Hujambo!

Here’s a group photo from the Introduction to Linux seminar I gave last weekend.

The seminar was held at ILRI, Nairobi on April 17th. The Regional Students Group of East Africa seems to be very active in Kenya (especially at ILRI, where the seminar was organized). The intended audience of the seminar was students doing a grad or undergrad course in a field related to Bioinformatics. The slides for the presentation are here.

I’m giving a seminar on the Linux operating system at ILRI on Saturday, April 17th. The audience is around thirty aspiring bioinformaticians from the Regional Students Group of East Africa. Most of the participants are from Kenya, but we’ve had confirmations from students in Uganda and Cameroon as well. I haven’t taught since I left Tala and Holy Rosary College about eight months ago, but I like talking and I like Linux, so it should be a good day!

I’ve been pretty busy at work lately, so I haven’t had so much time to prepare my notes. The target audience is beginners, but the talk is all day and should be both hands-on and intensive. Not wanting to let anyone down, I decided to leave work early today to work on my notes from my house, only to find that there was no electricity in Westlands. Fantastic!

I have walked to the Sarit Centre in Westlands and am now working away to the sweet taste of an iced coffee inside Java House. I might head over to Art Cafe in the Westgate mall just to change the scenery a bit. I still have about 50% of my slides left… oh no!

My two years as a VSO volunteer are coming to an end: I’ve accepted a position as a Linux system administrator with a Kenyan-based non-governmental organization, ILRI. I’ll be working with ILRI from August – December, and then we’ll see after that. I’m done with VSO. That means I’m done with teaching. I’m done with snakes and scorpions. I’m done with Tala. I’m moving to Nairobi. I will miss this place but maisha iendelee ( “life goes on”)!

I arrived in Kenya in October, 2007 and was supposed to stay until October, 2009, but I’ve changed my mind. I began looking around for jobs in April or so I think, and I had just about given up hope when ILRI contacted me in June. Before then I hadn’t heard anything from any of the 7 positions I had applied for. Nothing! Not even an automated “Thanks for your application” response. I guess the sheer number of applications makes those sort of courtesies impractical? Who knows.
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For the past year and a half I’ve been working as a teacher at Holy Rosary College in Tala, Kenya. It has been a great experience but it was a bit nerve racking at first because I wasn’t prepared to be teaching classes. Over my time as a volunteer at the college I’ve taught five different units, for each of which I prepared my own course material. In the community-oriented spirit of open source I’ve decided to post my course notes online.

Unless otherwise noted, these fall under the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial Share Alike license. In a nutshell, you’re free to use them but…

• don’t forget to tell people you borrowed from me!
• no profiteering!
• you can share your additions as long as you use the same license!

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I’m just kidding, because there is nothing special about going back to school (haha?). We should have started classes over three weeks ago but the information never seems to get to all the right people at the right time. Our students always take a bit of extra time anyways. So we’re starting this week. I almost started today. Here’s the breakdown of classes I’ll be teaching:

• Web development I (HTML)
• Network essentials
• Operating systems II (Unix/Linux)

So at least the course count is down from last semester, where I had five classes for awhile there. I’ve taught the networking class three times already (or is it four?), so there’s no problem there, but teaching anything new is always a bit stressful. The course content isn’t anything difficult (not like teaching Object-oriented programming with C++ last semester), but making my own notes every night gets a bit tedious. I could get notes from the other teachers but I never really like the notes. My colleagues use more of a dictation style of teaching, where as I like to write short points on the board and then talk about them.

In other news, it’s been two years since the first post on this website. Back then it was still called Sara in Kenya. In other, other news, sarainkenya.org expires (goes “bye bye”) on May 14th, so go check it out if you have never seen it. You can browse the May, 2007 archives by clicking here: http://alaninkenya.org/2007/05

Update, May 15, 2009: I have saved a copy of the old sarainkenya.org here: http://thefro.org/sarainkenya.org