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.