The Flood Gates Have Opened

Good news! I got internet set up at the school yesterday, so now I will have internet in my office/server room/closet. More importantly, I guess, the students and teachers will have internet access for educational purposes. I set up a proxy server so it can share the connection with other computers, but we have very limited bandwidth to work with. We have a 230 Kbps connection which is really fast for this area, but that speed drastically diminishes with each computer that uses the proxy server. I'll probably only share the line with maybe 4-5 other computers at most.

I could have had the internet working a few days ago, but I refused to believe that the Basse area had a wireless MAN (Metropolitan Area Network) without me knowing. Some mysterious man I had never seen before brought a wireless ISDN modem here a few days ago, and said "Plug this in. This will give you internet." I was like "Uhh...no it won't.. idiot.. maybe in China it would give you internet.. go away.. weirdo.. " Well, out of boredom I found the drivers for it and installed it, and it actually worked. It was baffling. Just as mysteriously as the man with the modem appeared, the internet began working. Some U.S. cities are just now getting MAN's, so I was a tad bit surprised. Having wireless MAN's here makes a lot more sense because the country has no copper or fiber infrastructure anyways. And the country is really flat for the most part, so signals can travel with more ease.

Now the problem is allocating enough internet time to 1000 students and 25 teachers. We're probably going to limit it to Grade 12 students only, and the teachers can use it 1 night a week. It's been a mob scene here today. All the students know the internet is working, and they all want to use it. The same goes for the teachers. I don't even know if I'm safe here right now. They've basically been pressing their faces against the windows looking in the computer lab today. They are eager to get in touch with the rest of the world. Many of them see the internet as their ticket to move to the U.S. or Europe. Others just want to go to their favourite football team's website. I'm hoping there are some that want to use it to actually learn something, and there seems to be.

This week was the first week that I had the students using the computers. This week is the introduction to the keyboard, and next week will be the introduction to the mouse. I had each of them type their names, 2 sentences, and 2 questions. Most of the sentences or questions they wrote said something like "Please take me to America with you," or "I want to use the internet," or "Will you teach me to write e-mails?", or "I want to live with my brother in Europe." It's difficult to make sure everyone is getting a chance to use the computer when there's sometimes 5 students on 1 computer and 3 chairs.

Here's some new pictures of where I live and work:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/52546085@N00/

and my older ones..

http://www.flickr.com/photos/97939559@N00/

Here's my host brothers and sisters dancing and playing on my new djembe and a view of Basse from a hill: