Hujambo!

Telecommunications companies in Kenya are extremely profitable. Just the other day Safaricom announced record profits for the past year, making it the most profitable company in all of East AND Central Africa. As astonishing as the announcement is, I’m not surprised (I come from the United States, where many corporations are among the largest “economies” in the world). The part that really gets me is the ridiculous marketing slogans these companies choose to brainwash the masses into buying their crap. While Safaricom is the “big man on campus,” Celtel is also very popular in Kenya (and equally ridiculous).
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Holy Rosary College has now arrived to the 21st century: we now have a website! You can check it out here.

While my main work here is teaching students and training staff, one of my other responsibilities was to create a website for the college. Well I’m proud to announce that we are now on the world wide web, but before you applaud me, applaud Mark!  Mark was the VSO volunteer here before me, and he was the one who originally created the website.  Unfortunately, sometime between him leaving in 2006 and me arriving in late 2007, the website disappeared.

A few months ago I stumbled upon a copy of the website on one of our servers here at the college.  After some procrastination I finally got around to updating the college’s contact information and making some phone calls to some people in high places.  Behold, Holy Rosary’s website… back from the dead!

Well it’s official, I’m a teacher now!  A new semester is here and I’ve now taught for a week and a day!  It’s the beginning of week two and I’ve had five class sessions already.  This semester I’ll be teaching three units: Networking Essentials and Introduction to Programming and Algorithms for the students, and Introduction to Linux for the staff.  That’s one class every day, so I’ll be very busy writing lesson plans, assignments, and continuous assessment tests (CATs)…

On the first day of class I usually write my name, the course number, and the course title on the board.  Last semester I wrote “Mr. Orth” and a few students giggled; I guess they could see right through the act, as I’m not really the formal type.  This semester I told my students to please call me “Alan.”  Among other things, I also tell them to please ask questions.

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Most of you should recall that this website used to be located at sarainkenya.org, but when I returned to Kenya without Sara I relocated to alaninkenya.org. I designed a cheesy placeholder for the old website just in case any stragglers dropped by.

The site features a funny picture of me “hunting crabs” while on vacation in Kenya’s coastal city of Watamu. Sara is pictured with some fancy bread and a cute hat, taken during her dietetic internship at Cal Poly, San Luis Obispo.

Well that website expires on May 14th, 2008, so go check it out before it’s too late. Now is a good time to update your bookmarks as well. If May 14th has already passed you can now find Sara’s personal website at: http://barefootdietitian.com.

Until next time, adios!

I was walking past a large crowd in Tala’s market the other day when I heard a man yell…

“Hey! Yesu amerudi! Habari yako, yesu?”

It means “Jesus has returned! How are you, Jesus?”  Haha!  The large crowd had gathered for some small entertainment (juggling, music, traditional medicines… who knows) but they all stopped to look and laugh when their front man stopped the show to point me out.  I just said, “Mzuri sana” and my friend and I walked off laughing.

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