July 14, 2009

Last day of the class. We were 6 sheets of card stock short of being able to print enough certificates. This was cool because it meant that a lot of people came to the class (we had planned for 30, but at least 40 had come to at least part of it). Unfortunately, the driver took us to 4 different copy shops and we didn’t find one that was just opening until 8:30 – when we were supposed to be at class. So we were late. But this was a Saturday and everyone was there. It is always validating when we offer training and it spills into a usual day off and people come anyway. It demonstrated that they were finding it valuable.

We started with a couple demonstrations and then I introduced the hydraulic model[1] of the local system. I made a little avi of the regional flooding below. I had given them a list of tasks to try with the local model and they spent the day (until 3:00 getting used to it). Then we passed out the certificates and the class was done. We got a couple of comments that when the students showed up they were discouraged because the manual looked intimidating and the math looked hard, but that both Mark and I are very clear teachers and made it simple. I’m not sure how wide spread the sentiment was, but this was encouraging given the quasi-language gap.



After the class Kester took us on base to the officer’s club for beers. We talked about his career goals and his vision for putting together an interagency water modeling working group. He also said that I was on TV this morning. I am a little surprised, since I half thought that it was just a print media interview.

After that we went back to the hotel and met Dave. More than a dozen US personnel will be coming in for the exercise in the next day or so. Mark and Dave had enjoyed traveling together before and Mark was looking forward to him joining us. We had plantain fries and fish appetizers at the hotel and then walked to Buddies.

One interesting conversation we had at buddies regarded ‘bush meat.’ We had seen road signs for ‘bush meat,’ which, essentially, is mixed meats hunted in the jungles and savannahs of inland Guyana. Dave said he wasn’t that interested because it probably included the meat of something that shouldn’t be hunted. Mark replied that he wasn’t that interested in eating monkeys. This is a data point I had never considered in the late David Foster-Wallace’s thoughts about meat disassociation. In Consider the Lobster, DFW posits that the closer an animal is to us on the cladistic diagram, the more likely we are going to have a separate name for its meat. Consider, we eat chicken, duck, rabbit but not cow, pig or sheep (which are beef, pork and mutton). But there is something about the anthropomorphic qualities of a monkey that infuse its consumption with creepy cannibalistic overtones. But, since I believe that monkey is qualitatively, rather than quantitatively different than humans, if it is not endangered, serve it up.

On a less philosophical topic, I also posited that sloth struck me as possibly less appetizing than possum, the most disgusting meat I have consumed to date. This turned out to be an unverifiable claim to my dining companions. Sometimes I forget that not everyone has tasted every mammal that wanders the woods of their child hood wanderings.

Dinner was good, again. We got home, and I set my alarm for 2:30 am.
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[1] I am not being redundant here. There are two different models. Hydrology answers the question ‘How much water and when?’ Hydraulics answers the question, who is going to get wet and how deep will it be?’.