Recovery Mode

I just wrote a long blog entry, but Blogger 'decided' to dump it. Here's the digest version, I guess:

Peter Knight is feeling better but not fully recovered yet. He visited the hospital today to see how things are going in the hands of CUAMM and the doctor from Juba. (James is a Mundari man who grew up in Khartoum and was educated there. Jim has a lot of respect for him.) Then Peter came and sat in the office compound under the mango tree, so Jim got to meet him and I got to catch up with him a bit. He confirmed Jim's sense that things at the hospital are much better than they were when Deb and Dan did their assessment in December/January.

Stephen left for Juba this morning on the Mundri Express. He's renewing his passport so he can go to Kampala to get the grinding mill parts taken care of and see Lillian and David. Margaret's brother Peter sent her some chicken feed from Nairobi so maybe the chickens in the chicken house will develop faster. It seems to be stored in the Mothers' Union office and to have gotten a bit damp in the rain last night, so it stinks a lot here in the diocesan office next door.

It rained all night, but everyone says it hardly rained. The sand here is very absorbent!The only apparent consequence of the rain is that the flies are more energetic and abundant.

Today I spent time with Gordon and Vasco working out how they can teach pastors and teachers to use computers and the Internet. Now that we have the VSAT system, it is more likely to be affordable; they'd been sheltering our diocese from the cost of sharing with others here. But I have to help them set up profiles to guard their files from others, and we need to turn off images in Firefox. The other thing I did today was fix the wireless connection on Vasco's computer. I was all set to phone the techs in Kampala, but I ended up figuring it out myself. This makes me almost as happy as being able to pull off the pastors' conference -- it's not my field, but I can do it!

The adult ed conference is going pretty well. It seems like adults are taught like children here, so we are focusing on how adults are different and what they can do to teach them more effectively. The top 3 problems faced by these adult ed teachers were pretty much deja vu for me: lack of training and pay for teachers, lack of suitable materials, and students failing to persist in their studies. Since I spend huge amounts of my time at work trying to deal with the last, I felt well equipped to describe the problem, but I suspect I made our methods of addressing it sound more effective than they are! Student persistence is a universal problem, and teachers are never paid enough and never have all the materials they think they need.

Tomorrow we are asking them to bring some of their materials and be prepared to talk about how they would teach a typical lesson in a way that works for auditory, visual, and kinesthetic learners (all new ideas to them). We will also reread a text on the adult learner as an ESL lesson (Mary did it with them today as a reading class, like she'd do in her Forest Park classroom), and we'll address whatever issues of English language they decide to bring to us. The hardest thing for me about this conference is how little time we have vs how much I want to discuss.

Lunch today was again just bread and chicken. Breakfast is always bread, but we do have epekyidise (ep-eh-chee-de-see), which is a yummy mix of honey (epe) and peanut butter or sesame butter. Not sure if I'm spelling the word right except for the epe part.