MY WORLD OF TRUTH
Saturday 16 September 2017
AFRICA'S WEEK IN PICTURES
A selection of the best photos from across Africa and of Africans elsewhere in the world this week.
REUTERS
On Wednesday a hawker plies his wares in Nigeria's commercial capital Lagos.
REUTERS
The previous day, a commuter poses inside a minibus taxi in Kinshasa, Democratic Republic of Congo.
REUTERS
While school's out for one student in Michika village, north-east Nigeria.
EPA
On the other side of the continent, Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe chooses an entirely different form of transport to take him to the official opening of parliament in Harare...
EPA
... while members of the Presidential Guard await his arrival.
AFP
On Friday, RB Leipzig's Guinean midfielder Naby Keita celebrates after scoring during the German first division football match against Hamburg.
AFP
Meanwhile in Lyon on Sunday, Guingamp's French-Congolese defender Jordan Ikoko vies with Lyon's Dutch defender Kenny Tete.
AHMED JALLANZO
Earlier that weekend in Monrovia, Liberia, supporters of the opposition Liberty Party decided to mark the official launch of their campaign by donning green wigs and lathering themselves in white paint.
EPA
On Saturday, a child looks on bemused as a Malawian traditional dancer marches during the Harare International Carnival...
EPA
... another from the same dance troupe gets a slightly warmer response in the same spot in downtown Harare.
AFP
Later that day, a chef gets ready for Abidjan's annual Grill Festival.
Wednesday 6 September 2017
Endometriosis: My life full of pain
Endometriosis isn't just painful periods, it's a chronic condition in a league of its own.
One in 10 women has it yet, in the UK, it takes on average seven years to get it correctly diagnosed by a doctor - something experts want to change.
With endometriosis, tissue that behaves like womb lining is found in other bits of the body, causing nasty symptoms.
Amelia Davies was 12 when she got her first period. She soon came to dread her "agonising Auntie Red".
"At times it was so bad I couldn't go to school. I missed loads of days. The pain was really intense, with lots of different types - stabbing, cramping and burning. I was so bad I couldn't walk or get out of bed."
New guidelines for the NHS aim to reduce delays in diagnosis and save women years of unnecessary distress and suffering.
Crippling pain
Amelia first explained her symptoms to her GP and then a few different doctors, but they couldn't find anything wrong.
"Finally, they agreed to send me to hospital for an ultrasound scan.
"So, there I am sitting in the hospital waiting room in full school uniform with dad laughing and joking about to try and keep me calm. It felt like people in that waiting room were giving me dirty looks, and assuming I was there for a pregnancy scan or something. I felt judged."
The scan revealed she had a cyst on her ovary, plus endometriosis.
When a woman with endometriosis menstruates, the misplaced womb tissue bleeds too, causing crippling pain and some rather unusual symptoms.
Some women pee blood at their time of the month. Others even cough up some blood if the rogue tissue is in their lungs.
Over time, the bleeding can irritate the body and lead to scarring or adhesions - tough cords of fibrous tissue that can cause more pain and make organs stick to each other and cause complications.
Amelia's doctor advised her to take an oral contraceptive pill to help alleviate her symptoms.
She currently takes the mini pill and hasn't had a period in two years.
But Amelia, now 18 and living in south London, says her endometriosis still causes her daily pain. She's been writing a blog about her experiences.
"Sometimes it can be really bad still. I get flare-ups and that's really difficult.
"I get the phrase, 'At least you're not dying,' quite a lot.
"I know it's said most of the time by good friends who are trying to be nice and reassure me. But endometriosis for me is the prospect of a long life full of pain. I sometimes feel like people are measuring my level of struggle against others' and that doesn't feel fair. It's daunting."
Caroline Overton, a consultant gynaecologist who helped write the new guidelines from the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence said: "There is no cure for endometriosis, so helping affected women manage their symptoms is imperative.
"As one of the most common gynaecological diseases in the UK, it is vital that endometriosis is more widely recognised."
