2005-05-25 - 11:11 a.m.
To help explain the kind of mental capacities we deal with here in T-stan, I’m including a section from a fellow PCV's recent letter to me. She describes, much more eloquently than I ever could, the terrible humor involved in a nation filled with dead brain cells.
“I was particularly filled with loathing for the place the other day when my 16-year-old host sister squatted in the middle of the courtyard and amused herself for a full hour by burying her face in a paper-mache hat my father had made, endlessly amazed by its acoustics. I felt as though trapped in a scene from ‘Flowers For Algernon,’ seeing someone I once regarded as of at least human intelligence decay into some kind of perverse toad squatting there. Then, of course, later that very same day she asks if I will ‘help her get into medical school’ (aka pay the $1500 bribe her family can’t pay). Guljahan: the last thing this country needs is you in a white lab coat.”
