January 9, 6:25 AM – Unlike Lilongwe, Tete, Mozambique seems to be immersed in a rainy season – rain, rain, and more rain when I woke up this morning. Periods of rain are punctuated with long power outages. These seem to hit in the afternoon and last until the evening – at least that has been the pattern for the last four days – at least I have had electricity in the evening, which is when the spiders are at their most active.
I met my second group of students last Thursday afternoon – a group of ten who have no computer skills. Nor do most of them speak English.
Thanks to the power outage, we couldn’t use the eight computers which make up the high school computer lab, so everyone ended up taking turns on this laptop. I had found a mouse training program, which uses some basic games to get adults to practice clicking, double-clicking, drag and drop. Everyone seemed to enjoy that. Then I put them into PowerPoint and had them try to “draw and color” a picture of a simple house, to give them further practice. Unfortunately, if we continue this way, they won’t have a chance to progress much, as the key to progress is computer time, especially to get them comfortable with the mouse. If you’ve been using a computer forever, you’ve probably forgotten how difficult it is to get the hang of the mouse.
As far as I’m concerned, PowerPoint is an ideal program for computer literacy, as it provides lots of opportunities to use a mouse, and you don’t need to understand English to use it. And it’s a lot more interesting than typing plain text into Word!
I had planned to walk to town yesterday, but the rain and consequent mud kept me inside. It made for a long Saturday – and has contributed to this morning’s primary consideration, that I am going to have to get to town in a day or so as my toilet paper stash has dwindled to almost nothing. I am about to start my second of two emergency rolls, Coghlan’s Tissue on the Go!, which I picked up from Mountain Equipment Coop on a whim, when I was buying my last load of travel supplies. Perhaps the glamour of real North American 2-ply tissue went to my head, but I went through almost an entire roll yesterday. Well, they are small. I highly recommend keeping one or two around, for when you are going, on the go.
On the bright side, I put my time to good use, and assembled a 37 slide PowerPoint deck for teaching QuickBooks, as well as a Non-Profit Accounting simulation exercise, which I’ll use next week. We spent last week converting Saul’s July 2010 spreadsheet into Quickbooks, and learning the basics of creating a Chart of Accounts, and using the general journal. My simulation is a simplified version to practice what we learned, and to move beyond, to take advantage of the QuickBooks customer and vendor workflow, budgeting etc. It includes 19 different accounting transactions to highlight QuickBooks functionality. Working on it gave me a great sense of satisfaction, knowing I have gone from not understanding the program myself, to being able to grasp the basics of how to use it for non-profits. Of course, I am somewhat hindered by my lack of sophisticated Accounting knowledge, but fortunately, the accountants here don’t need to bother with taxes, depreciation and buying on credit.
Understanding QuickBooks is a feat which took the better part of all my spare time last week! But I converted my knowledge into PowerPoint so I am quite pleased with myself. Figuring it all out, although taxing, was also exhilarating.
To cut through the silence here, I am on my second listening of Larry’s audiobook, Lord of the Flies, which is one of my all-time favourite books. I am currently on disk 3, Ralph is, coincidentally, planning his toilet, dreaming of having a proper wash, haircut, doing his nails etc. I had similar thoughts while in bed this morning – the lack of hot water has reduced me to quick in and out shower moments, and boiling water to fill the sink for spot-jobs.
I also woke up to another jolt – the sound of someone clearing his throat and moving about. Although it sounded like that someone was in the house, I forced myself, again, to recognize that is impossible, and that the person was likely at the back of the house, probably the guard. Since I keep the screened windows open for fresh air, sound travels. Although I consciously believe this, I am subconsciously expecting to encounter an intruder.
I’ve finally gotten to use my two water filters – to remove invisible sentiment first, and then a zap with my ultraviolet generating SteriPen to kill any microorganisms which otherwise would be partying in my digestive tract. This means that I can say that I have been able to use virtually everything that I brought with me, including a sweater, as it is quite chilly here this morning – probably in the low 70s. VERY low 70s.
I am staring down a LONG Sunday – I had planned to walk to church, but I’m not sure what time it starts and suspect it will be in Portuguese – not to mention the mud and frequent rain showers which discourage me from leaving home.
I may spend some time trying to barrel through the other PowerPoint slideshow that I need to finish here – two sets, one of basic Office skills, one of more complex skills. I started it already, but it’s kind of boring, as I know that material inside and out. It currently has 114 slides, and I’m on slide 16. My goal is to have it finished before I leave here. The students had asked for notes, so I thought this would be a good way to distribute them – I’ll convert them to Adobe reader.
Time for breakfast – granola and milk. I brought supplies here, which I have been going through quickly – unlike Bill`s assertion that ``no one gains weight in Africa``, I have done just that! It`s distressing, but fortunately I had a supply of cookies to help me overcome the weight gain anxiety. I brought non-perishables, expecting to supplement with fresh food from the local market, but since I didn`t go out yesterday, that hasn`t happened.
Rebecca would be proud of me – I had a can of vegetarian curry last night, which had beans, potatoes, carrots and some kind of ``meat protein``, which resembled ground beef. Thanks to the thick curry sauce, I was able to convince myself it was actually meat, so felt better. There`s not a huge variety of canned products available here – most are from South Africa. I also enjoyed a can of Mussel Soup, although it tasted like mussels, I couldn`t see evidence of any large pieces of mussel. I finished up the small jar of crunchy Skippy peanut butter yesterday, which had seen me through the Korea Garden Hotel experience as well. I could have bought Malawi peanut butter, but wasn`t sure of its keeping properties, so I spent more to get the imported kind. I also found some of those ubiquitous Chinese noodles, which I`ll have for lunch. As a brief nod to food variety, I do have a bag of Granny Smith apples, which are disappearing at a rate much slower than the cookies (I`m down to a half box of peanut butter ones), and three individual servings of fruit yogurt, which I have been rationing. The cookies were meant for my students, but since the first group didn`t seem all that hungry, I ended up chowing down through them myself. Yes, I admit that was wrong.
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