Emma Cox, from Endometriosis UK, said: "The impact a delayed diagnosis has on a woman's life - her education, work, relationships and personal life - can be huge. On top of coping with the disease itself, women have to put up with being told, sometimes for years, that what they have is 'in their heads' or 'normal', when it isn't."
Endometriosis facts
- You can't "catch" endometriosis and nothing you did made you get it
- Women and girls of childbearing age and of any ethnicity can have it
- It's a long-term condition that can be difficult to diagnose at first
- Common symptoms include pelvic pain, period pain, tiredness and pain during and after sex
- Your GP may not be able to see any signs that you have endometriosis and some tests may not show up the problem
- You may need a procedure called a laparoscopy (where a surgeon passes a thin tube with a camera into your body through a small cut in your skin) to confirm the diagnosis
- Medication (including the contraceptive pill) is available that can help control the pain and symptoms
- Some women have surgery to get rid of some of the tissue or a hysterectomy to remove the womb
- Women with endometriosis can still try for a baby - it's estimated up to 70% of women with mild or moderate endometriosis will be able to get pregnant without fertility treatment
HOW AMERICANISMS ARE KILLING THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE
So it turns out I can no longer speak English. This was the alarming realisation foisted upon me by Matthew Engel’s witty, cantankerous yet nonetheless persuasive polemic That’s the Way it Crumbles: The American Conquest of English. Because by English, I mean British English.
Despite having been born, raised and educated on British shores, it seems my mother tongue has been irreparably corrupted by the linguistic equivalent of the grey squirrel. And I’m not alone. Whether you’re a lover or a loather of phrases like “Can I get a decaf soy latte to go?”, chances are your vocabulary has been similarly colonised.
Speaking on the wireless in 1935, Alistair Cooke declared that “Every Englishman listening to me now unconsciously uses 30 or 40 Americanisms a day”. In 2017, that number is likely closer to three or four hundred, Engel hazards – more for a teenager, “if they use that many words in a day”.
As a nation we’ve been both invaded and invader, and our language is all the richer for it
But how did this happen and why should we care? After all, as a nation we’ve been both invaded and invader, and our language is all the richer for it. Words like bungalow, bazaar, even Blighty, have their roots elsewhere. Heck, go far enough back and isn’t it pretty much all just distorted Latin, French or German?
The first American words to make it across the pond were largely utilitarian – signifiers for flora and fauna that didn’t exist back in Merrie England. Moose, maize and tobacco were among them. But there were others, too, that in retrospect might seem laden with significance – words like plentifulness, monstrosity and conflagration.
With no means of swift communication or easeful passage between the two countries, American English merely trickled back into its source to begin with. But as the balance of power between Britain and her former colonies shifted, as America ascended to military, economic, cultural and technological dominance, that trickle swelled to a torrent, washing away any kind of quality control.
Cookies and closets
Throughout the 19th Century, Engel contends, “the Americanisms that permeated the British language did so largely on merit, because they were more expressive, more euphonious, sharper and cleverer than their British counterparts”. What word-lover could resist the likes of ‘ornery’, ‘boondoggle’ or ‘scuttlebutt’? That long ago ceased to be the case, leaving us with words and phrases that reek of euphemism – ‘passing’ instead of dying – or that mock their user with meaninglessness, like the non-existent Rose Garden that political reporters decided No 10 had to have, just because the White House has one (it doesn’t exactly have one either, not in the strictest sense, but that’s a whole other story).
What word-lover could resist the likes of ‘ornery’, ‘boondoggle’ or ‘scuttlebutt’?
Call me a snob, but there’s also the fact that some American neologisms are just plain ungainly. I recently picked up a promising new American thriller to find ‘elevator’ used as a verb in the opening chapter. As in, Ahmed was ‘elevatoring’ towards the top of his profession in Manhattan.
Nowadays, no sphere of expression remains untouched. Students talk of campus and semesters. Magistrates, brainwashed by endless CSI reruns, ask barristers “Will counsel please approach the bench?” We uncheck boxes in a vain effort to avoid being inundated with junk mail that, when it arrives regardless, we move to trash.
