This post is not the end to the blog some of my readers are hoping to have. This is not some sweeping review and shared introspection of the time I spent in Kenya. Nor is it be a critique or … Continue reading →
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I know that this blog has recently shifted to an awfully tech-focused tone as of late, but it’s primary purpose has always been to help me convey my experiences serving as Peace Corps Volunteer in Kenya. This experience is rapidly … Continue reading →
Hata Siafu translates literally as, “Even safari ants,” from Kiswahili. Hata (even) is used quite frequently in Kiswahili and subsequently in Kenyan English and it seems many of Kenyan English’s idiosyncrasies are derived from literally translated Kiswahili. The intention of … Continue reading →
I got bored yesterday and whipped up some cartoons for a friend. Thought I would share them today. The friend likes ants, hence the ant theme. We were also arguing about whether or not ants “think” which is why the … Continue reading →
…I sit and work on my computer. The KASNEB invigilators (Kenyan English for ‘proctors’), are watching my students while they take their exams, so I don’t really have anything to do. But they want me here. So I am just … Continue reading →
Last Thursday, there were some odd happenings going on here at NYS Mombasa. I woke up to the sounds of Black Hawk helicopters running laps around my base. It was weird, especially considering, according to public information, the Kenyan Armed … Continue reading →
One of my final projects here as a Peace Corps volunteer in Kenya has been to implement a temporary information sharing platform for volunteers while we wait for a more permanent solution from the angels on high. Due to its … Continue reading →
I know just yesterday I wrote that I would not be updating my blog for a bit, but with two recent announcements in the Ubuntu-sphere, I felt obligated to chime in with my own two cents. For those who haven’t heard the news, Ubuntu last week announced that it would be shipping version 11.04 with [...]
Image says it all peeps. Life has been really busy these past few weeks. My students have received textbooks for their computer courses, and though each doesn’t have their own set (far too expensive), they have been working hard at absorbing through text everything I have taught them over the past year. They have their [...]
It took me two years to come to this revelation, which is sadly two years too late for me, but I hope this helps out some others. When I first started using Ubuntu in Kenya, I was more than pleased to notice that the Safaricom modem, a Huawei E160 by model name, is seamlessly supported [...]
Baraza – n. – A Kiswahili term. An attempt at translation would be, “a meeting,” but usually it connotes a meeting with a specific goal, usually solving a problem or answering questions, led by a village committee or village elders. I thought I would take some time and share my first impressions with a new [...]
Last night a friend of mine and I were discussing life, as we do in Peace Corps, and our personal social support systems. Who are our friends? What do they mean to us? Where do they fit in our respective lives. Over the course of the discussion an analogy emerged about friendship; about the different [...]
Peace Corps Kenya has a tradition (which we admittedly stole from Peace Corps Thailand). About three months from out Completion of Service (COS), we hold a COS workshop and it is during this workshop that the tradition takes place. Without getting into the specifics of the ceremony (because it’s a super secret ceremony), the end [...]
People like parables and anecdotes. They are short, easy to remember, and oftentimes presented in such a familiar and anthropomorphized fashion as to be irrefutable. The perception of such facts s that the collective wisdom of all the world’s storytellers is infallible. Yet when grouped together and thought about as a whole, these short, out-of-context [...]
Possibility. People always speak of standing at the “edge of possibility.” Yet this phrase befits Possibility with inherent characteristics to which I take issue. An edge grants Possibility too much shape. That in fact, Possibility is maybe a downward trip, as if at the edge of a cliff. Or that Possibility is a mere shift [...]
We all know I like to make analogies. Recently I was inspired by a Penny-Arcade (PA) comic to analogize by two seemingly disparate parts of my life: development work and video games. I realize that niche filled by my readers who also find themselves in this crossover is most likely limited to me, Jeff and [...]
I wrote the title of this post in Kiswahili, yes. Most literally it translates as, “The monkeys and I, we are knowing one another.” This post should be considered inevitable in any Peace Corps blogger’s Peace Corps career, and as such, I feel like I should cover the topic today. Today, as I was walking [...]
