April 2010

It's been awhile since I last posted a blog entry. While laziness was involved, I will give the excuse of having no computer. Yes, it is true, Senegal has finally eaten one of my treasured electronic devices. Alas, this is a normal occurrence. I am one of the lucky ones, a couple people here have gone through several computers, a few iPods and a lot of phones.

But never fear, I am typing on a brand spankin' new Eee PC! A reasonably priced little guy, I still had to give up my trip to Spain (tickets from Dakar only $300!) and dream of becoming a couch surfer. I also got a 500GB external hard drive. This will help me immensely in my piracy and theft of films from the hard-working and much-abused American media. A lot seems to have happen technologically since 2008. Could Windows 7 be more scarily stream-lined? Opera is the new web browser of choice? And, seriously, what the hell is twitter?

Work is going well. School is clicking along and we made the first Diourbel nutsheller last week. Hopefully, we'll have 16 operational nutshellers for sale in the next couple of weeks. Unfortunately, we missed the end of peanut harvesting season. It might make more sense to just hang on to them until next year, I think we could charge a much higher price.

SeneGAD is going great! Already, we've had more projects this year than all of last year combined. Thank you everyone who donated, you're making it all possible.

I met the Amassador! She came to the Tamba region's Girls' Leadership Conference. A seriously personable and down-to-earth woman, I was extremely impressed. The conference was amazing and she really helped make it special. The girls all had a 'cyber training' in a cyber cafe. Each sent an email to the Ambassador and she responded. It was pretty cool. (Several of the girls had never seen a computer before and didn't believe they existed.)

I also met the new stage, or group of volunteers being trained in, a couple of weeks ago.  One of the most motivated groups I've ever met, I really think they will be great Senegal PCVs.  Many were interested in working with SeneGAD, so I'm pretty pumped.