Well, every good blog must come to an end, and it looks like this one’s finally reached it. What follows are my thoughts, as typed while I was still in Kenya. I didn’t finish writing them while I was still there, so it will just drop off mid-essay, but I think that’s more truthful than [...]
Please login first to post comments.
Oh right, I forgot about this whole “winter” thing. I did a little sightseeing yesterday, since I missed my connection due to snow-related delays. As someone who doesn’t even have a coat with me, I must say that it’s quite cold. After walking around for a few hours, I took my hands [...]
I’m in Nairobi, back from Lodwar and the Lake Turkana region. Our trip was filled with all sorts of cramped transportation and intense, constant bargaining, so in a way it was a nice final Kenyan trip, because it was nice to see how much better we can handle all of it than when we first [...]
It’s all happening so fast now that I’m so close to the end! I’ve moved out of my house, and I’ve left Mombasa for good. It was a sad moment looking back from the bus as it crossed the bridge from the island. The past month has been full of “Well, this may be the [...]
A few days ago I updated FUZOMA on this site to version 1.6, which makes it the seventh release! This will likely be the last version, since there’s not much time left before I leave here.
For the uninitiated, this is a project where I squeeze as many awesome educational games and programs into a single [...]
There it went. Two years of teaching “Creative Arts” has officially come to a close. It’s a melancholy feeling, and it’s only amplified by the circumstances.
The way my schedule works, I teach both Classes 2 and 3 on Thursday, one after the other, before lunch. Today, the Class 3 classroom was being painted courtesy of [...]
Sometimes I think about the way I portray my Peace Corps experience on this blog, and I worry that especially recently, it looks like I do nothing but take vacations.
In any case, I semi-recently had a visit from my dad and stepmom, in which we quite possibly saw every single individual animal in Kenya over [...]
This story is the reason that I had originally decided to hold off on updating my blog for a while. There were a few people who I wanted to tell the story to personally first, so they wouldn’t read about it and get worried. It’s actually a pretty short story, and it goes like this:
A [...]
Well, I’m back, but I’ve been slow in posting because so much happened on vacation that I was overwhelmed by the idea of writing about it. Now that a little time has passed, though, I feel more comfortable skipping a lot of the details, so it’s a bit easier. So here we go!
The vacation started [...]
So here I am at my first Internet cafe of the trip. Since leaving Mombasa I’ve hiked around the Kakamega rainforest, played cards by a roaring fireplace, rafted the Nile for two days, relaxed on a small island in Uganda, and visited the Rwanda genocide memorial.
For know I’m in Kigali, the capital of Rwanda, [...]
First off, you can all rest assured that I have not died of an eye infection, nor have I been held for ransom in any of the countries I listed in my vacation plans. Rather, my infection went away with some eye drops, and my vacation plans have changed so as to disclude DRC, so [...]
In fact, yes.
Tomorrow will be the last day of classes for this term, followed by exams week. I’ll be administering the same exams as last term, maybe just with the questions reordered, since it will provide an easy way to track progress. This means, then, that tomorrow is the last real day of the term!
That’s [...]
Corruption is part of day-to-day life in Kenya, and it’s a topic I’ve largely avoided, since as a Peace Corps Volunteer blogger, it’s important to respect the Peace Corp’s partner organizations by not talking about the terrible things they do.
I will say this, though: corruption lowers my motivation.
Corruption in education exists on different scales, and [...]
Here are some pictures I’ve taken around town with my phone, geotagged automatically and placed on a handy little Google Map:
View Don’t Be Ragging On Geotagging in a larger map
You can also view these same pictures plotted on maps at my Picasa page and my Panoramio page, for a total [...]
Since I lost my phone a while back, I finally bought a new one—a Nokia 5230, called the “Nuron” by T-Mobile in America. It has some goofy features that I’ve been playing with.
One program that runs on the phone is called Qik and it streams video directly from my phone’s camera. I’ve used it a [...]
The picture I took the other day didn’t do my new friend any justice, so here are some better ones.
Any ideas? The closest thing I found online is that it may be an “argiope,” but I haven’t seen any pictures exactly like it.
Today I saw a man get beaten badly with sticks and rakes while I sat in the waiting area of the bank. I had quite a view through the large bank windows.
He might have died—I’m not sure because he ran from the angry crowd, and then as he crossed to road toward the bank, he [...]
So tonight I followed my usual schedule, which is to eat dinner at home and then open the school library from eight to nine, allowing kids to come in and use the computers before they go to bed. Things went along nicely, and then at nine the kids filed out to go to the dorms. [...]
