What to Expect when You're Expecting (a Blog Post)

Happy Friday.

Just cracked the first Primus Rwandan beer in the last few days. Ahhh.

T.I.A.

I don't get internet connection at my hostel. I only have internet for a half hour in the morning (when we get breakfast at the other hostel where there is wireless internet, which, aside from being very slow, has only two working power strips) and at supper time. So even if you get to be one of the lucky two to use, the connection speed is caterpillar-like and uploading pictures and video is nearly impossible. With that said, I have collected a lot of amazing videos and pics that I'd obviously love to share BEFORE I get back to Boston, lol. 

With that said, this is what you should expect in the next few weeks: written post everyday (written on word without internet connection and then pasted into blog once we get wireless), and hopefully, maybe, probably, pictures every week. Once we get to Soweto, the internet situation should be better, the security situation worse; good substitute, right? So, at the end of my deployment, or when I have 67 hours of energy to spare uploading all of the best pics and video I've taken (I have a FliP camera that saves in .mp4 instead of .avi so must find converter first), you will visually witness the beauty, diversity, and reality that is Kigali and South Africa.

I also have a YouTube account now (TheOle1984), where you can find all my video. In order to try to please the consumer, I picked the most recent and most emotive video to publish first (but hopefully not last). This is a short video of eight 6-11 year old boys that were playing soccer with a ball made of spun together plastic bags in an extremely uneven and potholed compact earth outside of a school in Kigali, Rwanda. And they were happy. Very few of them spoke English, and the ones that did were shy. Yet, despite that fact, I was able to have the boys choose captains and then teams, after which we played ball. One of the boys--the one who spoke English the best--managed to be outstanding in a phenomenal group of soccer talent. 

They were even sweeter and more content than I had imagined upon approaching them, officially making my trip thus far. That was my favorite part of the day, the rest of which was spent teaching teachers how to use the XO, a machine they've had access to for a year but have not used because of the difficulty of integrating the laptops into their lesson plan and a bad experience with porn-surfing while connected to the internet at the nearby Kigali International Airport. Hence, the laptops have been essentially under-utilized and ignored.

More on that later. This 45 second clip takes 1 hour and 45 minutes to download. 12 minutes left!

T.I.A.

Because this is taking so long, it may be the only sampling ya'll will get, other than my words, so enjoy this. I will paste in exactly one hour and 12 minutes unless the file is not compatible with YouTube, at which point I will erupt.

T.I.A.