The Longest Week

A Baobab tree - I'll be sitting under a few of these!


The week began well with a staff meeting with the new director. I will be arranging an IT meeting to set the directorate IT policy - hopefully after the new team has completed their period of "stabilisation". This involves the director and his colleagues visiting each school in the region to ensure they have enough teachers (and headmasters!) - 60 school visits in total. The Gambian version of "Question Time" visited our offices on Monday - I joined the audience to watch the recording of "Education Forum". Hopefully I'll have appeared on TV looking very interested - you may catch it on Gambia TV's iPlayer!

On Tuesday I was introduced to my new IT Officer - I'll be sharing my skills with him so that he can continue supporting the office after I leave. I suspect most of his time will be spent scanning machines for viruses and fixing old PCs! This brings me nicely back to a PC at Pakalinding Upper Basic school - I scanned it this week and I found 16,700 virus infections.

This must surely count in the Guinness Book of Records! The level of infection here is at epidemic proportions - I'm seriously considering removing Windows and installing Linux on the majority of machines (an operating system with a much lower chance of viral infection). The key here is giving people proper access to word processing, printing and email/Internet and not lining Bill Gates pockets!

The weather this week has been something of a surprise - during my first few week or two in Soma I was surprised at the cool breeze and mild morning/evening temperatures. This week the temperatures have rocketed into the high 30C's/100F with high humidity - hopefully this is the last few weeks of the wet season and things will begin to cool off a bit. Keeping up with the laundry is especially difficult - I'm still doing it by hand, although a local lady has been found who'll do a much better job.

After a long hot week I was hoping for a relaxing weekend to catch up - instead our new director announced a "workshop" for all headmasters/mistresses for Saturday and Sunday. The title for the weekend was "Workshop on Time Tabling and Familiarisation of the Minimum Standards Monitoring Tool for Basic Schools". Providing IT support meant I finished at 2am on Monday morning! We all started again at 8am for the week part 2.