Another weekend, another adventure.
On Tuesday night I jumped on the train to Nairobi, Second Class, and despite a rocky start (the engine car was missing, but it eventually showed up almost two hours late), things went pretty smoothly. On Wednesday I got my Swine Flu shot while visiting the Peace Corps office, and then I [...]
Went to Malindi for Saturday night and Sunday morning:
SUPERBOWL SUNDAY!!!
I found a West Coast CBS rebroadcast from the USA that actually streamed reasonably well to Kenya, so, being the techie volunteer with the good Internet, we had a lil’ party at my house! We got to watch the commercials and everything. The only problem? [...]
For a completely ridiculous reason, sorry.
So some of you may have noticed I haven’t been replying to emails. This is because before I left for Kenya, I decided to upgrade my free Google Apps email account to the $50/year “Premier” version, which buys me telephone support among other things, which I figured might be useful [...]
Before we resume our regular programming (meaning longer, rambling, more verbose passages of text), here’s another round of pictures, courtesy mostly of ErinRose, who was here until Sunday.
This one’s for you Elise, from the Nairobi nature walk:
ErinRose and I ate lunch near the rhino and saw dozens of baboons wander past us:
The guide told me [...]
Will write more later. For now, catch up on the photos:
Me, my sister and my mom in Mombasa:
And in Watamu and Malindi:
And on safari with the fam and my girlfriend:
And visiting an officially-sanctioned tourist-friendly Massai village:
So there can be no confusion about just how muddy it gets here when it rains, here’s a clip of some trainees on their way to my session on “technology in the classroom:” Forget “uphill both ways,” this is walking to school at its most dangerous. We even saw a giant tree branch fly by! [...]
Well, it’s been a while and I wish I could say that I’ve been as busy as I wanted to be. Since I got back from Nairobi I’ve mostly been cleaning and reading, but I’ve recently come back to Loitokitok, the place where I spent my first couple months in Kenya, to celebrate Christmas with [...]
Just a little news that applies to both my old job and to the Deaf community at large:
http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2009/11/automatic-captions-in-youtube.html
I think we all knew this would happen sooner or later, and it’s still not here 100%, but now a small subset of Youtube videos have the option of displaying Closed Captions based on some behind-the-scenes speech recognition. [...]
So for a little under a week now I’ve been in Nairobi for my one-year medical and dental checkup. Conclusions:
I don’t have cavities.
I don’t have TB.
I have a normal heartbeat.
None of these things were actually in doubt, but that’s just about all that was tested.
I also finally changed my malaria medicine from [...]
Well, I’m back from Machakos and I’ve met the ten new Deaf Education Volunteers who just arrived. Some of them have blogs, which are now listed in the right column. Enjoy! I got back from Machakos just in time to grade my students’ exams, return them, and to finish shooting video for the DVD yearbook.
Today [...]
About a month ago I got a donated iBook from a volunteer who was setting up a solar computer lab, and the plan was that I’d set it up to my liking, with lots of educational games and whatnot, and then just “clone” it to the 20 other laptops when I get to Lamu. This [...]
Old news I know but I’ve been busy. Here are some Halloween pics.
The naked man in tehe cardboard box is supposed to be a matatu.
This guy’s helmet and chestplate were purchased here in Mombasa at the Secondhand Supermarket, where Goodwill donations go to die.
The next morning, waking up in a tent in the [...]
So I said it before, but this time it’s far more likely to happen… I’m going to Lamu! I bought the ticket for myself and two other volunteers today. Tomorrow I’ll be going up by bus, and supposedly at some point we’ll reach a bridge that collapsed during the recent rains, and then we’ll have [...]
OK fellow volunteers, this comes up a lot in conversation, so I thought I’s mention it. Safaricom now offers an unlimited Internet package, which everyone’s been waiting for. It’s 200 shillings… per day. That’s a lot if you do it every day, but it’s not so bad if you just use it every now and [...]
The rains continue, and today the streets flooded, making my walk to lunch a real adventure. The clothes I hung to dry a few days ago are still outside, enjoying their extended rinse cycle. None of this, however, compares to what awoke me this morning: an indoor dripping sound. I got out of bed, thinking [...]
So a few nights ago I got carried away with the running water in my house and I splashed a bit on the wall, which dripped down into the outlet and blew a fuse in my house. So now I have no lights or fans, which means for three nights now I’ve had to rely [...]
