Photos

I finally uploaded some news photos from this year. If you want to check them out, head to:

http://picasaweb.google.com/amynaaron

Also during the opening of our computer lab, a reporter from one of the national newspapers, Sidwaya, came and wrote an article about the lab. It's in French but we found when you use an online translator, you probably won't get the correct translation but you'll get something fun and often awkward to read. You can find the article at:

http://www.sidwaya.bf/spip.php?article4637&lang=fr

School's Out!

With a final scribbled signature across some carbon-copy paper that had become slightly damp from my sweaty arm, I finished my last report card and thus my career as an educator in Burkina last week. It was a good feeling. Maybe I’ll be nostalgic for the old days of teaching later but for now all I’ve had time to feel was “woo hoo!”

Mostly we haven’t had time to realize that school is over and our final months in Burkina are winding down. These last weeks have been really packed. The bike race in Djibo went pretty well. Of course everything changed up until the day of the race. After getting all fired up to race with the men, Emilie and I were told that the women’s race was actually 18km long with real prizes so we decided to enter the women’s race after all. I spent the 4 or 5 days before the race going on long rides to get ready only to find out the day before the race that it was only 5km after all. I’m shamefully terrible at sprinting on a bike and this race was no exception. Out of the 25 girls in the race, I was 9th. Luckily Emilie did a better job of representing the foreigners and won first place. The men’s race was really intense with over 100 people competing. After the first 10, they stopped counting the men, but Aaron came in somewhere between 15th and 20th. The real shocker was the bus that brought about 30 riders at the end who didn’t finish the race. According to Aaron there were some bad crashes in the beginning and some of them looked like they had definitely been through a battle.

As soon as school was over, it was time to start our weeklong computer camp. We did two classes every day for 5 days. In the morning, we had a class of students from 8 to 12 and the evening class was for adults from 5:30 to around 7:30. Overall the camp went really well. We did 3 days of computer theory and basics (how to right click, left click, what’s the desktop…) and then the last two days they made their own PowerPoint presentations and presented at the end. There were the usual hiccups, such as teachers who scheduled final exams during our allotted time so students had to leave early or arrive late. The biggest surprise was a 2-day power outage in town that forced us to cancel one of our evening classes and cut a morning class short once all the batteries were too low. I spent several weeks making nice to the head doctor of the hospital so that we could borrow their projector for the training. Unfortunately, after the first day the projector was nothing more than nice décor thanks to daily power outages that lasted anywhere from an hour to a day. Overall camp was fun and we’ve had lots of requests from both students and people in town to have more but I think any new camps will have to be done by someone else since we don’t have much time left and we’d rather spend it visiting our friends in town and seeing things nearby that we haven’t had a chance to see yet.

Our plans for June? Day to day activities may vary, but I think it will consist mostly of laying on the beach, eating fresh seafood, and speaking English…hello Ghana!

Put away your pagnes and get out those padded spandex...it's a bike race!

After weeks and weeks of sitting around while no progress was made on the computer lab project, things suddenly came together (as they tend to do) all at once. As of last Monday, the Lycée Provincial du Loroum Salle d’Informatique was officially open.

The lab is simple: four tables, ten chairs, and a fan (hoping we can add a second fan soon!). We have ten computers for the students to use and one for the supervisor. Since it is too late to start anything official with the students, for the rest of the school year and throughout the summer the plan is to open the lab for students and public who pay 10¢ and 50¢ an hour respectively. Though we’re open now, the “official opening” (when the important people will be present) is supposed to take place on Thursday. I’m not sure what the official opening would entail. Drinks are more or less mandatory; Aaron and I already had to veto the proposal to serve sodas and beer in the lab itself. (I just know somebody too important to chastise would spill all over the place.) We’re organizing a weeklong computer camp to take place in three weeks when classes are over for students and teachers. After talking with current IT teachers, it sounds like mastering the basics (click, double-click, and that ever-elusive right click…) will take most of the week. It helps that we’ve been helping students in the computer lab all week and saw what some of the major problems are. I think we’re going to spend a bit of time on opening day discussing the pitfalls of using the restart button whenever you can’t get back to the window you want. Also, iChat will have to be disabled for the duration of the camp.

We’ll get lots of pictures during the next few weeks and put them up for you once we get to Ouaga at the end of May.

Other big news, we found out this week that there’s a bike race this Saturday from Pobé (our neighbor, Emilie’s, village) to Djibo. The race is 25km long and there’s even money for the winner. I’m mostly entering to support Emilie. The organizers told her the race was for men only and there was a women’s only race in Djibo (a town slightly larger than our old grocery store parking lot). Well, this got our inner feminists all fired up so now we’re doing the race. I have no ambitions of winning and haven’t ridden more than 5km at a time in months. I’m like that Ghanaian from the winter Olympics: I just don’t want to come in last. Maybe Aaron can do well and win us some money for cold beers in Djibo, though.