Ain't no flies on us.

Some of you may remember the childhood taunt/game "there ain't no flies on us". If you aren't familiar with it, there are two teams and each team says successively louder ...

there ain't no flies on us
there ain't no flies on us
there might be flies on some of you guys
but there ain't no flies on us.

Now, I know it's not grammatically correct (which sadly seems to be happening more and more in the English language by supposed native-speakers) and is in fact a double negative which means that there really are flies on us.

Well, in Michigan there really are no flies on us. Why you may ask? Well, and I know this sounds strange, but Michigan flies are the slowest flies I've ever seen in my entire life!! A three-year old child with undeveloped reflexes could kill a Michigander fly. I know it's a strange posting but I've killed several flies in the house now because we tend to leave our garage door open when we're home as does most our hood (yes, burgalurs, people are more lax about home security in the burbs), so we get these big Michigander flies who fly in, think they own the place with their noisy buzz, and then get killed by my hand and a piece of papertowel. Aren't you supposed to have some kind of sense of accomplishment when you kill a fly in your home? Some kind of sense of "gotcha sucker!!! Michigander flies steal that feeling from you. It's kinda sad.

Detroit Orientation Institute

Recently A and I participated in the Detroit Orientation Institute (http://www.doi.wayne.edu/) which was an absolutely amazing experience for we learned a tonne about Detroit and met some pretty amazing people.
Some of the things I learned:

1. The population of Metro Detroit is upwards of 85% black (African-American for you PC types. Although I really think this name should be changed. I'll go into that another time.), with the rest being caucasian, bengali and middle-eastern.

2. There are some pretty amazing houses in the richer areas of town.

3. The public school we visited had one science teacher who taught every student in the school (all 600+ of them) for one hour a week. She had 27 classes and no prep time! And there's no toilet paper in the school. Who runs a school with no toilet paper? Each of the class room doors is locked from the inside too.

4. There is some absolutely amazing redevelopment going on in Detroit. New loft spaces, business districts, community organizations.

5. I've never seen so many abandoned buildings in my life. Detroit's population went from 1.6 million in the Metro Detroit area in the 1940s or so to less than 1 million today, leaving a lot of unused housing to rot and decay.

6. One of the first food banks was created in Detroit and is now a model for most other foodbanks in North America. (see: Forgotten Harvest http://www.forgottenharvest.org/; Focus Hope )

7. Domestic violence is a big problem here.

8. There's a huge split between people who live on the East Side and people who live on the West side, so much so that someone told a story about two Detroiters meeting in Vietnam, discovering they were from the mid-west, from Michigan, and from Detroit. When the question arose of what side they were from, they discovered it was from opposite sides, and they WALKED AWAY FROM EACH OTHER in disgust. How bizaare!!

There's more and I'll come back to it at a later date.