snot-nosed child

Originally uploaded by Fono.

Here I am! I am alive and well (I think.) The parasites and bacteria may have already invaded my system and may be already preparing a coup — it’s hard to tell during the incubation period. Life is an adventure!

The purpose of this post is basically just to say that I’m going to start posting now, with the exception of this particular post. I do, however, have the obligatory “solemn looking african child” photo for your viewing enjoyment. It is a rule that if you go to a developing country you have to take a closeup of a solemn looking child.

The basic summary: I am living in a rural suburb (Bayan Loco) of a village (Kafanchan) in the middle of Nigeria, about 200km from the nearest place with things like sidewalks and 2-story buildings. The population here is over 1 million, which in Nigeria qualifies you only as a “village.” I’m working at an NGO called the Fantsuam Foundation, which has a huge smorgasbord of projects, mainly revolving around microfinance and ICT. I’ll have to go into more detail later. I’m similarly assigned to a whole smorgasbord of tasks, but in reality it looks like I’ll be working on a web design course and microfinance banking software dev’t for the next while.

The blog is fundamentally operational, but is still under construction. It’s taking a lof of time because I’m doing some serious wordpress-hacking in order to have a fully customized personal view (mobilefono.com) of what is in fact a shared blog (mapunta.org), and this is apparently really difficult — especially with slow, intermittent internet access!

Mapunta.org readers, the technology is now in place for you to have your own personal view (and domain name, if you’re willing to shell out a few bucks), simiar to mobilefono.com. I have no idea if any actually intends to use mapunta ever again, I’m just using it because I already paid for the webspace.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, November 8th, 2006 at 10:09 am and is filed under Nigeria. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.