What on earth am I doing here?
A few weeks ago (12th May, actually), I got a Skype chat from my friend Werner from Mewe : “would you be partial to an all expenses paid teaching holiday in Zanzibar from end June to mid-August?” Well, yes - what is there not to like about this idea? I spent 4 years in Ghana 4 decades ago, so the idea of going to East Africa was enticing.
It turns out that the expenses do not include beer, but apart from that it is just about doable if you get somebody to cook for you; I am looking into this, but more of that later.
I met Werner a few years ago in Kingston where he was running a enterprising and worthwhile project to introduce schoolchildren from non-British backgrounds to a sense of their own history and to celebrate their own heroes and role models. With his wife Anne Marie, they wrote and produced plays in local schools and colleges, and hoped to get some work from the government’s Respect for all agenda, which they richly deserved. Sadly this did not materialise. Also, Werner is an IT (Linux) wizard on the side.
They are now back in (Werner’s native) South Africa, and Werner, who was due to do this teaching “holiday”, got another contract which he couldn’t turn down. Hence my presence in Zanzibar. The project is an ongoing commitment by various European NGOs to provide both IT and entrepreneurial skills to local young people, so they can use them to add to and stimulate the local economy, which is largely based on tourism. There are a number of thriving and profitable businesses here, bright and hard-working people, and a stable and diverse cultural life. So all of the signs are good.
My teaching is an introduction to Web programming, based on PHP (and the rest: JavaScript, MySQL and HTML), which will be then taken forward by the bright young(ish) sparks who run this project within a project (more later), all from Austria, who started their IT career at the point where I, with any sense, might have thought of giving it up! However, everybody has to start at the beginning, so people like me still have their uses!
So - more over the next few weeks. Life is good. I am doing an amount of reading, preparing classes, fighting computer viruses, power cuts and bad Internet connectsion, none of which matters too much. After all, most of the world lives this way, and they are no less happy than we are. Oh, and slightly more beer than I might be drinking at home.