Long lost me!

So, I’ve gotten a little bit lax on the blog updates…

What’s been happening here… well, there was the attempted coup, the African Union meeting is coming up, and I’ve been putting in my time as a commuter. Our house has evolved a few “versions” as us geeks like to say, and now we’re at v2.1. Amongst the highlights, we’ve grounded the power (2 independent poles in the ground connected to the mains), installed a generator (3^rd tier backup solution), and thrown a party for the most recent group of Volunteers. Next step will be getting better surge protection in place, apparently the Rainy Season (just around the corner) brings in plenty of lightning strikes.

Life here continues to be interesting, busy, and at times frustrating. But on the whole I’m feeling like I’m seeing this place more and more like home. This week I’ll be starting to do advanced computer skill workshops at work, which will hopefully be good, and there’s a new training center for employees coming online that’ll probably keep me busy. This is really great because really the only way to keep things moving here is to develop local skills, and local computer skills are a major need. I know that sounds strange sometimes from America, where most of the news we get about Africa involves starvation, wars, and disease. But many of the systems the world uses to efficiently deal with these problems rely on computers very heavily now, and so it is difficult to find local people to manage these issues if few people have computer skills. More importantly, from what I’ve seen, people with advanced computer and engineering skills are desperately needed to help provide locally appropriate solutions to problems. After being here a year I’m kind of able to see such solutions, but not nearly as well as people who’ve lived here there whole lives.

Month’s big adventure: Fixing the city power connection for our local DVD rental store. Turned out to be a broken part in the mains <-> generator switch.