Liam in Africa

This is a blog dedicated to Liam Hanks' trip to The Gambia. Please feel free to leave comments! Be sure to check out the Archives for older posts so you can get the whole story!

Sunday, August 13, 2006

"Busy as a Bee!"

Demba Badjie, who is one of the multitiudes of people who live in the same compound as me, says constantly that I am 'Busy as a Bee!' Its true too. I almost never have time at home, and even when I am at home I have to clean or cook or... sleep. This last week, even on my days off I've been going here and there.... working constantly.
I've decided to undertake the monstrous work of putting in place a standard set of courses (based on the GCF courses) that can be used as a cirriculum for anybody who teaches the comptuer classes. I am also right now in the process of creating a book of all of my notes from this class I have been teaching about Excel for my students to use in preparing for their exam. That in itself has turned out to be WAY more work than I had thought - and I had anticipated it to be a lot of work! Ugh.
Also, because of the age of the computers currently being used in the classroom, I have to go to other places to use computers up to the task of creating the course. I spent all of Wednesday at Bob and Barbara's working on all of this, and barely made a start. I went back on Saturday, but the power went out shortly after I arrived, and still hadn't come on when I left.
Also this week, I've had to create a presentation about the life of Shoghi Effendi, Guradian of the Baha'i Faith from 1921-1957. I created the entire thing from quotes out of two books, but it was still a huge amount of work. You can download the presentation as PDF here.
This morning I presented (which means I read) my thing on The Guardian, and it was well recieved. Unlike most people here I have the ability to project my voice - in fact I do it naturally when speaking in or to groups, so I've ended up being 'voluntold' a couple of times to do presentations and whatnot.
We tried this morning to get a round of 'king of kings' going after the devotinoal meeting this morning. Although everyone else was enthusiastic, I eventually gave up - I seemed to be the only person who knew the tune and was able to keep it... after a while it was a bit agonizing for me!
I've come to enjoy the pain inflicted upon one's tounge by spicy food. Afra is quite spicy, but tastes so good that I always force myself to eat it, despite the pain, and I'm finding more and more that it doesn't bother me! hehe.
...Still no new computers... They're here, but havn't been brought to me yet!