It’s understandable, of course. Sometimes, American words just seem more glamorous. Who wants to live in a flat, a word redolent of damp problems and unidentifiable carpet stains, a word that just sounds – well, flat – when they could make their home in an apartment instead? Sometimes that glamour is overlain with bracing egalitarianism – it’s a glamour untainted by our perennial national hang-up, class.
Take ‘movie’. The word has all the glitz of Hollywood and none of the intellectual pretensions (or so it might be argued) of the word ‘film’, which increasingly suggests subtitles (‘foreign-language film’ is one of the few instances in which the f-word doesn’t seem interchangeable with its American counterpart – ‘foreign-language movie’ just sounds odd). Other times they fill a gap, naming something that British English speakers have been unable to decide on, as is increasingly the case with ATM, a boring but brief alternative to cash point, cash machine, hole in the wall. Also to be factored in is what Engel dubs “Britain’s cultural cringe”, which predisposes us to embrace the foreign.
It’s often pointed out that plenty of these Americanisms were British English to begin with – we exported them, then imported them back. A commonly made case in point is ‘I guess’, which crops up in Chaucer. When Dr Johnson compiled his seminal 1755 dictionary, ‘gotten’ was still in use as a past participle of ‘get’. But as Engel points out, good old English is not good new English. Moreover, his beef isn’t really to do with authenticity; it’s more to do with our unthinking complicity. Because it’s not just the cookies and the closets, or even the garbage, it’s the insidiousness of it all. We’ve already reached the point where most of us can no longer tell whether a word is an Americanism or not. By 2120, he suggests, American English will have absorbed the British version entirely. As he puts it, “The child will have eaten its mother, but only because the mother insisted”.
By 2120, Engel suggests, American English will have absorbed the British version entirely
The new Esperanto?
For more than half-a-dozen years (I almost wrote ‘more than a half-dozen’), I was a UK book columnist for Bloomberg News. Despite the nature of my beat, my identity as a Brit, and the organisation’s proudly global nature, I was required to write in American English. A cinch, thought I, but even at the end of my tenure, I was still bumping into words my editors deemed Briticisms. (‘Charabanc’, sure, but ‘fortnight’? That one was a minor revelation, suddenly explaining the many blank looks I’d received over the years from American friends.) Which is fair enough – Bloomberg is, after all, an American company. And yet I can’t help feeling a little retrospective resentment towards my British editors for all the Americanisms that I’ve got past them unquestioned. Likewise, when I published a book in America, I was excited to find out how it would read after it had been ‘Americanized’, but I’ve noticed it’s fast becoming the norm for American works to make it into print over here without so much as having a ‘z’ switched for an ‘s’ or a ‘u’ tacked on to an ‘o’. And if we can’t rely on our publishers to defend British English…
Like some hoity-toity club, language seems to operate on a one-in, one-out basis
None of this would matter if these imported words were augmenting our existing vocabulary. It’s impossible to have too many words, right? But like some hoity-toity club, language seems to operate on a one-in, one-out basis. Engel quotes researchers behind 2014’s Spoken British National Corpus, who found that the word ‘awesome’ is now used in conversation 72 times per million words. Marvellous, meanwhile, is used just twice per million – down from 155 times a mere 20 years earlier. ‘Cheerio’ and, yes, ‘fortnight’, are apparently staring at the same fate.
Even so, you might ask, is this really such a bad thing? When my grandfather returned home from the front in World War Two, he became a firm believer in the unifying powers of Esperanto. Along with Volapuk, Ekselsioro and Mondlingvo, that idealistic tongue came to nothing. American English is succeeding where it failed. But it’s hard not to feel that diminishing linguistic variance isn’t shrinking the world. Engel rues the way in which our national character is going the way of London’s ‘Manhattanized’ skyline, reticence yielding to self-promotion.
And then there’s the very valid theory that you can’t feel or think things for which you’ve no language. A borrowed vocabulary, one that’s evolved to meet the needs of people whose lives are subtly but profoundly different (ask anyone who’s lived Stateside for a while – those superficial similarities and familiarities soon fall away to reveal a decidedly foreign country), deprives us of fully experiencing our own. It’s nothing short of a “crisis of self-imposed serfdom”, Engel says. “A nation that outsources the development of its own language – that language it developed over hundreds of years – is a nation that has lost the will to live”.