DISCLAIMER: Specifics are for science, stereotypes (and generalizations) are for survival. What I write below is an inherently stereotyped recounting of my thoughts and opinions regarding my recent trip to Tanzania. Having stayed only a short time in the country, I was unable to compile a complete anthropological or sociological report of all specific ethnic [...]
I am feeling very speculative today so I thought I would throw out a hypothetical situation that wouldn’t at all surprise me should the events actually unfold. As the title of the post suggests, I suggest an anaolgy: Canonical and HP are currently heading on a trajectory that may later leave analysts comparing them to [...]
I am sitting here, waiting for a colleague to return so that we can continue setting up his file and print server for his school, so I thought I might take the time to blog a bit. On the long bus from Dar to Arusha, TZ, one of my eCorps teammates and I had a [...]
Sorry, I don’t have time for a full update. I have been travelling all this month, first in Makindu, then all around with my family, and tomorrow I am off to Tanzania. After all that, I will return to my normal blogging schedule, including round-ups of everything I have been doing. In the meantime, check [...]
Most Kenyans accessing the non-mobile Internet do so through local cyber cafes scattered throughout the country, some even in the smallest and most remote of villages. This unprecedented level of specific-location access allows someone approaching the internet as an income generating activity to tap an enormous demographic. Yet as far as I can tell, most [...]
Politics have always been interesting to me, but I have always considered myself a staunch independent, voting, but not necessarily engaging or even inclining interesting the day-to-day of the political rigor. Serving in Kenya has really opened my eyes up to both the good and bad of politics. Whereas living in the US there is [...]
America needs a cultural and economic shift. We all know that America has been having some economic troubles recently, but a quick article up on Salon.com recently painted a nice picture of what they call an economic collapse of our empire. Sharing this link with a friend of mine prompted a conversation regarding what America [...]
One thing that I notice about many Kenyan villages that to this day still astounds me is the amount of freedom a child has when returning home from school. Kenya introduced free primary education back in 2003 and since then classroom sizes have significantly grown. Students in their respective school uniforms are a common sight [...]
This is ridiculous. Did you know that there is a on-going debate regarding the proper means of punctuating sarcasm? It’s true. Apparently, a company called SarcMark has recently filed a patent on their new, copyrighted, sarcasm punctuation mark. It’s the spiral-designed one on the left of the picture above. Meanwhile, to counter their move, a [...]
Mzee Macdonald ana shamba ii ai ii ai oo Na katika shamba yake ana ng’ombe ii ai ii ai oo Na muu muu hapa, na muu muu hapo Hapa muu, hapo muu, kila mali muu muu Mzee Macdonald ana shamba ii ai ii ai oo Brief post today, tell me what it is and test [...]
“A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook [...]
I love language. I love language because I love thinking, and language is our vain attempt to express our thoughts to others, the primary means of collaboration and arguably one of our species’ greatest strengths. Joining the Peace Corps I was very excited at the prospect of getting to live in another language, immerse myself [...]
Let’s see, you have successfully gotten your computer running the your latest Linux distribution of choice, but you are still missing the finger-twitching action of a good video game. You could dual boot your machine, but that just seems wrong to some, and a nuisance to others; you could run a virtualized instance of Windows, [...]
It’s TED season again. For those who don’t know, what TED is, it’s a series of conferences that has been growing in public popularity in recent years, despite its age, where the supposed best and brightest collect to share ideas on the latest and greatest… stuff. It has also been criticized for hefty entrance and [...]
No matter how the dice roll, in about 6 months’ time I should be back in Massachusetts, my home, after my 2 year stint with the Peace Corps. There are still some questions as to when the exact day will be, and I may not know for sure until September, but I looked at the [...]
I am living in what I consider to be a very exciting time in modern history. Kenya, is undergoing a constitutional referendum! Hooray. African politics aside, for this post is not about post-colonial government flaws, constitutional weakness, or things like that, I am excited because to me a constitutional shift, however minor, is like building [...]
For those who don’t need to be convinced about backing up data, here are some tips based on operating system: All Operating Systems Mac OS X Linux Windows I am frequently called by fellow Peace Corps volunteers about potentially lost data and how to recover it; viruses that have ravaged computers; dropped machines that, “for [...]
