Slacking, but not really

So the blog updates have been a little sparse. I apologize. It happens to everyone. Below are some hopefully entertaining pictures and stories from a recent trip to the Eastern Cape that I hope will placate my audience for the time being.

I can say that I was slightly busy writing with my Nigerian email friend. I made up a fake email address and responded to one of those obviously fraudulent emails about some wealthy relative of mine that died with millions in the bank. There is always a greedy Nigerian at the other end trying to take some poor sap's money. I emailed a lot with someone claiming to be a "Barrister" from Nigeria, while I posed as a regular Texan willing to cooperate with the supposed lawyer. He sent me some obviously fake documents that I posted earlier. He also kept asking for my phone number. I wasnt about to give him my real number, so I looked up a Walmart in Houston and told him to call me at 8 pm (which was 2 am his time). Needless to say, he wasnt very happy when he found out my alter ego didnt really work there. We have since ceased communication.

But instead of blowing my cover and berrating him for trying to steal American's money, I asked him to please stop sending emails and damaging the name of his struggling country. I told him to use his apparent knowledge of emails to start a business or to help somone. That was the right thing to do, right? He didnt seem to think so.

I thought I was really clever until I discovered a whole cohort of folks dedicated to scamming the scammers. Their main site is www.419eater.com and its actually pretty interesting. Gets into the questionable ethics of re-scamming the poor Nigerians who have no other way of making a living except via fraudulent emails. Anyway, I could never live up to these guy's genius, so I likely wont be responding to anymore Nigerian email scams. Probably.

But to be honest, work at the clinic has taken up a lot of time and energy lately. I suppose that is fitting since that is WHY I AM HERE... Have been desperatly getting all the data together, finishing up a thesis proposal, and counting the ways in which CAPRISA is a total disaster of an organization. But that is another story....