Phew!

Janice is much better able to upload photos (on her mac it's easier to reduce the photo size and thus upload more quickly) and she has made her blog all fancy-like and so I'll just link you to her for the pretty stuff. Mom and dad, just click on the link that you see. Now I can dedicate ALL of my time to talking about me, me, me. This past week the strike ended but petrol, diesel and kerosene is still in very short supply for most people. Now it looks like the elections might actually happen on April 10th. The elections are to elect people to write the new constitution that won't make mention of the king, who had rewritten it in 2005 when he briefly declared marshal law and apparently felt the need to give himself all of the power despite recent democratic reforms. But he screwed everything up so badly that he also wrote his own obituary. But the Maoists are participating in the democratic process with full intention of becoming dictators should they win the elections and the democrats (small d) are represented by a guy in his late 80s (the Prime Minister) who carries an oxygen tank and refuses to give up power despite his lack of energy or good ideas. So of course anyone under the age of 50 hates him and might well vote for the Maoist leader because he's 50ish and a charismatic leader. So the king is hated, the Prime Minister is ineffectual and is sacrificing the country for his ego, and the Maoist says that he actually wants to redistribute all of the wealth in the country like, well, the real Mao. I mean, like Cambodia or Zimbabwe buddy? Really? And this guy is supposed to be well-educated. It's almost like there's no hope for the next few years and in a leadership vacuum this place will just get more poor and tumultuous. But perhaps not. My theory is that if the Maoist guy will incite violence until he's the leader but blames all problems on the Prime Minister then why not put him in charge and let him fail? The US, UN and EC run the economy here and I doubt will let the guy "re-educate" everyone. (I might be arrested if this blog was traceable!) A good part of the world becoming so small is that (unless you're an African country and only accountable to China or an oil-producing nation that the West allows to break the rules until we change our policy and overthrow the dictator that we had funded for decades) it's harder and harder for countries to get away with lunacy. There's a lot of interesting talk here about what happens when all kinds of western NGOs come to a poor country and preach democracy when, meanwhile, the economy is still stuck back in the 19th century. So young people get really excited about their "rights" and really mad that they don't have electricity or running water and fall behind the first guy with a gun who promises that he'll speed up the process of changing the government. Because meaningful change is slow. It's really interesting to hear people talk about Jeffersonian democracy maybe not working in a country without a functioning economy. But then again, I don't know what does. I mean, India is the biggest democratic country in the world and it's crazytown there. Although some states there have actually elected communist leaders. Alright, I'm done trying to understand. xoc
***HA! I just realized that the bad king, the blind old man, and the socialist are Bush, McCain and Obama. That's SO funny. The world really is small! Come on, just joking...***