Running right down the middle of the horror film genre is the double-tap ending. The bad guy has been offed at the conclusion of some balletic series of events involving farm implements or heavy machinery and everybody is ready to start living happily ever after or at least start attending PTSD group therapy sessions, when suddenly the masked or behooded or magnificently malformed hypervillain lunges at the heroine—it’s always the heroine—drawing on the last resources of his expiring body in hopes of at least getting some company in the abyss. For Patrick the villain is math, and it lunged at him right here at the end of the story. Statistics and probability, to be precise, have cost him the furtherance that the West African competency exam provides. Fortunately, he is allowed to resit1 the exam at the end of the month.
In the mean time, I’ve offered what help I can provide. I’ve assisted him with math before but I don’t know how much I’m really helping. The inherent abstractness of math doesn’t go well with lapses in linguistic clarity, which we commit in both directions. But he’s going to tutoring sessions along with a number of other students. “I have gone to the maths lecturer who is offering private classes for the resit. Many of our students were there today.” See, I had to edit that quite a bit because the original only made sense if you talk to Patrick a lot. I have no idea how one would explain binomial distributions.
But I feel like he’s in good hands for a change. The main thing he’ll struggle with, I believe, is self-doubt. But he’s very receptive to pep talks. He was born resilient, that much is literally painfully obvious. It doesn’t take a whole lot of effort to remind him of that. I wouldn’t say he’s proud of it, but when he’s looking back at his life from a stable future I bet he will be. And that’s just fine. I think he’ll burst through this wall just as he has all the others. But keep him in your thoughts!
* * *
Patrick has been pretty preoccupied lately so I haven’t belabored him for pictures. But there are so many I haven’t shared. Let me just pick out a random assortment.
I don’t include this because it’s an award-winning photograph, but to highlight some things I certainly take for granted, like being able to keep mosquitoes out of my living space. He asked if I’d seen these before. Yes, I replied, we have a lot of mosquitoes in our back yard.
“But not in your house?”
Well no. See we have pricey Anderson windows. As opposed to, well, a hole in the wall.
“Here they make all sorts of noise on our ears.”
I don’t think I can add any pith to that.
Patrick sent me a message recently that concluded with a Spock-hand emoticon. I asked if he knew what that meant, and when he said no I launched into an epistle on Star Trek, concluding with an exegesis of Spock and his famous hand gesture. Took him a couple tries but he figured it out. I think it would be completely hilarious if Trek took root in West Africa and became a cult classic.
The Gambia is home to an absurd number of goats.
At the end of his first year of college I wanted Patrick to have a chance to celebrate a little bit. His family had all already moved up to their temporary home in a village in the north, and he spent a week alone in Brikama finishing his exams. I sent him 1000D (somewhat south of ten bucks) and told him to grab a friend and go to a restaurant. He admitted he’d never been to a restaurant and wouldn’t know what to do. I suggested he go to one of the places on campus, since they were much more casual than, say, La Parisienne, which judging by the number and quality of Google reviews is probably the best restaurant in the whole city. He and a friend had some face-meltingly spicy chicken and Patrick told me later that I made him “feel like a boss.”
It’s funny to me how sometimes our luxuries are his commonplaces. We all like oysters, but I’ve never eaten a million of them.
It’s a pity that The Gambia is such a materially poor country because culturally it’s a hopping place. This is a classmate of Patrick’s at her wedding. She’s Fula—Fula being one of the larger of the country’s many tribes. Patrick complains that tribalism just keeps people bickering instead of solving problems. And he’s probably right. But the traditional stuff is something else, isn’t it?
Alright. Next publication date is August 22. We won’t have exam news yet but we’ll see if we can’t find something interesting to share. See you then!
His word, and one I have to say I really like. I think Americans are more likely to say “retake,” which, even though they’re both made of parts as common as #8 screws, sounds especially pedestrian to me. “Resit,” for reasons I totally can’t explain, makes me think of The Paper Chase, so I’m adopting it as my own.