So after about 72 hours with no power, it’s back on! This is the longest I’ve been without electricity since I’ve been in Mombasa, and I really missed having fans near my bed. As a result, it was also the first time since I’ve been in Kenya that I set up my solar equipment to [...]
1. About a month ago, I bought a new couch. Having guests is much nicer now… it was awkward before when people had to stand.
2. Around the same time I also bought a larger mosquito net. I makes sleeping a less claustrophobic experience:
3. Lastly, about two weeks ago I (actually ErinRose) discovered that I [...]
Well, my girlfriend left on Sunday, so it’s back to the usual routine for the rest of the term. It was a fun two weeks while she was here. In my previous blog post I uploaded some pictures from her first weekend here, so now here are some pictures from the second and third weekends, [...]
My girlfriend is here for her second visit. She arrived on Friday and we spent this weekend on the North Coast Mombasa, about twenty minutes from my house. On Saturday we went to Haller Park, a nearby rock quarry-turned-mini-zoo/park where injured/abandoned animals are taken as a kind of safe haven. Here are some pictures:
I [...]
Today was the first day of the third and final term of the school year. Out of 160 students, not many were here yet. To be precise, I think 5 kids showed up. This is relatively normal, as first week is really the “ramp up” week. We had a teachers’ meeting (which I rustily interpreted [...]
I absolutely loved the train ride from Mombasa to Nairobi last week. It was a charming and relaxing alternative to the bus. It takes longer—12 hours instead of 8—but since I spent most of that time sleeping in a bed, I could find no reason for complaint.
Here’s the station prior to departure:
Here’s my room. [...]
(And not the vacation kind.)
Apparently my web hosting provider, HostMonster, has started enforcing a new rule regarding number of files allowed in their Unlimited Hosting Plan. The new limit is 50,000 files, but I apparently had over 200,000, most of which were files created automatically by the image gallery that Hostmonster recommended for me, and [...]
I’ve just returned from the Mombasa Train Station, where I booked a ticket for the overnight train from Mombasa to Nairobi. It’s more expensive than a bus (over double) but the Peace Corps would fire me if I took a night bus, since it’s against policy due to the number of road accidents. Tomorrow I [...]
A group of five of us traveled together to Zanzibar for the week right after the Mombasa CST. I think the flight was under an hour, although the visa process was slow. I was annoyed to see that my visa which I got in advance from the Tanzanian Consulate was only good for six months, [...]
The first week after the second school term ended, I mainly stayed at home and dealt with medical stuff and laundry. The subsequent week consisted of my “Cross Sector Training.”
Each Peace Corps training so far has a handy abbreviation: Pre-Service Training (my time in Loitokitok) was “PST,” In-Service Training (my trip to Nairobi after the [...]
I just got back from a week of Peace Corps training and tomorrow I’m off to Zanzibar tomorrow for another week. Some exciting opportunities came up during training, so after Zanzibar I may finally find a way to do more in the evenings than make classroom worksheets and update my floppy disk! I [...]
First, some quick updates. The infection continues to retreat. You may note a complete absence of it in the wedding photos. In my trip to the hospital today, the nurse also commented on how well my arm is healing.
While in the hospital, I was expecting some reference to the growing “Obama was born in Mombasa [...]
I’m in the Peace Corps office now, killing time while some other volunteers are in a meeting.
So far so good. The infection looks like it losing the battle against the antibiotics, and now I have a free day in Nairobi. I’m thinking of buying as much Dr. Pepper and and as many tortialla chips as [...]
From the lab results:
Gramstain: Gram positive cocci present Culture: Moderate growth of streptococci species
Huh? I had to look it up. It appears that I probably don’t have a Staph infection after all— I have a Strep infection! I was not previously aware of this, but Strep can cause a number of [...]
WARNING: I won’t get into all the gross details, but this is mostly a medical post. You’ve been warned.
So I wish I could say that I’ve been a good, effective teacher and that I’ve been focused on exams week, but it’s not true. In fact I’ve been missing quite a bit of class recently. Last [...]
Here are the official lyrics, typos and all, for the video of the poem that many of you asked about.
Journey by James Carter starts like so:
A poem is a journey That starts off in your head A word, a phrase, a thought you’ve had [...]
How many entries are we showing above?
For now, we are showing up to 50 entries on each page. Entries that
are too short are filtered out. For more entries, please use
archives.
|
Connect to Peace Corps Journals
About the Journal
Contact Us
Disclaimer:
| |
| Copyright (c) 2010 |
