Redpack Ramblins

Headed to Regionals!

Wed, 11 Nov 2009 11:22:14 -0500

Wow! The team has been looking great the last 2-3 weeks in workouts. We are currently ranked 6th in the NCAA Great Lakes Region and we plan on improving on that ranking. Visualization is in full swing and we understand the LaVerne-Gibson cross country course as well. Regionals will be the 3rd time this year that we have raced on the course. It is a very challenging course, but for those who are ready to accept the challenge, let the racing begin! Wish us luck as we pursue our first NCAA National bid in a decade!

Zach Raber '98 has Carroll HS Cross Country on the up and up!

Thu, 22 Oct 2009 08:28:48 -0500

As a student-athlete, Zach Raber '98 was a fierce competitor, one of the best runners in Indiana during high school and a stand out at Wabash College! He has taken that attitude, work ethic and leadership and passed it on to his Fort Wayne Carroll cross country team. Coach Raber has established one of the most successful programs in the state and has been recognized as one of the best young distance coaches in Indiana. Check him out on the news from this past Monday:

WANE Team of the Week (video)

Both his boys team and girls team are competing at the New Haven Semi-State this weekend in hopes of advancing to the Indiana State Cross Country Championships next Saturday, October 31st!

Good luck Coach Raber and Go Chargers!

Progress! 5 weeks until NCAA Regionals...

Mon, 12 Oct 2009 08:14:04 -0500

This past Saturday we ran at the Gibson Family Invitational hosted by DePauw and Rose-Hulman at Terre Haute. As our season rolls along, so does our team progress. We are making strides towards our goal of making a return to the National meet. Two Zionsville runners are leading the way, Sophomore Kevin McCarthy and Junior Seth Einterz are working hard up front. We have some work to do in the middle of the pack. Donavan White is "on his way back" from an early season set back but is looking to make a huge return to the front in a few weeks! Our 4-9 runners need to decide who will represent Wabash College at the Regional and National level. The team is looking for a few guys to step up! To be continued...

Coach Busch

Greetings All...

Tue, 08 Sep 2009 08:43:12 -0500

Richmond '11 -- The team spent the last couple of weeks very close to home, both during practice and on weekend race days. This past Saturday was the 48^th Wabash Hokum Karem, a six-mile relay-style flight through the school’s wonderfully flourishing Fuller Arboretum; and last Saturday the Redpack ran alongside family and alumni in the Charlie Finch Annual Alumni Run, a four-miler, also through the arboretum. Many of our most recent weekdays have been spent warming up and working out around the very same loop. I feel as though I’ve run more than half of my mileage since the beginning of school without leaving campus. Yes, that may be true. But I’m not complaining. The arboretum is great. All those trees, every one of them indigenous to Indiana, every one of them green and more attractive than any, I don’t know, car or fire hydrant I might pass on the road. And the ground is soft and grassy, much softer and grassier than any alley or street. And I know the course well. I’ll never have to worry about getting lost. And drive-by jeerers must have trouble jeering through the trees, because we do not normally have to listen to their petty vociferations while we’re hidden safely on our greener side of the sidewalk. And that’s nice, to be away from the jeerers. But the GLCA Championship meet in Ohio is this coming Saturday, so we must break with the security of the familiar. But we’ll be all right because we’re tough, because we don’t have to stop at stop signs.

Jeerers beware.

Keep your shoes on,

Mike

Introductions!

Mon, 31 Aug 2009 14:32:19 -0500

Einterz '11 - Richmond '11 ---

Hello Folks,

This is Mike and Seth, your official blog writers for the cross country team. We're roommates at the Kappa Sigma house, and at odd hours of the morning, between and after and - most of the time - before homework, bored with the humdrum of fraternity life, we'll fill you in on the recent escapades of the Redpack. Tonight, introductions:

Seth: "I'm a junior Philosophy major, Physics and French double minor. I got into running when I was in fourth grade and my older brother was training for the Indianapolis Mini-Marathon. As a twelve year old, he ran a 1:23:38, and ever since I have been trying to live up to that speedy legacy."

Mike: "I'm a junior English/Philosophy double major. This is the beginning of my fifth year as a runner, my second as a member of Wabash's cross country team. Huzzah. I got fired from my last job as a blogger. Hopefully I can keep this one."

Keep your shoes on,

Seth and Mike

Conference Rankings?

Thu, 13 Aug 2009 17:32:04 -0500

The NCAC Cross Country Coaches had their annual meeting on Tuesday, August 4th and the Little Giants are ranked 2nd in the preseason coaches poll. Allegheny College received all 10, 1st place votes for 100pts, the Little Giants came in second with 83. Allegheny finished 10th at last fall's NCAA National Cross Country Champions and will be very hard to de-throne from the top of the NCAC. BUT, we will do everything we can this fall to inch closer!

