Food & stars

Friday, January 22nd

Not much to post about today. It was a pretty slow day with nothing really planned. All I had was an appointment with the new Provost here at Masoka. He had to leave for Dar es Salaam later in the day and would not be back until after I had left. He’s a nice man (Mr. Temm, if I’m spelling that correctly - its pronounced “Tim”) but seems to be in pretty deep at this point. He was appointed Provost the day after I arrived and he’s been extremely busy ever since. The spoils that come with power, I guess.

My appointment was for 8am but he wasn’t in when I arrived at five after. I came back at 9 and was able to talk to him for a few minutes - his work area was covered with stacks of papers and he looked as if he was out of breath already. We chatted some about my experience here so far and left the doors open for future contact and support. I felt bad taking up his time just to chat - but he didn’t seem to mind much. We wrapped up in about 15 minutes.

After I left, I went back to the apartment and realized that I was supposed to lecture another IT class at 9! D’oh! So I went back to the main office but no one seemed to know where I was supposed to go or what teacher I had to contact - nothing was mentioned on my handout/schedule that I received from Aiwe. We all decided that it might be best to just skip the class and not worry about it. I could always makeup the lecture sometime next week if it was really that big of a deal.

So, with that taken care of, the only other thing on my agenda was dinner at 7:30 at Mr. Mmbaga’s residence here on campus - sweet - no traveling, no major time out in the sun, no dust, etc. So I basically chillaxed in the apartment all afternoon, took a short nap, read a magazine, watched two episodes of The Shield on my laptop, and then went to dinner. My stomach was giving me some trouble most of the day - it may have been the blood soup I had eaten the day before, but who knows. It may also have been all of the traveling and work finally catching up to me. Either way, it was nice to rest up a bit.

One thing I did after a light lunch was to go to the internet cafe here on campus - it was actually open! I have been able to access the internet several times while in town, but only for basic stuff like checking email and downloading some docs from home through Blackboard. But with the slow connection times and the sheer demand for a computer, updating things like this blog are just too big to do from here. So again, I apologize that this blog is “recorded live” but posted at a later time. Trust me, not much editing is being done to these entries.

Anyway, I went to the cafe and was able to get on a machine - they have 8 computers here for over 100 students. They have Pentium 4 desktops running Windows XP on 512 MB of RAM... Yeah, they’re slow. And their internet connections are a turtle-ish 10 MB/sec. Good thing I brought a book with me. Besides that however, I began to notice a copule of things -

• students save their work and personal documents on the desktops. I saw some rather unflattering pictures...
• I don’t think anyone has done a disk check on the computers, no one has defragged the computers, and I have to wonder when the last OS update was conducted
• they are using IE 6.0 as their main web browser - red alert!
• their anti-virus protections are about 8-12 months old - platinum red alert!

Many of the students have their own flash drives but still leave their content on the computer. I have a flash that I’ve been using here and have caught viruses every time I’ve used an internet machine, either in town or on campus. It isn’t pretty. The lab tech (a young woman named Edith who is completely overwhelmed with requests from students) logged me on her administrator account so I could begin to clean up at least one machine - but I ran out of time, partly due to the slow internet connection (trying to download updates) and partly because about 20 students showed up to use the computers. I didn’t want to take away from anyone’s time, so I stopped my maintenance about halfway through. I asked Edith if she wanted help tuning up the computers, and she acepted very quickly. I am supposed to meet her back in the cafe (lab) at 2pm on Saturday to continue working on the first machine, but to also train her in basic maintenance. When I told her about disk check and disc defragger, she wasn’t sure what I was talking about - it may have been the language gap, but even when I showed her on-screen, it seemed to be something new to her.

For the record, my Mac laptop has not caught any virus from my flash drive (yet) - when I put the flash in, the computer spots them but since they’re all .exe extensions, it doesn’t do anything with them. I may try to catch some of these viruses on my flash and bring them back to our IT department just for kicks - see what they think. I’m no expert, but its my imprssion these are some nasty viruses - as in, “destroy everything on your hard drive” viruses. People are hurting over here - and FWIW, my laptop is going through a massive scrubbing when I get back, just in case.

Dinner at Mr. Mmbega’s place was nice. He is the former Provost (just replaced by Mr. Temm) - he has a new title with the university (didn’t quite catch it) so he hasn’t retired or anything. It was a huge meal - the party consisted of me, him, his wife, and Jean Kocher who is a visiting professor from Midland Lutheran College in Nebraska. She has been here since August and will spend a year here, teaching classes and conducting research. Needless to say, she is light years ahead of me in speaking Swahili (but she doesn’t rub it in). Turns out she has been keeping a blog about her experiences here (and it is an awesome blog - you need to check it out), and quite frankly, I can verify everything she mentions in it. There is a lot to love about this country, but there is a lot to get used to also. Turns out I’m staying in her old apartment - she has a different spot on the other side of campus that actually has a refrigerator and a small stove - lucky dog. And it turns out she knows Dr. Tom Martin at Susquehanna - apparently Dr. Martin spent some time at MLC before winding up at SU. I’ll try to get some blackmail stories...

Again dinner was nice - too much food for the number of people. I almost ate myself sick. I swear, I’ve eaten more food here than I would be at home. But the company was good - I learned a lot about the history of the Masoka campus and the Tumaini system overall. We left about 10pm, and I came back and completely crashed around 10:30. I was still very tired, it seemed.

Friday nights are very quiet here - I guess most of the students leave campus for the weekend. It is much louder here during the week.

The only other thing to do was wake up at 4am on Saturday to call home and wish Zach a happy 6th birthday! He was still awake, so I got to talk to him and Mrs. Professor Stark for a few minutes. It was a nice convesattion and I’m glad I called. I’m having a great time here, but I miss them terribly. It doesn’t help that the stars twinkle here at night - I’m not kidding. When you’re talking back home, missing people you love, and hte stars *twinkle* - oh man. I even think I’m starting to miss my students at SU... nahhhh... it ain’t that bad :)

For your entertainment, please enjoy a snap of my boys - Zach is on the right and Jack is on the left - happy birthday Big Man!