Some Good Ideas

Classes in the web design course are continuing.

Despite being thrown in at the deep end, the students are coping very well. Yesterday in our first lab, around half of them were viewing web pages for the very first time. Today the whole class were looking at a webpage editor, dreamweaver, for the first time! In a class of ten, three have progressed particularly quickly, and all are showing promising levels of interest. We've also seen great patience on their part with the fairly disorganised running of the course. This morning class began an hour and a half late due to the double-booking of the classroom...we mzungus were getting pretty frustrated but the students weren't too bothered, African Time i guess! In general though I'm optimistic about the prospects for this web design business idea.

Yesterday I had an interesting chat with Dave, an Irish guy here working for a small volunteer organisation called Solar Aid. A businesslike fellow, he had valuable insights on the workings of a small, independant development agency such as Ungweru. In particular he had two decent practical suggestions. The first was to investigate the possibility of mobile internet via 3G, as an internet connection alternative for Ungweru. The second was an addition to Cormac's tourism website idea for mzuzu.org, that we might use it as an information portal for ex-pat volunteers wanting to come to Mzuzu. Local landlords could advertise things like accomodation.

This evening Cormac had the good idea of showing a movie using the projector in the conference room. Some of the youth group and some local kids watched it as well. Jamie and I listened to an informed view on Malawian politics from John. Jamie had a lot of questions for him from his daily reading of The Nation.