Project updates

Hi,

Yesterday I wrote a blogpost at home to publish it today at an
Internet cafe, as I've been doing so far (sometimes with two days
delay). Since we were planning on doing the shopping for the trip too,
I had the great idea to save the Open office document in a USB stick.
Of course this Internet Cafe doesn't have Open office and I can't use
that text now, so I'll try to recall everything:

The bad stuff

- the wi-fi station we want to set up in Tangbaya has yet to be
shipped from the US because of further complications, including that
IMAGINE got the wrote piece from their provider.

- along with the wi-fi station comes the inverter, which means that
for now we can't do anything with the solar panels we already got with
us. So we bought a generator and we'll be using that for a couple of
weeks, until the other package arrives.

- Bart, who's in charge of the filming, broke 2 ribs and won't be able
to travel as planned. We're hoping that he'll recover soon enough/will
be allowed to fly later on and coincide in the field with me for 4-6
days.

The good stuff

- i watched all the videos i hadn't had a chance to watch yet with
Mani songs, stories and an interview with the counselor. We'll have
lots of work transcribing them and that should be fun! I was glad to
see, too, that my language knowledge was coming back as I watched more
and more videos.

- i also used ELAN for the first time a couple of nights ago. It
allows you to transcribe video or audio easily without losing track of
the context. you can even merge multiple files in one and do a single
transcription. You can use separate layers for different speakers :)

- we got lots of info and encouragement from the counselor of Mani
origin based in Kambia. He'll very well educated and actually running
for the district elections campaign this year, after ensuring the
party internal election first.

Upcoming

We're traveling to Tangbaya tomorrow morning and I expect not to have
internet connection for 2-4 weeks. Hopefully it'll be only 2 weeks and
I'll be able to write from the field and report back on how the kids
are doing in the computer and Mani literacy process :)

PS the connection is so bad, blogger won't let me post via the UI, so
I'm doing it by email!