Talk and formalities at Fourah Bay College

Fourah Bay College is at a great hill-top location over-looking Freetown. I loved the drive up, Sillah avoiding traffic by taking narrow streets in the neighborhoods between Texaco and campus, me intaking every single bit of city I could see. 

This morning Tucker and I gave a talk to 2^nd year students, per request of the Head of the Linguistics Department. Our aim was to encourage them to do language documentation in the future, talking about multilingualism and language endangerment, and sharing some of our experience in the field. Since Tucker took care of the more theoretical part (diglossia, particular cases, metrics in Sierra Leone), I concentrated on comparing the different situations I encountered doing fieldwork in West-Africa, California and the Amazon.

Then Tucker introduced me to several big people at the university and we finally collected a couple of batteries to be used with the solar panels we purchased for the project. Tucker had donated these and other batteries to the College awhile back, after concluding one of his projects.

Now, it turns out that the wi-fi system we ordered from E-magine is not ready yet -as of yesterday it hadn't been put together in the US, nevermind shipped over to Sierra Leone. So we're probably going to head to Moribaya / Tangbaya on Monday without the full equipment. Tucker has arranged for someone else to go to the post office to pick up the remaining equipment as soon as it arrives to Freetown.

PS1 I'm writing this on my laptop a restaurant next to an Internet Cafe, which is out of action due to lack of electricity.

PS2 OK, now we're in a different Internet Cafe with electricity, but the connection is so slow... it's unbeliveable. Well, except because yesterday's connection was even worse! Gmail on HTML wouldn't always load :(

PS3 I'll start to carry a USB cable around so I can (try to) upload low resolution images as I publish blogposts. (I got my camera with me but this laptop doesn't have a card slot).


Update: added the image above -impossible to add any more due to poor connection :(