Archive for July 2009
From linguistic analysis to computer repair
Last week, I visited a discourse analysis workshop with my friend Jeff Pubols. Jeff works in computer support here in Nairobi, and he was visiting the workshop to perform some basic repair and cleanup on laptops used by Kenyan translation teams.
People with skills like Jeff’s are essential to keep equipment operating so that translators can keep working smoothly and efficiently.
Meanwhile, I was watching linguists working with various translation teams, helping them analyze various features of their language and of the biblical texts that they were translating. (Discourse analysis is concerned with how language works above the sentence level.) It really does take all kinds!
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Nairobi home life
Hi from Nairobi, Kenya. I’m living here for several weeks helping out with web and communications projects … which mostly involves sitting in an office staring at a laptop. Life at home is quiet too, but here’s a little bit of what it’s like.
This is the house where, up until today, I have been staying with Tom and Susan. We had to move a few doors down today, but it’s similar enough that you get the idea. (We are staying in the houses of people who are traveling, so we have to move around as people come and go.)
Here’s our (former) front door and the nice little garden inside the gate:
Living room:
My room:
View from my balcony. You can almost see the house into which we moved this morning — all the way down on the right.
We have lots of great fresh fruits available:
And lots of vegetables too. Nairobi’s cool highland climate is conducive to growing a wide range of produce. I made a stir fry with six or eight kinds of veggies:
Another meal — curried potatoes with leftover meats and vegetables. The soft drink in the background is a ginger beer produced by Coca-Cola in East Africa. It’s really good!
Susan saw a display case of camel milk in the grocery store, so of course we had to try it.
The package claimed some remarkable health benefits:
We decided that trying small portions first would be wise:
It turns out that camel milk tastes a lot like hay … or barnyards … or worse. “It’s like licking a camel!” said Tom, who was singularly unimpressed. We decided to share the experience with our friends Jeff and Heather (are we still friends, guys?), who gave it a mixed review. (Incidentally, Heather and Susan are in Togo and Benin now, having adventures. Follow along at Pubols Postscript.)
categories kenya
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