Day in the Life: July 15, 2009

6:45- Wake up very exhausted from working so late the night before.
7:30- Load the laptops into the car.
8:00- Arrive at Katane Primary School with Rosi, our translator for the day.
8:15- Start the students on editing their newspaper articles. Four separate groups work on four articles, one at a time and each added their own editing. The learners correct grammatical and spelling errors as well as typing errors and sentence coherence, all in English. Surprisingly, they were all extremely interested in this activity.
9:15- Help the learners to think of more topic ideas and start them on article writing. By this point in the week, about three fourths of the learners understand the concept of writing an article and are able to do it themselves.
10:15- Work on Scratch with the learners and actually have some of them do it correctly.
11:00- Take an adventure to the health clinic in Sagweshi Village. It consists of a 20 minute drive up a mountain (whoever decided to put it there was an idiot). If you walk, it’s about an hour; I couldn’t image trying to walk it when healthy, and definitely not when I’m sick. Plus the dirt strip (road) is full of gaping holes and large rocks (one of which we get stuck on).
11:10- Save a distressed baby goat that has a paint-can stuck on its face. Watch it reunite with its mother.
11:25- Get a private tour of the health clinic. It is surprisingly nice considering the state of the village, but it is government run. We also meet the mother of one of our students who recognizes us immediately and “is very excited to meet the people her daughter talks about so much.”
11:50- Adventure back down the hill and be 20 minutes late to Mmaweshi.
12:20- Arrive at Mmaweshi, start on article writing.
1:15- Read the most adorable and amazing article ever: Jan writes about how the laptops are his tool to the future and how much he uses them in school. He also writes about how thankful he was for us from One Here…One There to be at Mmaweshi.
1:30- Canadian journalist, Sonya, arrives. She is writing her graduate thesis on our project, so we catered to her until she gets the hang of what we were doing and starts helping out with the learners.
2:30- Try to have a meeting with the Soul Buddyz, but have it turn into a 45 minute performance. Meeting is postponed due to time constraints. Realize our original documentary idea may not go as planned.
4:00- Unload and charge laptops.
4:30- Send out emails at the Internet Café; meet Sonya for some personal interviews about the project. Blogs are postponed because the café closes.
6:30- Eat dinner back at Thusanang Trust.
7:30- Meet with Gary at the Pot and Plow. We talk about Swaziland (he used to live there) so that when we go we have some kind of idea of where to go and what to do.
8:30- Start the process of counting laptops. First we have to separate the old ones by school and match each one with its learner. Then we have to count the new ones. After three weeks of dragging laptops around we don’t know if they’ve all been returned every day. Next we count the “extra” laptops. These are the laptops donated from Larry Weber and KYP.
9:15- Freak out because we think we are missing 20 to 30 laptops (we find out later we are not, don’t worry OLPC)
9:45- Decide we need a fool-proof system set in place when we return the laptops to the schools.
10:00- Work on specs for the Newspaper application. This involves drawing out each page of the application exactly how we want it to look on screen. We also design each newspaper template. We also do much needed laundry.
11:00- Try to work on blogging and other things but accidentally pass out until morning.

Total time working: 16 hours and 15 minutes…and you don’t even know about everything we did the next day.