It might seem tactless to bemoan the state of any branch of all-conquering English when so many other languages are being wiped out entirely. But ultimately, the battle isn’t really one of British versus American English, but of individual experience versus the homogenising effects of global digital culture. For a provocative glimpse of where this might all lead, it’s worth noting that Globish, a “sort-of language” (Engel’s phrase) created for business types by former IBM exec Jean-Paul Nerriere, consists of just 1,500 words. Jokes, metaphors and acronyms are verboten, being too fraught with potential for misunderstanding. Personally, I think I’d rather communicate in emojis. But here’s hoping it won’t come to that. Engel’s book is certainly a wake-up call. Sorry, cri de coeur. Wait, better make that a call to arms.
Saturday 2 September 2017
HOW TO BECOME A BRITISH CITIZEN
The issue of becoming a British citizen is a hot topic at the moment.
There's Wolverhampton student Brian White, who moved to the UK from Botswana aged 15 with his adoptive British family, being refused it.
Plus, the Home Office having to say sorry to Lancashire 21-year-old Shane Ridge after mistakenly telling him he must leave the country or go to jail.
So, if you're not a British citizen how do you get granted the paperwork you need to stay here?
What do you need to become a British citizen?
"There are two ways you can acquire British citizenship: automatically or you can register yourself as a British citizen," immigration solicitor Fahad Ansari tells Newsbeat.
"If you were born in the UK, after January 1983, you'll only automatically be British if either one of your parents are British themselves or they have indefinite leave to remain, which means they're free to come and go from the UK as they please."
"If you were born abroad, you don't automatically get British citizenship unless your parents are British by birth or naturalisation."
The government says you can apply if:
- you are 18 or over
- you are of good character, for example, you don't have a serious or recent criminal record, and you haven't tried to deceive the Home Office or been involved in immigration offences in the last 10 years
- you will continue to live in the UK
- you meet the knowledge of English and life in the UK requirements
- you meet the residency requirement
Number 2 can prove problematic...
"Until a few years ago, the good character requirement was what me and you would associate with being a good character," Fahad adds, "someone who doesn't commit crime and is generally a law-abiding citizen."
He says recent immigration controversies have meant that the Home Office have expanded the requirement meaning anyone who has had an encounter with the law, no matter how small can be refused citizenship.
"I had a lady who came from Zimbabwe and was an asylum seeker. She was required to report to the Home Office every week before she was granted refugee status.
"On one particular occasion she didn't report and the reason was because she was giving birth at the hospital.
"She wrote to the Home Office and explained everything was fine. But then a few years later, when she was applying for citizenship, she gets refused on the basis that she missed that one reporting requirement."
In 2014, Brian White's application to become a British citizen by naturalisation was rejected when he arrived in the UK, he was granted limited leave to remain by the Home Office, rather than indefinite leave which is required.
'Big song and dance'
A petition to help Brian remain in Britain has had more than 90,000 signatures.
Fahad believes media exposure can be crucial to getting a change in immigration decisions.
"If you have the ability to make a big song and dance about it, get publicity, make a social media campaigning and petitions, that does assist greatly in changing the decision."
As Brexit approaches, Fadad says we may see more and more immigration cases in public. "People are apprehensive about whether or not they're allowed to stay in the country, they're applying for citizenship and being told that they don't have it.
"That's the case with Estelle Dragon. These problems are arising and there's more and more new problems that people will only be aware of as they try to assert their rights as British citizens."
"My advice to everyone is to apply for paperwork that regularises your status right now, don't wait for the future."
HOW MARRIAGE CHANGES PEOPLE FOREVER
“Why is it there are so many unmarried women in their thirties these days, Bridget?” – the dinner party scene in Bridget Jones’s Diary is excruciatingly familiar to anyone who has ever found themselves, alone, surrounded by a room full of married friends.
While psychologists may not have fully resolved the question of whether marriage makes people self-satisfied like Bridget’s paired-up friends, or if instead smug people are just more likely to get married, research suggests the experience of committing to and settling down with another person really does change our personalities for better and for worse… until death do us part.
