Singing and Dancing
Yesterday marked the end of yet another fasting period, this time it was only for 2 weeks. I was given a number of different reasons for the fasting, so not entirely sure which is the right one, but all had something to do with St Mary.
As well as being allowed to eat meat again, groups of girls roam around town in their traditional costume, singing and dancing with home made drums, collecting money. Fortunately I had been forewarned and that being foreign I was likely to stopped regularly, unless I was either going to stay at home all day or get taxis everywhere. I did leave the house to go into town and then I was stopped every few steps by yet another group of singers who wouldn’t let me pass until I’d given them some money. The pocketful of small changes I’d taken out rapidly disappeared, until all I was left with was a 50 birr note.
In the evening one of the main roads in town was closed off for a fun fair, celebrating 20 years of the TDA (though I never found out what TDA stood for! – Tigray Development Agency was a best guess). A stage had been set up for a cultural dancing show (and speeches), although I arrived a little late and had no chance of getting to a spot where I could actually see the stage, but I’d probably already seen enough singing and dancing for one day.
50 Birr – that’s about Rs.300, isn’t it? Or £2.40 in real money. I can only speculate it’s a lot!
Cute kids. Maybe just as well it was a large note and you had an excuse to stop!
I enjoy your blog, recently discovered, and subscribe to the feed. I’d be interested in hearing a few technical details of your new setups. Will you be using battery-backed UPSs and a generator, for example? What have you selected for OS and for AV protection? Protection against curious, accident-prone or malicious users? Data security? And which applications will you be running? Dust a problem? I’m curious because I try to teach ICT while attempting to maintain a small network of PCs in a school with kids who have started to discover USB sticks, SIM converters, games and how to do strange things with OS and app configuratios. In a dusty, intermittently-powered environment. Oh, and without money for licensed, virus-free software, of course. Quite a challenge for someone with very little brain!
Thanks for any tips!
Cheers Clive. We’re in the process of setting up a website (http://digital-campus.org) which will have much of the info you’re looking for – as I’m sure lots of other people will be interested too. Basically though, we’re going with thin client terminals connected to Sun server, so this should make everything more secure, robust and less virus-prone. For situations where you’re worried about viruses and costs, then go for Ubuntu or another open source operating system. If you’ve only had experience with Windows before, then there is a bit of a learning curve with Ubuntu, but certainly worth the effort!