second working day

Working
in Linux, the Chinese input is not available, thanks to the poor
connection here.

It’s
my second working day here. As I complained yesterday, my job should
be fixed by today. Early in the morning, I attended a meeting of all
OLPC Economic Development Team members. Knowing nothing detailed of
the whole thing, I just sat there and listened to what was going on
and what should be done soon. Seems they were busy during the last a
few months. Quite a few things was what I have never heard before. It
seems now I know what people have been doing. They select schools
according to recommendations from the ministry of Education, and talk
with another partners to get money from them to buy the OX PCs. Then
they distribute the OXs along with a server to the selected schools.
Apart from what was pre-installed in the OXs, the severs contain a
lot of information such as electric books, audio/video materials.
What they do specially here in Afghanistan here is that, the OXs are
not prepared only for teachers and students. The parents are also the
target of these OXs. While that is what my group mainly focus on. The
information here is like restricted by the condition of the social
security and development, many people don’t even know that they can
change their lives with the money and skills they have. The aim of
our group is to gather information for them, and send them to as many
people as possible.

My main job at the moment is to prepare a presentation for the group
which will be given to ASMED (Afghanistan Small and Medium Enterprise
Development). This belongs to USAID, which also is the main resource
of the money incoming to the group. Later on it seems I should also
go to other NGOs to collect information about economic development
and put them together. In addition, the evaluation of the OXs’
influence on ordinary people here is also coming to me. Hopefully I
will be busy soon. I need to start up to work after the loooong
holidays.

After
work, Sohaib, Baseer, Kasia (yeah, I got all the names needed for
later writing) and me had some rest on the roof. We flew kites until
all the kites were destroyed (poor paper kites), and then we played
football. It has been years I think, since I played that with others~
I think the normal days have arrived.

One
more thing to mention is that, what I had for dinner… steamed
potatoes, salt and cheese put as you want, that is the whole dinner
about. OK, I will have to say that, this is really exotic to me.
Thanks my God, whoever you are, I will lose weight soon.