Too late to 'polagize?

So, I’ve been a terrible blogger.

The first step towards recovery is admitting you have a problem, right?

Before you call off our friendship and close this window to go peruse stumbleupon or whatever new-fangled website they’ve come up with recently, let me share a story with you…

It begins in a quiet, picturesque village nestled in the heart of a fertile little valley.  National exams have just concluded and everyone is settling down to a much-deserved period of mental repose.  All except your friend and humble narrator.

Why, you ask?

Well…

BECAUSE OUR PROJECT GOT APPROVED, THAT’S WHY!!!!

The application has been sent, the forms have been signed, and the project is soon to be posted on the Peace Corps website.  We’re in need of about $1,800.00 to create a Learning and Information Technology Center, the goal of which is to provide a venue for computer literacy courses, and to allow students and teachers to access online learning resources.  

As things stand, our elementary and high school students have very few reading materials (and if they do, they were generally printed in the 1970s). Aside from helping educators inject some up-to-date classroom activities and literature, this will also give us a chance to connect students and teachers in Guinea with students and teachers in the ole U.S. of A.

If you’re reading this and thinking “Heck yeah!  How do I sign up??”, send me an e-mail!  

If you want to donate to the project, not only are you sure to earn some great karma points, but I will also personally write you an ode.

Seriously.  I’m getting pretty good at them.

In other “Life in Ditinn” news, Flo is a big, happy, and chub-ster again, thanks to the heaping bowls of rice my neighbor gives to her every day.  I’m going to have to up the mileage on our runs from now on, because right now she gets tired after running a couple circles around the cow in our compound (as opposed to her usual 12-20 laps).

All in all, life is going well.  The rains have set in once more, which reminds me of home.  Though generally, you don’t have sopping wet chickens blown into your living room when it storms in Tacoma.  Nor-Easters even pale in comparison to the intensity of these rains.  The other day while walking to school, I was caught in a storm (imagine, if you will, black apocalyptic-looking clouds appearing out of nowhere), and so was forced to run for shelter in a nearby “Credit Rural” building.  I spent the next half hour waiting for the rains to abate, in a dark room, sitting awkwardly across the desk from the manager as he filled out forms using a leaky pen and a sputtering flashlight beam.  I suppose that’s one nice thing about monsoons – they bring you into contact with folks with whom you’d otherwise have no real business interacting.  That, and they produce mangos the size of your face.

Note to the potential adventurer: Never eat an entire grafted mango before going on a 3.5 hour bike ride up mountains.  The idea of eating something that looks like a dinosaur egg is awesome.  Later feeling like a miniature velociraptor is going to rip its way out of your stomach is not.

Now that school has ended, I’ve been keeping myself busy with (you guessed it) home-improvement projects and in-service trainings.  On the home-improvement front, I have now successfully crafted a utensil-holder and a dog travel-crate, and I have also screwed innumerable screws in half and broken two hacksaws.  Guinea has apparently bequeathed me the strength and clumsiness of a she-hulk.  Go figure.


On the in-service trainings front, I just completed a 3-day conference called the Youth Entrepreneurs Training Program.  It was excellent, and I hope to begin offering courses this August!  The plan is to take on a student intern or two to help me run the LIT Center at our school.

As I write this (quite scattered) blogpost, I am sitting in a hot and humid office in Dubreka.  If you’ll recall, that’s where I spent the first 3 months of training.  Well, we’re getting ready to welcome the new group of education volunteers, due to arrive in July!  I’m psyched to begin training the language and technical teachers, and to help with organizing the new stage’s training schedule.  This also means that I will be around computers more frequently, and thus able to post blogs more than once every three months.

So, pretty please, don’t write me off as a complete blog failure yet.

Deal?

Peace and love,

K