(sorry, I’ve been missing my Megatokyo…)
Boy, I never know when they’re gonna hit, but when they do they’re pretty intense. I’ve been in the middle of another coding binge for the last five or six days, pulling 10 – 12 hour stretches from morning until night, with short reprises to walk over to the office to get online to do some research, check email, get lunch, and just stretch the legs a bit. But let me tell you, I’ve made some killer progress on this app in the last week.
Alright, so this post is going to be sort of quick I hope… I haven’t written since I was in Cinque Terre, and that was about 3 weeks ago, give or take. So I’ve been neglecting my blog. Let me recap a bit so you can at least know what I’ve been up to, sans the nitty gritty details.
To maintain sanity, it’s important to occasionally take your routine and, as it slowly hardens into a fixed and immutably rigid structure, strike it with a blow of sufficient force to shatter it to pieces. This isn’t to say you should throw away what you have and start over from scratch (although that is always an option), but rather that you should “mix things up” every now and again, allowing those component pieces to reallocate themselves into a different and perhaps more interesting configuration. Variety is the spice of life.
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Well, not really break, more like time-when-I’ll-work-but-not-so-much-at-school. But it’s a break from school, so the next two months are hereby christened “Break.” Amin.
So yeah, school’s wrapping up, got one more week of classes (this week), and then exams for the next two weeks, and that’s it! My students will have their exam for my class next Monday, so really I’ll finish up next Monday, inshallah. I really can’t wait for it, ’cause my students are mostly mentally already on break, as am I, so this week is definitely going to drag and fly by all at the same time. Isn’t it funny how time can do that? It’s really good, though, that school will finish up so soon, as my NPCS project needs my attention more and more these days, and I want to spend more and more time on it these days, so it’s really a win-win situation.
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This last week was my education group’s first Inter Service Training, or IST. It took place very close to my home, which is nice – it could have been anywhere in The Gambia, and it just so happens that admin decided on this place that’s just quite literally a stone’s throw from my front door. I mean, I could really chuck a rock from my house and break one of their windows. That close. Pretty convenient.
Where’ve I been, you ask? It’s been weeks since my last post, I’ve been slow to respond with emails – I mean heck, it’s almost like I’ve fallen off the face of the earth, so to speak. Well, that obviously hasn’t happened, but what has happened is that I’ve dived head-first into a multi-week coding binge from which I’ve still yet to surface for anything more than a brief moment to get a breath of air, and then I’m back at it.
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So, a few months ago, another Vermonter Peace Corps Volunteer I know who’s currently serving in Jordan and I decided to see if we could put together some kind of publication in one of the major papers in Vermont, with the intention to inform people back home about people in these countries, and in particular, to compare and contrast Islam in Jordan (an Arab country) and The Gambia (a non-Arab country). A major purpose of this endeavor is to get the point across to Americans that the vast majority of Muslims in the world are good, peaceful people without a violent bone in their bodies – something that might need to be reinforced when one is bombarded daily with stories about “Islamic extremists” engaged in acts of terrorism. One must remember that extremists are just that: extreme. Not common. Not the norm in any sense of the word.
So, last week was a break between the second and third terms for all of us teaching here in The Gambia, and I decided – late Saturday night, as it were – to go traveling upcountry to Basse for a week, leaving early Monday morning.
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The following is an excerpt from a response I wrote to an individual in the Peace Corps Boston office, requesting answers to some generic questions about life as a Peace Corps Volunteer in the Education sector. I spent like three hours writing it so I figured it would be good to share it here, whether or not Boston decides to use it for anything.
…if you come to The Gambia: they’re awful. Besides the fact that there are just a few of them scattered around the country (to my knowledge, there are three in Kombo, and one in Basse), they suffer from more problems than I’ve ever seen with ATMs back home.