21 March 2007

The good, the bad, and the horrifying.

“This is the day the Lord has made; let us rejoice and be glad in it.”
PSALM 118:24 NIV

I’d say it’s about time for a general update on all the little things. After all, daily life does have progress worth noting, its just that it happens so slowly that it is easy to miss. Let us be happy for what is here and now.

Thoughts on the work situation: Spiders, sickness, and students’ smiles.

The YMCA Digital Studio has been providing me with a constant stream of work.

Unfortunately, the Anansi the Spider Animation project is on standby as my co-worker has come down with some medical issues. Before he became ill, we did see a lot of progress on finishing the first test episode. The voice over audio was recorded, some of the sound effects chosen, backgrounds painted, and about 90% of the animations were complete. During the process we realized how monumental a task animation was, and decided it would be a good idea to recruit anyone and everyone who was interested in learning computer animation. To that extent I will begin teaching an introductory class on Macromedia Flash starting this week. Giving students a path to express themselves creatively is one of the things I came here to do, it took about 9 months to get to this point, but hey I’ll take it.

On a side note, one of the frustrations in creating the episodes is that quality royalty free or fair use sound effects and music are terribly difficult to come by. For at least providing us with some avenues of choice, we have to give thanks to the Creative Commons foundation for the work they do with licensing work for fair use. They provide a way for artists of any type to license their work so that it reserves some or all rights, but allows people using it for fair use to go ahead and enjoy.

We also finished two short promotional/documentary pieces, one for the YMCA basketball team and the other covering a UNICEF launching of a water sanitation project. The next step for us is to put together a portfolio and distribute it to NGOs and businesses. Our hope is to sell ourselves as a complete multimedia studio and start being employed to create promotional advertisements or documentaries.

Work at the high school.

Our first term we struggled with secretarial tasks that bogged us down with so many papers to copy, type, and correct that we were unable give our energy to classes. Students would come into the classroom and at the same time teachers would come running in desperately asking us to type a report for them.

Our first step in solving the problem was refurbishing the secretary’s office so that they had the full capability to create all the documents that otherwise would have come our way. In addition, we gutted one of the unused rooms in the administration block, tidied it up, and turned it into a small teachers/secretarial lounge where anyone who needed a computer for small tasks could use one.

Then we finally had time to teach the classes. We only see each group of students once a week with each class lasting only 35 minutes. A lot is lost in the week between when we see the students so we counteract that by teaching only one concept a few weeks in a row. When we were trying to teach a wide survey of computer topics the students would become confused and lost week to week, forgetting everything we had taught them. It becomes a bit boring for us to be teaching the same thing week in and week out, but by pounding in only one concept in this manner, the students truly do learn it. The smiles on their faces as of late, showing that they understand and know they have power over the computer, is a wonderful thing to see. What kinds of concepts are we teaching? Well for example, right now we are working on how to format text in a word processor.

Think in small victories and approach the problem one task at a time is how the administration always told us to think of our work.

Thoughts on general life: Cold and ice.

We were entering into the thick of the hot season, suffering becoming daily routine, when all of a sudden we have been graced by a short reprise of the cold season. The past six days or so have once again returned The Gambia into “heavenly weather” mode and there are nights when you truly need to have a blanket wrapped around tight to keep warm. It reminds me a bit of the opposite effect of an Indian Summer. A short reminder of what delightful weather can be, right when it’s turning sour.

I have been helping Kaddy as much as I can to make the flavored ice treats, and during the Middle School lunch break helping her sell them. It’s a great way to hear all sorts of new language as the women joke, sell, and gossip about anything and everything going on in the school or their own lives. Of course I understand only a small fraction of what is being said, but if I learn just one new word a week, then progress is made. Probably the best thing I have learned through the process is a sort of official slang for what I can best translate as, “Leave me in peace gosh darn it.”

Overall my language skills have seen small improvements, but by no means am I confident in holding meaningful conversations. It seems like I am discovering my own brain’s strengths and weaknesses of learning language. As with learning German, I find myself not doing enough active speaking, rather only actively listening. The result is that when learning a language I gain solid skill in understanding a conversation, but am unable to say much in return. I think a sad point of my PC service has been that I have not given as much energy or progressed as much with language as I would have hoped during pre-departure.

Thoughts on the horrifying: Mice and moving walls.

The field mice that were mentioned in an earlier blog as the recipients of a rather cruel death by circular arm swings have come back in force. It seems like for every one mouse we get rid of two come back, and during the night time you hear them scurrying about the backyard area searching for who knows what. They have so far left the precious cassava crop alone, so there hasn’t been any re-runs of wrath and punishment. However, something tells me that in only a short time war paint will be applied and the hunt will begin.

Have you ever seen a scary movie where a pit of snakes engulfs a floor making it seem from a distance that the ground itself is alive? Or perhaps a swarm of bees so thick that it appears as if a black wall is approaching you? That’s exactly the feeling I had the other day from waking up from a peaceful nap.

As I rubbed my eyes open I looked into my bedroom at the white wall that usually is colored by a few magazine cut outs I have taped up. Then I saw a few dozen ants crawling around the higher parts of the wall and though to myself, “Uh oh, this can’t be good.” What looked like an inconvenience at first turned into a rather horrifying moment as my eyes began to scan the rest of the room that revealed my floor and half way the four walls was pulsating from the movements of hundreds of ants. The scene was not quite the scary movie scenario, but equally traumatizing. Luckily modern science has invented ant/bug spray and my inner Buddhist went quiet as I unleashed a whole can of spray on the infestation. Final result? The whole house reeked of that terrible chemical smell and it took a while to sweep up the freshly spawned graveyard.

When I asked Daboe what the heck it was all about he simply said, “There’s not much you can do. Every once in a while they’ll bring their eggs in the house because it’s cooler there, and when they are ready to hatch all the ants come in to get the eggs and disturb you. It all only takes a few days for them to come and go so it can be easy to miss.”

I suppose my weekly sweepings under all the buckets, large furniture, and trunks is not enough? On the other hand the whole episode is better than what my dad once told me about his Peace Corps days. Something about not checking his shoes before putting them on, only to unhappily discover that during the night a scorpion had taken residence inside of one.

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Happy Birthday Dad.

1 comment:

Unknown said...

Miss you, bud, but can't wait to see you in Vienna! Only a couple more months to go...