Coach Busch

Fri, 07 Aug 2009 06:10:18 -0500

"Someone may not read books, but they will read you."

Coach Morgan...summer 2009

So we are to the gods... (June 18, 2009)

Thu, 18 Jun 2009 13:59:21 -0500

Seth Einterz '11 -- In lieu of a letter, I've decided to share excerpts from a daily journal:

12 June 2009
Today we had a splendid trickle of water. I alternately placed one cup under the faucet while pouring the second over my head, and – slowly, slowly – I could almost imagine myself beneath a showerhead. At dinner I expressed my gratitude that I had been able to achieve such luxury, but Aunt Ellen cut my words at the stem. “No,” she said, “That is the hostage mentality.”

13 June 2009
Nothing. No water. No electricity. As flies to wanton boys…

14 June 2009
“One must always hope,” says Myra. But hope seems reckless in such desperate times. We visualize our food needs and their location before opening the refrigerator, and Aunt Ellen refuses to allow me to wash dishes, as I might waste water.

15 June 2009
Today, even as my hope had exploded into resignation, we came home from the hospital to find a veritable jet of pressure. I ran around to the side faucet, and shouted to Myra, “I’m giddy, Myra. I’m hysterically giddy.” I filled the sanitation pot in a record six seconds. I washed two weeks of sweat and sand from my clothes, I let my basins and my buckets overflow, I flushed my toilet excessively just to hear the sound of rushing water. My bathroom faucet has a leak that keeps me awake at night, but – family reunions aside – I have never been happier to find something dysfunctional.

16 June 2009
The lights flickered today, and icy fear rushed down my spine. The feeling was akin to the sudden realization that I was going to faint, or the horrible despair when you watch King Lear divide his kingdom in two. It was only for a moment, and then the familiar hum of the freezer and the fan and the lights flooded back into my consciousness. “Easy come, easy go,” Myra muttered.

17 June 2009
We were in the middle of dinner, left-over pork and potatoes, and the electricity went out. “It’s a hell of a country,” said Aunt Ellen. I excused myself, climbed into bed, and cried softly into my pillow.

...

Love to all, especially Frannie who is also immersed in French, but hopefully more-so than me, and hopefully with running water.

Seth

Madame Baye (June 17, 2009)

Thu, 18 Jun 2009 13:55:25 -0500

Seth Einterz '11 -- We are looking at a faded photo of a woman who is much thinner and even pretty. “That is your daughter?” I ask, slyly. “No!” Mamie shouts with laughter and something like pride. “That is me! I came to Kolofata just after your aunt. In that time, we were all young.” She is from Yaounde, and when her husband – a gendarme – was ordered to the Far North, our little Kolofata was blessed with a sparkling bundle of southern customs, human joy, and delicious food. She is the closest thing in this town to a restaurant, stirring whatever is on hand with stockpiles of more exotic ingredients: curry powder from Maroua, potatoes from Banki, celery from Mora.

“When I grew up, we were poor,” she says this with only a fool’s idea of wealth, “and being poor, we had no money for silverware, and no knife. We cooked with the same machete that we used in the cocoa fields.” This, apparently, explains why she cuts the tomatoes with no cutting board. Only her hands. Once criss, once cross, then twice more. She slices perfect sections into the pot. The juice fills her hands, the pieces cling to her weathered fingers, and the sauce will taste of tomatoes and forever be remembered with these hands, which wave good morning, tend to orphans, and bless the food.

There is a constant menace that the hordes of children will overrun the house, and I ask which are hers. Actuellement, she said, stressing that word, none of these are my children – by which she meant: you are all my children. A few were orphans, most were various nieces and nephews that lived with her. They did small tasks for her, like cutting the fat from the meat, or feeding the baby his milk, or showing the nasahra how to pound garlic. And they had a lot of love, enough to go around twice again. As we finished cooking, they turned the television on: Morocco versus Cameroon. “Tu vas partir? » Asked one of them. “Mais c’est le football! C’est le Cameroun!” I decided to stay: the game was interesting, the redolence of rabbit stew was heavenly, and - as I've learned throughout my life - one can learn a lot of lessons hanging around home-made food.

