Nairobi, Kenya - Entry 2

'm currently sitting in a conference on how to communicate in the scientific community. This is a long conference. At any rate, I'm fortunate enough to have an Internet connection here so it is allowing me to check my e-mail and write about my trip for the first time in several days.

Since my first letter on Wednesday, I've lead four six hour-long seminars/workshops on Information Technology and Web Development. The class has consisted of a diverse group of about twenty-five stakeholders in the field of Biochemistry ranging in occupation from scientists, to staffers, to media professionals. I've felt a bit odd, being twenty-five years old, teaching a class to people who are old enough to be my parents, but I've found them all to be eager, enthusiastic, and tremendously intelligent.

This teaching experience has been an extremely positive contrast to my previous teaching endeavors. Then again, after teaching basic English to Korean children and fundamentals of Math to fashion students in Southern California, there's no other way to go than up.

The conference got off to an amusing start, as I sat up in front of the audience, sandwiched between the two keynote speakers: the head of one of the Science conglomerates (one of the sponsoring groups) and a former Kenyan Minister of Foreign Affairs, wondering how I got myself into this situation.

My original presentation materials consisted of a systematic approach to understanding and strategically leveraging the online environment with regard to particular issues and their relevant stakeholders. What I soon found was that all the students wanted to learn HTML and Web site design. So after seeing glazed looks and yawns during my presentation on the first day, I quickly changed the agenda so that the second day would consist of basic HTML.

By the third day, I had more or less skimmed through my presentation on mapping and monitoring the online environment, initially intended to be a three hour-long presentation, in about forty minutes, instead resorting to the creation of a class-wide Yahoo Group throughout the remainder of the day.

The fourth day went from a media training and science communications workshop to a daylong Dreamweaver (a popular HTML editing software) course in which I helped the students to each create their own Web site and post their site on a free Geocities server.

So after the end of four days, I had basically scrapped countless of hours of seminar preparation in favor of ad-libbing Yahoo Group and web design classes. That being said, at the end of four days, I've managed to create a permanent tool for this class to communicate and interact online with one another and also given each of them their own personal web page.

The first half of the conference is over and the second half, in which the conference has been joined by Kenyan Parliamentary Members and prominent stakeholders from around the world, has begun. Last night, a few international colleagues flew in and we went to a dinner show in which we were served game meat such as antelope, zebra, and gazelle, while a group of African dancers and acrobats pranced around on stage. The dance routine was unusually post-modern, evidenced by the fact that at one point, the entire dance crew broke into the running man. Somehow, I managed to resist the urge to leap onto center stage and do the Cabbage Patch.

The tableside conversation has basically focused on issues management. Subsequently, I've been uncharacteristically quiet as of late. It's a bizarre thing, to listen to people talk for long stretches of time, just bizarre.

At any rate, I'm distracted by this guy talking into the microphone so I should probably cut this short and wait for a time when I can actually concentrate on writing.