Categories
Mombasa

Safaricom Unlimited Package

OK fellow volunteers, this comes up a lot in conversation, so I thought I’d 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 then for Internet splurging with downloads and video Skyping.  Just send a blank SMS to 555 to activate.  For some reason this info isn’t on their website, but they spammed me with an SMS ad telling me so.  Enjoy!

Categories
Mombasa

Water. A lot.

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 that I must have forgotten to turn off the tap the night before, which is normally of no consequence, since the water only comes out in brief bursts, and besides, it would go straight down the sink.  As I walked to toward the kitchen, however, I couldn’t help but notice that my feet were sloshing in water even before I got out of the bedroom.  I turned the corner and saw that the faucet was running into a basin that was, in turn, spilling onto the kitchen floor.  Water was in every room of the house (granted, I only have three rooms), and as even underneath a couple different power strips on the floor!  I quickly switched off all the power and shut the faucet, and then I spent the next hour and a half scooping up water with a dustpan and tossing it into buckets.

So there you have it: Kenya’s in a drought and my house is flooded and surrounded by rain.  What kind of crazy place is this?

Categories
Mombasa

Blogging By Candlelight

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 on candles while I wait for the electrician.  It’s annoying, but also kind of nice and romantic.

A few of you have asked me how Lamu was, and the answer is, I haven’t gone yet.  The solar computer lab is apparently a few steps away from the part where I come in, so in the meantime I’ve been frantically testing different programs to put on the twenty-or-so old iBooks that have been donated.  They’re pre-Intel Macs, so it’s a little more complicated to get all the Linux stuff working, and to be honest, I haven’t actually installed Linux onto a real system since about 1999, when I helped set up a dedicated Red Hat server for my high school’s web site!  I’ve tried really hard to get Sugar to work, so give the kids in Lamu a One-Laptop-Per-Child experience, but it’s a 1000-step process that I don’t have time for, and even after those steps, it’s buggy on old PowerPC Macs.  I did get it working, but by the end I was cranky and exhausted and impatient with each of the quirks that came up, so I’m scratching it.  Oh, well.  We’ll see what else I can come up with.

Me and my super-Linux-savvy friend setting up a web server in my room, 1999
DCP01783

The video yearbook project is moving along— we’ve shot video for classes 3-8, which leaves 1-2 and the three kindergarten classes.  The lower classes will be the hardest, since the younger the kids, the less likely they are to know how to spell their names for the camera.  So far so good, though.

A still image from the video yearbook-in progress:
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Lastly, my top secret Nairobi project may have been canceled… it’s definitely not looking good.  In fact everyone seems pretty sure that it’s cancelled, but I remain optimistic, mostly because I’m not really in the loop.  Stay tuned.