Tuberculosis, Malaria, and Death by a Broken Heart (June 8, 2009)

Thu, 18 Jun 2009 13:51:32 -0500

Seth Einterz '11 -- I was scrubbing the windows in the Isolation Ward (particularly dirty), when Fabien came by to check on a patient. “Why,” I thought to myself, “do we isolate the TB patients, if a doctor can walk in with no protection except his spiffy white coat?” I spent the next twelve window panes congratulating myself on such a superb observation, with which I would save the life of a medical student or two, no doubt. Thus at dinner I posed the question to my aunt. Without time for a breath, much less a beat or hesitation, she responded: “Because doctors are heroes.” She said nothing about window washers.

BUT, as any connoisseur of Greek tragedy or pop television could tell you, hero carries all the baggage of hubris. Fabien somehow convinced himself that he could go three months without his malaria medicines, and just yesterday I found him vomiting his entrails and cursing quinine. As he will return chez lui in nine days for a wedding, I tried to cheer him up, “But Fabien, consider: malaria is quixotically exotic. It’s intellectual in a spicy, self-sacrificing way. It’s like Kipling, or the Four Feathers, or Shooting an Elephant. The bridesmaids are going to fall all over you – and your parasite.” He wiped a little vomit from his chin, and told me that he prefers jewelry.

Other notes from the wild, wild, North: Amelia’s adventure almost turned into a third-world disaster when her train ran off the rails. Unfortunately, this happens often, she got to the airport on-time, and everyone is safe, which makes for a boring story. Tomorrow I play tennis with my aunt, a rite of passage for any young Einterz; may I come out faring better than the more traditional rite of passage in the Extrême-Nord, where the young men spend the next two weeks holding their garments away from their raw genitals. And, finally, I’d like everyone to meet Falta. Falta stepped on a snake. In approximately 90 minutes –lacking a hero – Falta will begin hemorrhaging from the mouth. And yet when Doctor Ellen asks, “What snake bit you?” Falta, with an elegance to match the Queen of England at tea, reaches into her purse and pulls out a cobra. If her schmuck of a husband wasn’t in tow, crying at the cost of the anti-venom, I would have proposed to her on the spot.

Love to all, especially my dear, dying Falta, and then a little more directed towards Rob, courtesy of Nestor,

Seth

p.s. a couple administrative pieces:
To Mike H. - My camera has broken, so please accept my apologies. I'll try and figure out a way around this.

To Everyone - I've been procrastinating on my school work, here, so future notes might be few and far between in the future. Thanks for staying tuned this far, and I hope you will not take offense if my silence between letters is a little more extensive than has been usual.

So we beat on... (June 2, 2009)

Thu, 18 Jun 2009 13:49:44 -0500

Seth Einterz '11 -- The hospital was caught in one of the flash storms that preview the rainy season, and everyone had filtered to sit and stand beneath the rooftops. I found myself next to three nurses: Abdou, Luc, and Bouba. After the usual greetings, commentary on the strength of the rain, and predictions whether the electricity would hold, the nurses turned to me and inquired about America, where the streets are paved with silver and gold.

“In America, there are no beggars?” asked Luc.

“And everyone has work?” added Bouba, “There is no unemployment.”

I explained, si, there is unemployment. They did not look convinced. They asked me how many people were unemployed. I admitted that I did not know the exact number, but I guessed that it was around five or six percent. “And of course there are people who have nothing,” I said, “Everywhere and always there are people who have nothing.” The nurses nodded their heads, grudgingly aware that the human condition has no frontier.

“But in America,” added Bouba, “Everyone goes to school.”

“Everyone should go to school,” I said, “Yet we have our problems. Not all schools are equal, so some people do not receive much of an education even if they do go to school. And many people drop out of school.” But I felt foolish, trying to explain the malaise in our public schools to these men.

“At least everyone in America can read,” Bouba said. I acknowledged that this was mostly true.

Luc then asked me if it was actually -10 degrees Celsius at Obama’s inauguration. I confirmed this, and the nurses looked at me with an expression that bordered terror. “And further, I prefer those winters over this heat.” They laughed uproariously at my joke (I was not joking), and rubbed the goosebumps from their arms. As we spoke, the temperature was hovering around a cool 35 degrees Celsius.

“And you were at Obama’s inauguration?” asked Bouba as the rain let up.

“No.” I explained, “I live in Indiana, and his inauguration was in Washington.”
“That is far?” They asked. “Like what? One hundred kilometers?”

“No, much farther,” I said.

“One thousand kilometers,” they said with skepticism.

“Farther,” I said, and this required a suspension of belief tantamount to imagining -10 degree temperatures. I lost the thread of their excited banter, but it seemed that in America one can, of course, traverse such distances on supersonic metros and airplane taxis. I gave up any effort to correct their illusions of my country. I was in a culture where the unemployment rate is eighty percent, patients do not always comprehend the tally marks that indicate the dosage of their medicine, and one might need three hours to cross one hundred kilometers. If one could dream of 5% unemployment, universal literacy, and interstate highways – if one could dream of America, that is – then one could dream of anything.

