Day 5 - technical problems
Tuesday, May 9th, day 5 - First part of the day the usual usual. Though now there was a Belgian team working on a women's reproductive health project staying in the main part of our hotel, whom we saw at breakfast (two Belgians, four locals). Arrived at ENATEF there were two white land cruisers with the GIZ logo on them there. That's the German development bureau that's funding my Ghana project, don't know what they're currently doing at ENATEF.
Fast forward to after the days lecturing, everyone got suited up, we got the smoker lit, all this took like twenty minutes which is usual. Then we didn't go anywhere, so i asked Bara what the hold up was.
"There aren't any more occupied hives it seems, just that one"
So we ended up going and looking at the hives, kind of miming going through them and discussing them with everyone around, since we weren't limited by number of suits. We did a similar thing one time in Ghana last year and it also went well. And it's very ironic that the photographer had really wanted to do exactly that and we hadn't been able to get that to happen yesterday.
Then we drove about 30km, which took about an hour, to go see a nearby Peace Corps volunteer. And i wanted to give her a copy of a good beekeeping-in-Africa book I've brought several copies of.
She is based at another agricultural college, this out in a more rural area. The road to get there had numerous very big holes full of water. It seemed like a serene bucolic place. She's only been there a few weeks, only having arrived in Guinea in February and then there's ten weeks of language training in the capital. She was from Massachusetts. Seemed nice.
Hour back once again on the bumpy road for a bit.
Arriving home to the hotel i intended to work on the slide show I'll use tomorrow. Specifically, to make a slide I've been procrastination making for a year now, and now that i need it tomorrow it's time to finally do it. So i get out my computer and ...
... well it turns out i left my charging cable at the training center. No worries i just have to be quick about it to get it all done on the battery and then I'll be reunited with the cable tomorrow. So i go to turn the computer on and...
Well see last post. Didn't panic tooo much because this is exactly what happened last year and was an easy fix in the end (loose connection to hard drive). But needed a screwdriver to open it up. The translator and driver fortunately both readily agreed to go into town to look for the screwdriver for me. Even though it was after 7 (or 8 even?). While they were out i drew up the diagram for the slide. I have no skills at drawing on the computer so i often end up hand drawing diagrams and then photographing them.
Guys came back w the screwdriver, which they'd managed to borrow from someone. Did the brain surgery on the computer. At first it wouldn't start at all and i was very panicked but finally it worked. Then it was being VERY slow. Like super tediously. And i thought it might have been related to the repair I'd just done but then i realized it was just the internet. But as i had photographed the diagram with my phone and needed to re download it from Google photos to use, this was a problem. As in it was taking over ten minutes just to load a page and recall without the charging cable i had a finite amount of battery time.
I was a bit exasperated with the amount of technical hurdles to what should have been a simple undertaking. That's what i get for procrastinating i guess. Finally i got it done though.
The end.
Fast forward to after the days lecturing, everyone got suited up, we got the smoker lit, all this took like twenty minutes which is usual. Then we didn't go anywhere, so i asked Bara what the hold up was.
"There aren't any more occupied hives it seems, just that one"
So we ended up going and looking at the hives, kind of miming going through them and discussing them with everyone around, since we weren't limited by number of suits. We did a similar thing one time in Ghana last year and it also went well. And it's very ironic that the photographer had really wanted to do exactly that and we hadn't been able to get that to happen yesterday.
Then we drove about 30km, which took about an hour, to go see a nearby Peace Corps volunteer. And i wanted to give her a copy of a good beekeeping-in-Africa book I've brought several copies of.
She is based at another agricultural college, this out in a more rural area. The road to get there had numerous very big holes full of water. It seemed like a serene bucolic place. She's only been there a few weeks, only having arrived in Guinea in February and then there's ten weeks of language training in the capital. She was from Massachusetts. Seemed nice.
Hour back once again on the bumpy road for a bit.
Arriving home to the hotel i intended to work on the slide show I'll use tomorrow. Specifically, to make a slide I've been procrastination making for a year now, and now that i need it tomorrow it's time to finally do it. So i get out my computer and ...
... well it turns out i left my charging cable at the training center. No worries i just have to be quick about it to get it all done on the battery and then I'll be reunited with the cable tomorrow. So i go to turn the computer on and...
Well see last post. Didn't panic tooo much because this is exactly what happened last year and was an easy fix in the end (loose connection to hard drive). But needed a screwdriver to open it up. The translator and driver fortunately both readily agreed to go into town to look for the screwdriver for me. Even though it was after 7 (or 8 even?). While they were out i drew up the diagram for the slide. I have no skills at drawing on the computer so i often end up hand drawing diagrams and then photographing them.
Guys came back w the screwdriver, which they'd managed to borrow from someone. Did the brain surgery on the computer. At first it wouldn't start at all and i was very panicked but finally it worked. Then it was being VERY slow. Like super tediously. And i thought it might have been related to the repair I'd just done but then i realized it was just the internet. But as i had photographed the diagram with my phone and needed to re download it from Google photos to use, this was a problem. As in it was taking over ten minutes just to load a page and recall without the charging cable i had a finite amount of battery time.
I was a bit exasperated with the amount of technical hurdles to what should have been a simple undertaking. That's what i get for procrastinating i guess. Finally i got it done though.
The end.