Joseph

I am staying in an apartment block near the Camara hub and just outside Mombasa. I have stayed here before - its an ideal location in terms of getting access to the hub as its literally within a kilometers reach of the place.

An old man called Joseph is one of the security guards minding the apartment block. Basically he opens and closes the gates and keeps an eye on things during the night. He is probably in his mid sixties, has silver hair, is as thin as a rake and is not unlike Morgan Freeman in looks. His weather beaten face has clearly seen a lot in life much of it tough and challenging.

He is lovely company. He has an easy going manner and a deeply infectious laugh where he throws his head back and his eyes go white bright and glisten with tears.

He keeps himself amused during the day via an old battered 14" portable TV connected to a rabbits ears aerial via a cable that has more sellotape on it than actual co-axial covering. The picture on the television reminded me of the pictures they sent back from the first moon landing except the audio was of higher quality then.

The TV broke down during the week. It just went dead. My first instinct was to tell him to dump the TV and we would look at how to get another one. He told me he was going to fix it.

The following day I wandered over to Joseph on the way to the hub. There he was sitting with the TV taken apart patiently testing each component on the circuit boards with a tiny hobby multimeter. It was old but it worked.

I asked him what he was doing and he said he had borrowed a multimeter from a friend and he was looking for the 'failure'. When he found it he was going to get a new one from the 'Electrical' shop.

The 'Electrical' shop was a place up the road where electronic components were scavenged from old appliances and sold on as spares.

And there was I with a supposed degree in electronic engineering and totally unable to help. Joseph had never finished secondary school.

I came back that evening and the television was fixed. Joseph gave me a thumbs up as I passed by. It had cost him 5 schillings to fix the television (5p).

And we were worried about computer maintenance in Africa....

New Beginnings

I stopped off in Nairobi on my way to Mombasa so that I could meet a good friend there - a woman I have known since this whole adventure started in the summer of 2003. Over the last few years I have written numerous stories about my friend and her incredible courage.

She asked to meet up so that she would learn how to make a website for a new initiative she has started. Its a small church which reaches out to people in the slum areas and gets them to work together and support one another.

We met at the hotel I was staying in which was situated in, lets just say, the 'less glamorous' part of town. As usual I had not done my research on the location of the hotel being attracted to its very generous one night stay rate! I really need to establish an income that stops me making mistakes like this..

Anyway, Mary grabbed my hand and led me through the crowds to a small cyber-cafe where we could work on building a simple website.

It seemed the most obvious thing to do was to start a blog. Within a few minutes she had grasped the principles and promised me that she would practice over the last few weeks configuring it to her needs. It was lovely to see her face light up when we typed in her blogname and she could see the beginnings of her site. As soon as she gives me permission I'll release the URL....

She had heard of Facebook and asked me how it worked and could I setup an account for her. I opened up my own account to show her how it worked and then got a shock.

I was looking at the page of feeds of essentially useless information with comments like how hungover people were, what filmstar they looked like, how much someone had spent on some new toy etc and I imagined how Mary would react to being bombarded with that kind of 'developed world' drivel every time she logged on.

Here is a woman who is desperately trying to get herself out of poverty, making sure her children go to good schools, setting up a church to support people like herself who are on the margins of society and all she needs is a chance to have a go. Her job is to feed 1000 children a day in a slum school for which she earns about 75euros a month. She works day in day out with every spare moment she has to try and further herself in life and make the immediate world around her a better place.

In the 'developed world' we really have no idea what its like to struggle and by extension I think we are creating a very indulgent, selfish model of society that us becoming more and more inward looking and blind to whats really beautiful in being human.

To be honest, I felt ashamed but setup a Facebook account for her nonetheless. I do honestly wonder is it the right thing to do but perhaps her connection her to the virtual world here can help us restore our 'site'....