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Published: December 9th 2010
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Dear Family and Friends
Already last weekend I went to Dakar for a conference.
I wrote most of this blog while sitting at the Open Africa unference(unconference if such a thing can exist, I suppose though when you gather a large body of social inept, but technologically inclined techies in a conference they tend to shy away from concrete plans rather starting the conference on the fly, which i find quite an ingenious (un)system. So what this (un)conference is, is a low key meeting where people show up present information on technology. This is called a barcamp, which is a cousin to foocamps, things are fairly chaotic, no set talks set, nor time tables thing more set up on the fly. Any way as i sat and watched the disorganize chaos materialize into some kind of organization I thought that this would be a perfect opportunity to update you on my going ons in St. Louis.
So I have several projects on the run while I am here in Senegal. First and fore most I am still technically with Edulogos, however, with them besides some small work here and there I have been largely on my own. As
I mentioned last week I am working with Caritas, a bit ironic for the raging atheist to be closely working with a Catholic charity, but hey, life has some interesting twist and turns. Unfortunately there is not much work on that front.
So for my work with the Talibé, it falls into two mains categories, mapping and semi consulting. I am attempting to have as much overlap between the two projects. For the mapping, it started off as an idea that was bounced between me and Jeorie, when I stumbled upon a list of all the Daara in Saint-Louis from 2005. In the list there were addresses, which we naively initially believed could just be typed into Google map... When I got my hands on the list, the addresses were "by the north side of the large mosque"... somehow I do not see that working with Google, let alone me. So that idea was put on the back burner for quite a while. Than a couple weeks ago, my mate Dan mentioned that he was talking with the president of Daara Vision Senegal about ideas and projects, who mentioned that someone ought to map all the Daara's in Saint
Louis. When I heard this, i thought perfect let’s do it. So ever so slowly, I mean really slowly, I have been trying to visit and compile information about Daara's.
I am tryng to not go about this all willy nilly, eg I do not just want to mark a Daara, what I want to do is have the name of the Daara, name of the Marabout, number of talibe, in which quarter in Saint-Louis etc. For my progress you can see it
here this shows the 7 daaras that work with Daara Vision Senegal and if you cruise around on the site you can see where I put in the information and what some of the applications can be for my research and presentation. In hind site now that I am done school, I really wish I had taken a statistic class, as I am becoming more and more interested in the utility and the practicality of using this kind of tools. As well if understood these kind of stats I could atleast manipulate many of the numbers for presentations and such.
Any who for the practical side in this work, I have to physically go to each
of these daaras to get the GPS data so I can put in on the map. This also requires that I go with a local as i have no flipping idea where the "large mosque" is or which building on the north side would be the Daara. All in all, this has been a very fun experience as i learn how to use technology and teach myself a whole set of new task and skills to get this job done. it is alot of fun to find these problems and then try to solve them. The other thing on this project is that I refuse to do it alone, part of my policy is work with others at all times that including locals and other volunteers, in part because i think that more people should know and understand how it works, but also i just frankly do not like working alone. I did 2 years of isolating school work and I am tired of being alone in my work.
So as you can see from my pictures that the talibé live in some pretty hellish conditions, I do not really want to go into too many details, as well
since I have seen so many daara’s now I am becoming desensitized to the poverty. Also I hope that the pictures can kinda speak for themselves.
This brings me to my second set of work which is my consultant/assistant work. this is also alot of fun but more painful in the work side. With Daara Vision Senegal their funding has been threatened to be cut, thus the association is frantically trying to reorganize themselves to prove that they should not be cut. Thus planning and evaluation of current projects are the main activities as well as maintaining the regular schedule as well. At the moment I am help writing the repport, but things have been very slow as Africa time keeps rearing its ugly head to thwart my efforts at getting things done efficiently.
On a totally unrelated front I have been sick again, I had to call in reinforcements to win the war with Africa's bacteria living in my digestion tract. I have been currently waging a war of attrition with these microorganisms, I was ever so slowly getting better. I had several days of almost normalcy and with the odd bout of rumblings. I thought I was
on the mend, but then I got a good dose of food poisoning, which lost me all the ground that I had so painfully fought for. Thus I am hoping that a tactical strike with heavy barrage of antibiotics will uproot the enemy from their heavily fortified positions.
Another side note, my camera batteries so kindly died, switched them, but either i put in the other battery incorrectly, there is sand in camera, or the release battery mechanism is broken, long story short is that the batteries will not come out of my camera... Joy.
Hope everyone's xmass shopping and preperation is going good! And do not worry I am enjoying the balmy 25 degree weather.
Love
Jan
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Jeff & Marianne
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Amazing blog, Jan. Thanks so much. Your descriptions of life for children in Africa makes nearly all of the struggles we face in the British Columbia seem inconsequential. What a world those children face! Great blog! I hope you can keep posting!