country,â she says, even though a certain loneliness was setting inâthe loneliness of the nerd.
Smithâs father taught semiconductor physics at MIT; her mother taught junior-high math. At the dinner table, the family would chit-chat about ways to prove the Pythagorean theorem. In her first couple of years in the Peace Corps, she missed the kind of people sheâd known growing up in the orbit of MITâpeople willing to engage, for instance, in passionate discussion about the
innards of a motor. âIâd run into development workers who had no clue about engineering. They wouldnât understand that there was a way you could solve a problemâ for the Africans. And she wanted very badly to solve the problems for the people sheâd met, women ferrying water on their heads, grinding, washing, lifting, churning their lives away.
In 1987, she received word that her mother had died. She flew home to Lexington, Massachusetts. âWhen youâre deep in grief itâs harder to be tolerant of a societyâs excesses,â she says. Wandering through a supermarket after the funeral, she marveled at the lunacy of her own countryâan entire aisle just for soup? It seemed impossible to reconcile the two places she loved, to bridge the gap between America and Botswana.
About a year later, Smith was gazing out the window of her room, studying the expanse of the Kalahari Desert pocked by thorn bushes. Suddenly, she understood the arch of her life: she would learn how to be an engineer and bring her skills to a place like this. She sent away for applications to graduate programs. Fateâor rather, the kooky force that passes for fate in Smithâs lifeâintervened. âA cat had kittens on my grad application for U Penn. It was just covered with placenta stains, and I didnât feel I could
send it in. So thatâs how I ended up returning to MIT,â she says. âThatâs how life always works for me.â
Sometime after she got back, a professor suggested that she try to solve a problem that bedevils people who live in rural Africa. It involves the hammer mill, a no-frills, motorized grain mill that women use to grind sorghum or millet into flour. The hammer mill can do a job in just a few minutes that might otherwise take hours, which makes it a hotly coveted item in developing nations. But thereâs a built-in flaw: the mill uses a wire-mesh screen. When that screen breaks, it cannot easily be replaced, because parts like that are scarce in Africa and not easy to fabricate. So for lack of a wire screen, grain mills often end up in the corner of a room, gathering dust.
What was needed
Similar Books
