Today (18-05-16)

Today I gave my last exam of the semester at 7:30 am. That meant I had to be at the university at 7:00 am. Which meant that I had to leave my flat at 6:00 am. To do that I had to get up at 5:00 am. Fortunately, I don't have to do that again at least for a couple of months. But, of course all day today I have been feeling like a zombie because I only got six hours of sleep insteard of the eight I usually get on week nights. My brain is certainly not up to doing any marking of final exams today. Tomorrow I will try and plow through as many of the 52 scripts as possible.

Remember

18 May 1944

Tomorrow is the 72nd anniversary of the deportation of the Crimean Tatars from their ancestral homeland to Uzbekistan and the Urals. This year the 18th of May comes just a few short days after Jamala's victory for Ukraine in the Eurovision song contest with her song 1944 about the event. In many ways the Soviet treatment of the Crimean Tatars and the Crimean peninsula resembled better known cases of settler colonialism in the Americas, Africa, Australia, and the Middle East. You can find my article, "The Deportation of the Crimean Tatars in the Context of Settler Colonialism," International Crimes and History, 2015, Issue: 16, here. Feel free to leave any comments about the article here.

Saturday at the mall (Rawlings sighting)

This weekend I was at the Accra Mall. I wanted to try the new Pizza Hut but the line was too long. I did try the new coffee shop and the new Philly cheese steak place, however. In between drinking a huge mug of Sumatran coffee and eating a cheese steak I saw J.J. Rawlings. Or at least somebody who looked almost identical to him. I was outside the mall and had just finished talking to my mother on the phone when I saw him leave the mall. He did not have any visible entourage which I found interesting. At any rate I have never been physically closer to such an historically important figure in my life. Assuming that is of course it actually was Rawlings and not a look a like.

Afro-Optimism

Somedays things look good. Today is one of those days. It didn't start out that way. But, it has evolved in that direction at least since noon. So this Friday the 13th is looking pretty lucky for me. If you want to make it even better you can put some suggestions for where to look for research grants in the comments of the previous post. So far nobody has left any recommendations of places that offer funding for academic research by scholars in Africa. However, given today's trajectory I have hope that somebody might in the next couple of days. Africa has always been the continent of eternal optimism.

End of Semester

The semester is rapidly coming to an end. I gave one final exam on Monday and have almost finished grading the exams. I have five left. My other final exam is next week. It is a larger class but grading might go faster because it is more closely related to my research fields.

As always I am on the look out for small research grants. Even a few hundred dollars helps a lot in the "Third World." So if you have any suggestions of where to apply for funds to study the type of things I write about please leave them in the comments. If you are not sure about what I write about then go see this site and scroll down. There you can see a number of my published works. My latest journal article of course is not available there. But, can be found here if you have access through a university or other institution. Needless to say acquiring primary and even secondary sources is much more difficult here in Ghana than it would be if I worked at a North American or European university in large part due to a lack of research funds.

Publication from 2014 now available online

I have a short article on Kyrgyz national identity in Civitis: Journal of Citizenship Studies that is now available online here. Feel free to leave feedback in the comments below.

Saturday Morning

This morning I had to get up early to get my final exams for Monday printed off. Despite leaving the house before eight I still did not manage to avoid the fruit vendors who have taken to knocking on my door at 6:30 am. I refuse to buy anything that early in the morning. So now that I have gotten my first exam copied I don't intend to do any more work for the rest of the day.

This Week

This week I got my final exam questions typed up and approved by the Head of the Department. I also submitted my article from The Russian Review last month for an award here at the university. Finally, I sent an abstract and grant application off for a conference in Hanoi next March. Next week final exams start.

Monday again

As far as I can tell this blog has three human readers left. That is undoubtedly more than my academic writing garners. But, still only a quarter as many readers as I had a decade ago or a 75% decline. Maybe it is because I have been in one place too long now. Out of the nearly 13 years this blog has lived a little less than one was in London but blogging was very light. Then I spent a year in northern Virginia followed by two years in Arizona, three and a half in Kyrgyzstan, and now five and a half in Ghana. So the African phase has been by far the longest. However, for better or worse it does not look like I will be moving anytime soon. So maybe I am no longer a man on the move.