Working in Kenya, I often get struck by how often acronyms get tossed around, but one in particular gets tossed around a lot: NGO. NGO stands for Non-Government Organization, and when it comes to development work, NGO are the hot thing. I thought I might talk a little about the impact of these NGO here [...]
For the past year or so I have been helping in various capacities, from friend to advisor to consultant to on-call technician in order to implement a technology solution to enable Kenyans living in rural areas (little access to electricity being our main definition of rural) to access information technology and the World Wide Web. [...]
America doesn’t export much. We all know that. The trade deficit is huge, and though there are arguments about whether or not this is healthy for the economy, in general it makes people uneasy. But don’t worry, this isn’t a post about global scale economics and trade; it’s a far more normal post. One thing [...]
Living in Kenya, there is far less a concept of personal space or personal time as there is in the West. When I am at work, obviously these concepts have no hold, as I am expected, and offer myself, to help with computer problems for anyone in the lab. But even at home it can [...]
When I got my first job at the age of 14 working at a local hardware store it was my first time I knew my father was preparing me well for the aworld beyonnd his house. It was at this job that my manager taught me his first rule of management: “Never tell an employee [...]
I watched the Celtics vs. Lakers game. Well, if you want to call it “watched.” I loaded up ABC.com in Firefox and had two chats going with some friends back home. ABC.com has a nice text-based play-by-play feature, but it all runs in this hideous Flash instance. The reason I call it hideous is not [...]
There are a lot of ex-patriots living in Kenya. They come from far away, from the USA, from the UK, from continental Europe, from Australia and New Zealand and even from other African nations. Living in arguably one of the most beautiful parts of Kenya, it is not surprising that I run into ex-pats a [...]
When I began the process of upgrading my base Linux installation to Ubuntu 10.04 LTS, I made an active decision to try something new in my own personal computing environment: I would switch over to a KDE-based distribution. I have been using GNU/Linux-based operating systems for about 10 years now, having experimented with them throughout [...]
For all who don’t know, the World Cup has just started. Football (aka soccer for the US of A-ers) is HUGE in Kenya, but believe it or not, it’s not a huge part of my life here. My neighbor is fairly apathetic, none of the teachers are particularly preachy about it, and even though the [...]
I am alive. I have been running around mad like a chicken with its head cut off (an event I can now say I have witnessed… thank you Peace Corps), and I haven’t had time to blog. What been keeping me busy? Well, a lot of little things that keep cropping up. There have been [...]
I know, it’s been done before, but let’s try again, with a different name. I was reading around Slashdot and was interested in one of their articles about the Qi Ben NanoNote, an ultra-small, clamshell-style computer with specs that match moderately-powered smartphones… of about three years ago. But there’s a catch! Two actually. The Ben [...]
You know those mornings, those mornings where you have a list of things to do, ready to feel accomplished. Then when you show up, something goes wrong, and before you know it you’re very own principles are thrown up against your productivity, and all of a sudden, you are fighting to save the world and [...]
I must admit, one of the more fun aspects of teaching has nothing to do with instructing, but has everything to do with observing. I particularly enjoy watching the patterns that develop amongst my students when using software. In some instances the patterns are based upon mimicry (actually, I bet all of them are, but [...]
I had a weird dream where I was secretly part of the North Korea/South Korea/America Peace Alliance Military, basically a sham agreement to maintain the illusion of collaboration and peace between the nations, but I was undercover in North Korea and they couldn’t find out. I never knew what my mission was, except that I [...]
…or lack there of. When I get home at the end of the day, I typically empty my pockets onto my desk so that I might pick the contents up and pocket them again for the next morning. Since coming to Kenya I have noticed that my pockets are oftentimes filled with trash. That’s right, [...]
It’s easy to just let the time slip away. No, I have not forgotten my blog, and it is still my hope to keep this updated as regularly as possible. But honest to goodness I have been busy. Electricity has been haphazard around here as always, to the point where some surges burst some power [...]
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