Much love to all, but especially Mr. Rodgers, green lights, and boats against the current,

Seth

Notes on the Run, Part II (May 29, 2009)

Thu, 18 Jun 2009 13:48:07 -0500

Seth Einterz '11 -- After convincing my aunt that I was not joking, but I was actually going to major in Philosophy, she looked at me with arched eyebrows. Now she enlists me in the menial tasks available for my particular set of skills – making photocopies, washing windows, cleaning storerooms, filling out surveys. She also poses philosophical conundrums at the dinner table, and looks at me with expectation, as if the utility of my education should be apparent in my effortless ability to answer yea or nay: Three starving shipmates should or should not eat the cabin boy? I bury my face in a mango and mumble, “Umm, Aristotle said, I mean, he would...well, Plotinus...actually, could you pass the water, please?" The saga of my inadequacies flows onward.

Consider today, when Aunt Ellen relieved me from window duty. She sent me with Falta to vaccinate the newborns of a small village just a couple kilometers from Kolofata. Falta, of course, did all the syringes and hard work and I had the single, simple task of placing two drops of Polio vaccination into the mouths of the infants. I landed drops of medicine in the baby’s nose, on the mother, and everywhere else except the mouth of the screaming child. Falta looked at me with skepticism, no doubt expecting a Polio outbreak in the near future and wondering how someone so incompetent could be related to Doctor Ellen. I considered telling her about Aristotle and Plotinus.

On top of sharp windows, demanding relatives, and screaming babies, I have encountered less predictable problems on my morning runs. For example, the first time I stumbled upon a herdsman and his cows, I slowed to a sheepish walk and I jumped with every subtle movement of the beasts. The second time I stumbled upon a herdsman and his cows, I ran through the herd with a semblance of bravery, spooking some of them, and leaving a very frustrated herdsman to chase after his property. I put on my apologetic face, but I was secretly pleased to have established my position on the tenuous hierarchy of man and beast. The next morning at the hospital I saw a patient gored by a bull, which prompted a miniature story time (real quote: “Remember the patient a couple days ago who was gored in the ass?”), and re-established – in dominating fashion – that particular hierarchy of man and beast.

Much love to all, but especially to Dylan who runs a 4:13 mile, which is fast enough to do the following three things:
1) Run away from a bull and escape being gored.
2) Single handedly and two-leggedly remove the Einterz family from the ZCHS track record books.
3) Win Regionals. Then, with a bit of luck and a bit more grit, win State. Good luck.

Seth

Notes on the Run (May 28, 2009)

Thu, 18 Jun 2009 13:45:48 -0500

Seth Einterz '11 -- A portrait of Americans in Kolofata:

Doctor Ellen received a Bachelor’s in Humanistic Studies from McGill, a Bachelor’s of Chemistry from IUPUI, an M.P.H. from Tulane, and a Medical Doctorate from McGill. She speaks English, French, Kanuri, Mandara, and one universal language with her very skeptical eyebrows. She is everywhere at once, and therefore impossible to find. She sees new patients, checks on old ones, signs papers, scolds mediocrity, and generally keeps the ship upright (and, of course, Myra plugs all the leaks. But Myra’s Canadian, we’re just covering the Americans)

Amelia received a Bachelor’s in History from Dartmouth College with lots of work in the sciences, and after after three years in Mali (two with the Peace Corps) she speaks French and a dialect of Fulfulde. She is now in her second year of medical school at Duke. She floats wherever she is needed, and today I saw her working with the ultrasound machine.

Brianna received a Bachelor’s in Community Health from Wisconsin-Lacrosse, and after six months with the Peace Corps, she speaks French and sometimes Kanuri. She, too, fills whatever void appears – fundraising for a new school, spreading health awareness, or helping with a vaccination campaign.

Seth (that’s me) is working on a Bachelor’s in Philosophy from Wabash College. He cleans the windows.

Maroua (May 25, 2009)

Thu, 18 Jun 2009 13:42:25 -0500

Seth Einterz '11 -- Aunt Ellen describes Kolofata as if it were the best friend who still doesn’t have a date to the Prom. “No village in all of Cameroon is more genuine,” she promises me. Great personality notwithstanding, Kolofata has only a small gathering for a market, its electricity and water have been copping out, and the weekends provide little amusement beyond an emergency caesarian section here and there. So yesterday I escaped to Maroua on the back of Fabien’s moto.