Labour Day Weekend

Well moving this blog to a personal journal of my daily life in Ghana seems to have greatly reduced my already microscopic readership. At this point it doesn't really matter, however. There isn't much left of the blogging world period. Certainly very few individual blogs have continued to exist for nearly 12 years.

This Labour Day weekend I deliberately avoided doing any work. I don't do that often. I have been thinking today about actually doing this project next semester. I am not sure if I could get enough contributers together to make a go of it. But, if anybody is interested let me know.

Today's Accomplishment

Today I found a journal to send a revised copy of the paper I gave in Jerusalem. I finally found one that did not require extensive stylistic and reference revisions. So that was my big accomplishment for today. Every step closer I come to getting another publication is another tiny movement towards further promotion. I should probably be seeing about getting revised versions of all the rejected manuscripts I still have sitting around so I can move this process along a little faster.

The Middle Day

I never get as much done as I hope to in any given day. But, I do make sure to do a little bit each day. Today, I got the process to get my rent subsidy underway. I also wrote another reference letter. Finally, I finished writing a draft of a proposal for an MA sandwich program and sent it to the person who will take over as HOD in August. So I got three things accomplished. I also got to the bank to get money which always seems to take forever. However, I failed to definitively find a journal for my last conference paper. All of them are going to require significant stylistic revisions particularly regarding the citations. I hate having to redo citations. Moving from footnotes to in text citation takes forever and I don't know why so very few journals use either footnotes or end notes anymore. We have to teach our students here that the international standard for historical writing is footnotes in Chicago Style. Yet, a huge number of journals in Russian and Soviet history require in text citations in Harvard Style. The only one that uses end notes instead of in text citations is The Russian Review. So I am probably going to have to go and redo the citations on the paper before submitting it.

Ruby Tuesday

Today the first productive thing I did was drop of laundry at the laundromat. Then I made it to the office to fill out more endless letters of recommendation. I still have students who graduated in 2011 and took the first class I ever taught here coming to ask for reference letters. It seems most of my former students want to become lawyers although given the complete lack of enforcement of law here I am not sure how that will work.

Most of the day I spent working on a book chapter on the Soviet mass campaigns of arrest and expulsion of ethnic Chinese from the Soviet Far East during 1936-1938. I didn't get lunch until after three in the afternoon as a result. I had a chicken shawarma. Like all other food here it was Africanized meaning made spicy.

Munchy Monday

Today I got up and had a hearty breakfast of three bananas, a bowl of ramen noodles flavored with ketchup, soy sauce, and hot sauce, and a couple slices of bread with ketchup washed down with tea. I then took the tro tro to Madina and transferred to one going to Legon. I walked the rest of the way from Bush Canteen to my office. Once at my office I had a number of students show asking for one of two things. Either they still hadn't gotten their mid-term exam back or in two cases they wanted me to write them letters of reference for a history department scholarship that is due next week. I got both of the letters done today, but one I didn't get printed off until late because by the time the former student got to my office it was lunch time.

At lunch I first attempted to go to the housing office in the hopes I could catch them before they went to lunch. This attempt failed. I arrived at an empty office. I then ate some jollof rice and sausage and called my wife before making a second attempt. This attempt was much more successful and I found out what I need to do at least as a first step to renew my housing subsidy for next academic year. Then I walked over to the All Needs Market and purchased some beverages and an ice cream. It is both good and bad that the campus is so huge. It is good in that all the walking got me off the high blood pressure medicine and is probably lowering my cholesterol. It is bad in that it takes an incredible amount of time. Some days I walk upward of five kilometers at work.

After arriving back at the office I wrote out by hand the final exam questions for my European History class. The exam will be on May 9th. Then I did the same for half of the questions for my Aspects of World History, 1945 to Present. That exam is May 18th. I may finish them tonight. But, I got interrupted by the food lady bringing ground nut soup, tilapia, and rice. In retrospect given the size of breakfast and the fact I had both a mid-afternoon and early evening meal it is probably good that I had to walk down to housing and back twice today. Otherwise I might start looking like a moving fufu.

End of Classes for the Semester

Today and yesterday I finished teaching my last classes of the semester. Today I had a class at city campus in Accra and yesterday I had a class at the main campus in Legon or as we call it "the village." So now there are a couple of weeks until my final exams. I have one on May 9th and one on May 18th.