It makes sense that it might – after all, publicly binding yourself to another person takes loyalty and forward thinking, not to mention a radical change of lifestyle for some, and of course living day in, day out with the same person requires a certain degree of patience and diplomacy.
Whatever the personality changing effects of marriage might be, you’d think the question would be a research priority – around the world, millions of us tie the knot every year.
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In fact, research into this question is surprisingly thin on the ground. Probably the best evidence we have comes from a recent German study, in which researchers looked at personality changes among nearly 15,000 people over a period of four years.
Importantly, 664 of the participants tied the knot in the course of the study, allowing Jule Specht at the University of Münster and her colleagues to see how their personalities changed as compared with the rest of the sample who did not get married. The researchers found that wedded participants showed decreases in the traits of extroversion and openness to experience as compared with the others.
This difference was relatively modest, but still, it perhaps provides some concrete evidence to back up the suspicions of single people up and down the land – that their married friends aren’t quite as much fun as they used to be.
The pattern is backed up, at least among women, by an earlier and much smaller US studypublished in 2000, in which the researchers tested the personalities of just over 2,000 middle-aged participants twice over of a period of between six and nine years.
In that time, 20 of the women married while 29 of them divorced. Relative to those who tied the knot, the divorcees showed increased extroversion and openness, as if freed from the shackles of wedlock. Newly married men, by contrast, showed benefits compared with their divorced peers, scoring higher on conscientiousness and lower in neuroticism.
The conscientiousness boost among married men seems intuitive. Anyone who has been married (or in a long-term committed relationship) will know that it takes certain skills to keep the marital ship afloat through sometimes choppy domestic waters. Surely then, marriage will hone these skills. These are exactly the findings of a new paper published this year.
The team of Dutch psychologists, led by Tila Pronk at Tilburg University, reasoned that two of the most important marital skills or traits are self-control (having the ability to bite your tongue for the long-term sake of the marriage) and forgiveness (so that you can get past all those times that your partner errs in some way, be that leaving their clothes on the floor or flirting with the neighbour).
The researchers recruited 199 newlywed couples and, within three months of their wedding, measured how forgiving each partner was (the participants rated their agreement with items like “When my partner wrongs me, my approach is just to forgive and forget”) and their self-control (participants rated their agreement with items like “I am good at resisting temptation”). The participants then repeated these measures each year for four further years.
The results showed that the participants increased in forgiveness and self-control over the course of the study. Statistically speaking, the increases in forgiveness were moderate while the increases in self-control small, but Pronk and his team pointed out that they were equal to the self-control gains seen in people who have completed psychological programmes specifically designed to increase trait self-control.
What about that self-satisfied vibe that married couples sometimes give off? The most relevant evidence here comes from studies into how life-satisfaction or happiness changes after marriage. Singletons like the 30-something Bridget Jones will be glad to hear that that while satisfaction does rise for a while after marriage, it usually returns to baseline levels after a year or so.
However, while that’s the overall picture, it may not be true for everyone. We often talk about some people being good husband or wife “material” (while others seem more suited to a life of bachelorhood) and consistent with this view, the evidence suggests that how marriage changes a person’s happiness varies depending on their pre-wedding personality.
For some people, marriage does appear to provide a lasting happiness boost: specifically, more conscientious, introverted women and more extroverted men show prolonged increases in life-satisfaction following marriage, presumably because the new married lifestyle suited these personality types, although this has not yet been studied.
Last of all, what about the popular idea that married couples seem to take on each other’s personalities over time? It certainly seems that way when you spot older married couples in comically matching jumpers or tracksuits.
It’s probably a myth. If this were the case, you might expect for those who have been married for longer to be more similar to their partners. But when researchers from Michigan State University assessed the personalities of over 1,200 married couples, they found little to no evidence for this being the case. The reality is that people with more similar personalities are more likely to get married in the first place.
Taken altogether, the research suggests that marriage does lead to subtle personality changes. But this has nothing on the personal upheaval that follows what often comes next: babies.