Maroua is the capital of the Extrême-Nord. It is the other sort of Prom date – not so genuine but real physical real fast. We sat at a street side shack, a shank of raw meat turning over a hot grill, and enough flies for every entry in the encyclopedia of infectious diseases. It was tough, and spicy, and delicious. They offered a special cut of whitish-yellowy meat. “La mamelle,” explained Zachary, a friend of Fabien. “D’où vient le lait.” Where the milk comes from. I tried some, because you do that when you’ve already resigned yourself to death by diarrhea, and I was next trying to empty a mouth full of oily fat without swallowing. Sometimes, one must sacrifice grace out of sheer necessity.

Students come from Nigeria and Chad to learn the craft of tanning in Maroua, and so I went as a tourist. The school is situated across a dried out riverbed, and it reeks like a butcher’s shop crossed with a wrestling room. The skins – goat mostly, but also serpent, antelope, n’importe quoi – soak first in tepid pools of water, then bird excrement, then the mashed fruit of the acacia tree. The children of the trade are street urchins in the dirtiest sense, they wear rags and trachoma-thick eyes and they dip their hands carelessly into bird shit to show us the soaking products. They eat with these hands, and they quarrel and they laugh, as we all do.

We ate dinner up the road from our hotel, where they vend fish from Lake Maga. In this street, conversation competes with the music, and dinner drowned out any surviving vestige of small talk – grilled in our sight, lathered in a basil oil, and surrounded by fried plantains; it was messy to touch (no silverware) and, topped with a Fanta, it was perfect. We returned to our hotel, where Fabien and I received catcalls from scantily clad women (“Bonjour les mignons”). I was thrilled, but Fabien explained this was not a normal salutation, and those women were the last kind of prom date: the one you pick up at a street corner. I explained that I take compliments where I can, and Fabien shouldn’t look a gift horse in the mouth.

Much love to all, but especially Mike, Big R, Richmond, Lurch, etc. because when I spend more tranquil weekends in Kolofata, I sift through my aunt’s collection of The New Yorker.

Seth

p.s. it rained last night. Temperatures still in the 120's, but at least it's super-humid now.

Bird Stuff (May 21, 2009)

Thu, 18 Jun 2009 13:40:23 -0500

Seth Einterz '11 -- I was trying to decide what to write when I heard a great commotion outside my room. I opened my door, walked onto to the porch, and stepped into a fresh pool of peacock urine. I thanked the peacock kindly, returned to my computer, and decided to dedicate this next post to both peacocks and pee, both of which are symbols of my misery.

With Aunt Ellen and Myra, I live in the compound of Amadou Ali, the Minister of Justice with whom I stayed in Yaoundé. Much earlier in his career, he received two peacocks – a male and a female – as a gift and a sign of his rising prestige. Actuellement, more than two dozen peacocks, all progeny of those first two, strut around the compound. They have absolutely no utility, they look gorgeous, and I want to kill them all. Their shrill call is only just less obnoxious than a rooster’s crow, but much more frequent and not confined to the morning. Further, they walk wherever they will: in the road, in the yard, and on the tops of our tin roofs, creating an infernal commotion that wakes me in the wee hours of the morning. That one of them has now pissed in front of my door merely adds insult to injury.

Urine, or the lack thereof, is not the cause but a manifestation of my misery. You see, I regularly drink two to three liters of water chaque jour, and that I piss less than once a day is testament to my perpetual dehydration. As I type this, not exerting myself more than the petite strains of my fingers, I am sweating like an icy can of Coca-Cola in State Fair heat. I feel as if I receive sunburn in the shade, and at night, apart from the peacock calls, there is the heat to keep me awake and sweating. The fans do nothing but circulate the hot air around my room, so that I sleep in a furnace.

Myra says that the heat could break any day, but it might also last for three more weeks. Aunt Ellen says out loud that it can be much worse. Her silence says, “Suck it up, wimp.” So I wait for the third week, and until then my piss is orange and infrequent.

Anyway, May 20th is Cameroon’s National Day – their Fourth of July sans barbecue and fireworks. Most of the hospital staff had the day off, so Fabien was missing some of the local translators on rounds this morning, which posed problems. For one patient, Fabien had to speak in French with a nurse who spoke a tribal language with a friend of the patient who spoke a third language with the patient himself (all of which I attempt to relay to you in English). After much repetition, signing, and confusion, it finally became clear that the patient had had blood in his urine for one month, and the blood did not come just as he finished, but was present the whole time that he urinated. When I consider that my too-orange piss is blood-free, I think I can even forgive the damned peacocks.

Love to all, but especially anyone else who suffers from a cold (ironic, no?),

Seth