Some Good News

Yesterday, I know I am again behind, I got some good news. I have only ever had one PhD student in any of my classes. An African-American woman took my graduate course on race and ethnicity before leaving UG due to a number of factors. She is extremely talented academically and an excellent writer. After leaving UG to return to the US she spent some time looking for a new PhD program. I wrote six recommendation letters for programs for her plus one for a scholarship. It turns out she got into her first choice school and got the scholarship which covers three years of tuition and living expenses. So even if nobody in the US ever takes me seriously as an academic I hold out the hope that some of my students will be accorded that respect.

Yesterday

Yesterday I couldn't post this because the power went out again. So I am posting it today. But, the events all refer to Wednesday. At 9:30 am I oversaw our last departmental seminar of the semester. We had a guest lecturer from Winneba talk about pedagogy today. This provoked a lively discussion among the National Service Personnel in the audience, most of whom had been students just a year ago. This was followed by another emergency meeting in which I got stuck being seminar coordinator for next year. In fact they named me seminar coordinator for life. But, I did get rid of my seat on academic board after two years finally.

I then finished up grading my mid-terms for European history, ate some waakye provided free by the head of department, and took a walk. After that I called my wife and spoke to my five year old daughter. Her Russian has gotten really good. It is her second language. Her first language is Kyrgyz which I don't speak very much of at all. She even threw in some English phrases for my benefit. She asked about her grandparents a lot.

The rest of the afternoon I spent doing minor tasks that took way too long. One was writing a reference letter for a former student applying for funding for graduate studies. The letter itself did not take long to write. However, getting the printer to work took a long time. I had to reinstall the HP printer program because I updated to Windows 10 a while ago.

The second task I still have not finished. I am searching for a suitable journal to send a revised version of the paper I presented in Jerusalem. I originally sent it to The Russian Review but they rejected it on the basis that they had just published an article by me on ethnic Germans in the USSR during World War II which is fair enough. So far I haven't decided on where to resend the manuscript. Any suggestions are greatly welcomed and should be included in the comments.

Tuesday again

Today I had my last 7:30 am class of the semester. It had three parts. In the first part I went over the end of the Cold War and the collapse of the Soviet Union. In the second part I went over what would be covered on the final exam. Finally, in the third part we discussed what the students liked about the class and their suggestions for improving the class in the future. They evidently really liked hearing about the 20th century from a living fossil that grew up during the Cold War. Their suggestions included more visual aids and slower speaking due to my thick American accent. Overall the class went well this semester. African students seem a lot more capable of learning than American ones from everything I can see on the Internet.

Just another Monday in Africa

Today I got off to a slow start again. I managed to get to the university a little before 11 am. Before I left somebody from the Adenta Municipal Assembly left a property tax notice. The flat owners owe 168 GH in taxes. I called my land lady and told her and she said to drop it by her old office. She retired from working at the university recently. Then I got a taxi to work since I was ferrying laundry to the laundromat. The university security guards don't let taxis drop passengers off by the main gate anymore so I had to walk a lot more than I anticipated.

After getting to work and dropping off laundry which has recently increased in price from 10 GH to 15 GH I checked my e-mail. I had one rejection from a journal. I need to figure someplace to resend that particular piece. I then called the immigration officer at International House and asked if he was in his office. He was. So I took my passport, a bunch of forms, and $300 US to get my work and residency permit renewed. Shortly after returning to my office the power went out as it does almost every Monday.

Lacking electricity I ate a quick lunch of jollof and cabbage, called my wife in Kygyzstan, and then walked down to a small store to buy some beverages. Then I kept walking down Danquah in the heat until I got to the Kwame Nkrumah Complex and went in to steal cool air from the Institute of African Studies. They have generators and unlimited amounts of diesel to run them unlike the history department which has nothing.

After a while I felt okay enough to make it across the field to JQB and browse in the bookstore. Prices for everything except labor have gotten really high recently. Most of the books were running between 80 and 200 GH which is equivalent to $20-$50. Since prices for everything keep skyrocketing while wages and salaries for the vast majority of the population including university lecturers remain absolutely stagnant the standard of living is dropping fast in Ghana. The middle class is evaporating much faster here than in the US.

Finally, I decided there were no books in the store worth the prices being demanded so I walked back to the history department. On the way I discovered that electricity had returned. It was only out for a couple of hours which is a big improvement from the 24 lights out followed by only 12 hours of power we had for a couple of years here.