Site Visit

I am in Fara Fenni, staying in my house for the next two years, on "site visit" as a part of training. It's a big town - more than 20,000 inhabitants - with none of the village charm of Bambako. The transition will be a big one, from training, from seeing all my friends so much, from the family and people I had in Bambako to this new situation. For the first time in my life, I feel like a kid from the sticks coming to the city and really disliking it. But, I am sure this will pass, I will get settled and start working. Tomorrow I am going to Njaba Kunda to see the senior secondary school (like high school in the States) there. I will be working with them to get power and get their computers working. All of the senior secondary schools in the Gambia recieved Pentium 4 desktop machines (either 10 or 20 of them depending on the size of the school) but some of the schools can't afford the generators to run them. I would love to work out solutions using solar power, but it does seem quite feasible here yet. I am not sure solar is ready to power desktop computers anywhere (or maybe desktop computers aren't ready to run on solar power). In any case, that will be a good challenge for the next couple years, and perhaps the school in Njaba Kunda has bought the generator they said they were going to buy and we can start working with a few computers this month.
Next week is the end of training and then swearing in. I will be an actual volunteer at last. Most of us are itching for training to be complete, but I am more ambivalent. Training has been easy and fun for me, and I recognize - especially now that I have been here a couple days - that we are about to start the challenging part. All the same, it will be nice to have the training wheels come off, and to get back to being more of an adult. And to get into the final transition for a while. My house isn't all that I dreamed it might be, but I will be able to make it nice and do a lot of the things I have been wanting to do. One of the great things about Fara Fenni is that I will be able to get almost anything I need here - there is a good market and we have a lumo (weekly market/ farmers' market) on Sundays. Also, being so close to Senegal will probably have advantages, assuming they ever reopen the border. It has been closed for two weeks at least because of a dispute over an increase in ferry charges. Some say the Senegalese are too used to pushing the Gambians around, others say that the ferry is used mostly by Senegalese going to Casamance (the part of Senegal south of the Gambia) and that a 100% (roughly) increase in fares is exorbitant. Hopefully the border reopens soon, as carrots and cabbage, to mention only two things, have disappeared and prices for other items are on the rise.
It's been a half an hour now and I still haven't been able to login to my email. The entire country of the Gambia has an 8 megabit connection to the rest of the world. That's the same as some businesses have in the States, here shared by a nation 200 miles long. Reportedly, it's supposed to triple sometime soon - it may have already, but the internet cafes are pretty terrible in terms of speed. That, and they all have internet explorer and no Firefox. I am planning to work with the people who run this cafe, so maybe I will be able to upgrade their machines and help them with some of the details.
So that's a bit about a bit. On Saturday morning I am off to Kombo for a week of enjoying the life there, getting sorted out before returning here as a volunteer and getting to work. It promises to be .... something.