09 October 2008

Again it has been a long time since I have written anything here. I have a regular update that I do through email because that is something that I can write offline and then send when I have internet access. This update requires that I am online and being online with nothing else to do is often a luxury that I don't have during work hours.

It has been a busy time. The last two days of September were Muslim holidays to celebrate the end of Ramadan. An advantage of living in a country that is split between Islam and Christianity is that we celebrate the major holidays for both religions. Anyway, Monday and Tuesday were days off. That was then followed by Nigeria Independence Day (01 October). I believe Nigeria celebrated 48 years of independence this year.

The picture here is of myself and a chief of a nearby village called Ningo. He is chief over about 3000 people. His son works at the College and brought me there to enjoy dinner with them. It is a very simple compound but we had a nice visit and good Nigerian food - pounded yam, egusi soup, and roasted chicken. It was funny that while we were there, the Nigerians complained about the sandflies and I didn't seem to notice anything. I experienced a delayed reaction, though, and spent the remainder of the week scratching the many small and irritating bites on my arms and ankles. It was a nice break to the long break, since Eriye had travelled and I was home alone for the entire break.

During the break I intended to do some work in the Internet Cafe. We need to move some computers around to get the most memory into the fastest computers, and have those computers available for use. We are also introducing some software for tracking and controlling usage and we wanted to roll that out on the first of October. But suddenly we started having problems with our LAN and with our internet connection.

I had travelled to Abuja to facilitate a small workshop for VSO and struggled for the two days before leaving to get our internet access working. I was supposed to leave about 7:30 on the Thursday morning but came in to make sure everything was working before leaving. Nothing was working, and I struggled until almost noon before it seemed stable enough to leave. When I got to Abuja I saw that my colleagues were online, so I was comfortable that all was okay. The same thing on Friday morning.

Then suddenly I got a panicked call. Things had stopped. I suggested some things to do but nothing worked. I finally said to reboot but that didn't solve the problem either. Finally, at the last call I told them to shut down and go home since it was late in the day anyway. And I planned to see what I could do about it on Saturday morning when I got home. And then I tried to enjoy my couple of days in HOT, HOT Abuja.

Saturday morning I stopped in the office and immediately found the problem - one of the Network Interface Cards had been disabled. That was one thing that I had not even thought to check doing "phone support." So that problem was solved and I thought we could go ahead and get some real work done on Monday without disturbing our users. No such luck. I spent all day Monday fighting our connection problem and finally had it working when I left on Monday afternoon. Tuesday, again, I expected to accomplish a lot only to find that our modem was not connecting to the Internet.

And that continued for 8 days. We finally found out that the ISP had a problem and that it would be solved over the weekend. The following Monday the problem was still there. The local agent for the ISP finally came with a "solution" but it wasn't until late on Tuesday that we found out the ISP had been updating the wrong model of modem.

The next couple of days have been full of intermittent problems, but finally today things seem to have stabilized a bit.

Anyway, I will close with that for this writing. We are doing well, staying busy and healthy. Eriye is selling mats and doing quite well but struggling with the trip to Benin to buy the product to sell. On her last trip home, the car she was in hit a woman and she thinks killed her. She asked the driver to stop but he refused, knowing that he would be killed if he stopped. The other passengers agreed and said that if anything happened to the driver and car, they would be stranded for who knows how long until they could get another ride. They told the driver to stop at the next police station, but I don't think he did. Eriye is still bothered by the whole thing.

And we are waiting for processing to begin our our application for Eriye's visa to come to Canada whenever I am finished here.

I really will close for now. I don't know who reads this blog as I don't get any feedback. But greetings and best wishes to all who find this page.