Students and staff checking out one of the computers

The day begins with a brisk 7- kilometer walk from our hotel to the library. We are led by Nixon and John, two Masais from the community who know the paths we’re walking along, which is a good thing because Team Smallbean would have been very very lost after the first 500 meters. We arrive just a few minutes late for the start of the 9:30 class. All but one of the students have already arrived and are talking quietly in the library. It is always an excellent sign of a class’ enthusiasm if Kenyans are arriving early to anything. While Carrie and Priyanka work with the class to develop scavenger hunt clues to help our students practice their interviewing and photography skills, I get the solar system set up. I’m a little apprehensive in that if it fails, there are no second chances here in EWuas. There is no electricity for miles and miles around.

It’s go time for the solar system I’ve been tinkering with for the last two months. And....it works! Like a charm. I LOVE THE AFRICAN SUN! This is totally nerdy, but after spending months and months testing solar systems in Boston (in June and July mind you, definitely the best time to be testing anything solar in Boston) it is amazing to get the panels to Kenya and watch how well they work with the equatorial sun in the house! I arrange the panels outside the back of the library, with approximately 15 feet of wire extending inside the library through a window and connecting to the charge controller. I connect up a laptop and, bam, things are charging and we are ready to go. Again, I apologize for the nerdiness, but one can only test things so many times in Boston. It’s all about how it responds in the field and the initial results are very positive.

Computer set-up

Meanwhile, Priyanka and Carrie have finished with the scavenger hunt prep and the students are finally out exploring the world with their cameras and audio recorders.  The library is suddenly quiet and Team Smallbean has a chance to catch its breath for a bit. The students begin trickling back after an hour or so and begin the uploading process to the computer. As I mentioned before, they are all very smart and, a couple of them have some excellent basic computer skills. Even better, they are happy to teach each other.

Smallbean's Photo-Tagging Software

After uploading the photos from the scavenger hunt, we turn to the Smallbean Photo-tagging software for the first time. For those who haven’t been following this blog, Smallbean worked with four amazing coders from the New England area to develop software that allows the participants in the CAP to visually tag the photos they take. Think Facebook, but in any language and offline in the middle of Masai Land with neither cell phone reception nor internet for miles around (I should add here, that a giant cell phone booster tower has been constructed in the exact center of Mile 46, the closest village to the library. The tower is very large and imposing and so far, not operating. Folks in the village expect it to be turned on “any day now”, but apparently this has been the case for the last month or so). The most popular feature of the Photo-tagging software is the audio feature to accompany the visual tags, which was added in the last week before we left Boston by Noah, our coder extraordinaire.  So, take a picture of an older Masai woman cooking. Label the woman with a box and provide her name. Label the pot and call it “mandazi”. And then, using the audio-tagging software, provide the spoken pronunciation for the terms. It’s very cool and, best of all, the students have really taken to it.

Students trying out one of the cameras

The rest of the class trickles back from the scavenger hunt. For the most part, Team Smallbean sits back and lets them do their thing, uploading and teaching each other. What we’re really trying to emphasize is that the computer is very much like the library we’re working in, and the goal of the CAP is to ensure that the data we collect is organized on the computer in the same way that books are organized on shelves in a library. 5000 photos and 25 interviews in Ki Ma are pretty worthless to everyone if we can’t tell where one interview ends and another begins. The students seems to grasp this and are surprisingly excited to learn the sometimes hard-to-grasp intricacies of the Windows file system. And just a small shout-out here to Windows 7: As someone who switched to Mac a few years back, I must say that using Windows 7 for the first time with the Citizen Archivist Project has been very smooth (once I stripped the computers of most of the annoying programs that were creating incessant pop-ups which have a bad habit of scaring the bejesus out of first or second time computer users).

As the last activity of the day, we talk about tomorrow’s first oral history interviews. This conversation with the students goes really well and is made easier thanks to the guidance we’ve received from Professor Carpenter, a linguistics professor at Wellesley College who met with Team Smallbean prior to our departure. She  advised us on the types of questions that we should be asking if we’re concerned with recording endangered languages that might not be around in another generation. Not only did she tell us really cool stuff to be thinking about in the questioning (perceptions of time; types of herbal and medicinal remedies used in the village, methods for describing colors), but she also provided suggestions to get people to use certain constructions of speech (ex: to get people to talk in the future tense, ask them to describe their hopes and dreams for their grandchildren; to get them to talk in the present tense, have them describe a terrifying experience). All of this research meshes really well with the data provided by the students in the class regarding the specifics of who in the village absolutely has to be interviewed to tell the full story that is EWuas. The day ends with plans to conduct our first live oral history interviews at the Saturday market held in Mile 46 every, you guessed it, Saturday. Apparently people come from miles around for the market, including large numbers of folks from the surrounding tiny settlements whom we might not otherwise get to speak with. Amazing timing.

We head home on Piki Pikis. For the second day in a row, we get a flat tire and end up walking at least part of the way home. Back at Kudu Hills hotel, Carrie is unfortunately a bit under the weather and checks into bed for the night around 6pm. Priyanka and I head down for dinner from our stone house on the hill, only to be sent bolting back up the path by a very large snake slithering just in front of our toes. We attempt a second descent and are again turned back by the same stubborn snake who now sits in a bush shaking about menacingly. We retreat again to the porch and each have a glass of white wine from the box of wine left for us by the still awesome Caro of AfricaSOMA. Finally, on our third attempt and after 30 minutes or so of waiting out the snake, we descend safely to dinner. Thank goodness there are no additional signs of snakes on this particular day.