African transport right here at home

It was a bit of a nightmare, but I finally made it back to Virginia. As much as I complained during my two years in Africa about transportation, I'm not sure the U.S. has a much better grasp of how things should work. For instance, why is it that two round-trip plane tickets are less expensive than the shorter and more fuel efficient circuit route? Why can't we just pay a set rate based on the miles we cover, allowing for holiday and seasonal differences? And how is it fair that two people on the same flight in the same class can pay vastly different prices? I'm sure there's some reasonable answer as to why the airlines can't function like Greyhound, and it probably has to do with maximizing profits.

I left Reno bright and early Monday to fly back to San Jose. The five-hour layover gave me plenty of time to collect my suitcases from baggage claim, drag them onto a bus for a ride to another terminal, and check them into the new airline. In fact, I had another 4 1/2 hours to kill after that. My first flight took me to Minneapolis, where thunderstorms kept us from landing. We circled for 45 minutes on our fully loaded airplane before we had to divert to Deluth to refuel. I may not be able to blame Northwest for the rain storm, but I can certainly chastise them for overbooking our flight to the point where they didn't have enough gas to circle a little longer like all the other airlines seemed to do. If only I had taken the free round-trip ticket when they announced in San Jose that they were overbooked!

Two hours late, we finally got back to Minneapolis and landed. Like many others, I had missed the last connecting flight for the evening. After Africa, you'd think I would be used to the incivility of people shoving themselves in front of me to get served first, but on the contrary, I find manners to be more important than ever. Consequently, I ended up dead last in line.

Because the delay was considered an "act of god", the most Northwest would do was to rebook our flight, give us $50 off our next roundtrip ticket, and offer hotel "discounts" by calling an 800 number. We weren't allowed to have our luggae back,m since it was booked through our destination. One of the ladies in front of me called and found a hotel nearby for a mere $100 a night. I still think of that in terms of "3 weeks salary". I was going to opt for a comfy chair by the gate for the evening, but another woman offered to share a room with me. $50 for a bed and a shower with no change of underwear. It wasn't worth it, but I agreed anyway.

The woman I stayed with turned out to be slightly crazy, but not in a bad way. She was just visibly shaken by having her plans go astray and couldn't seem to recover. "Where will we eat? Where will we sleep? How do we find the hotel? I don't know Minneapolis at all." She couldn't appreciate the adventure in it at all. Plus when I told her about my Peace Corps experience, she looked at me as if I were the crazy one!

My new flight from Minneapolis was no longer direct. Instead, I had a 2 1/2 hour layover in Detroit. Finally, 30 hours after I left Reno, I arrived in Norfolk. One of my suitcases did not. This didn't really surprise me. The fact that Northwest's computer system was down and that they couldn't electronically track the bag was of more interest. I put my faith in the system, and another 30 hours later, my suitcase arrived.

It's ironic that all my flights through Africa and Asia went so smoothly. I had to wait until I returned to the U.S. for things to go truly wrong.

Teenager Challenge - 2006

I left San Jose on Monday after completing my work at the 9-day forum on technology. It was challenging, rewarding, frustrating, and exhilarating - much like my work with Peace Corps. The hours were too long to count - from early morning until late night and sometimes the hours in between.

On Sunday, I met my group of 25 students. They each came in to register with me, so I got to talk to them individually for a few minutes. There were 22 boys and 3 girls, all between 15 and 18. They were from all over the country - the world actually, since there was one student from Korea. Another of the students was from Tipton, IA - the small-town home of my good friend Tina. And one was from Virginia, only an hour away from me.

It became quickly apparent that although these kids were supposed to be computer nerds, they were going to be a handful. In actuality, I should have seen this as a good thing. They were all fairly well-adapted and not nearly as socially awkward as I remember myself being at that age. They were also smart, funny, and interesting to talk to. Unfortunately, that's all they wanted to do. Talk. All the time. In the middle of group activities. In the middle of lessons. In the middle of my sentences. It didn't matter. They were talking. Or (as pictured), they were testing their boundaries. This was the last day when one of them dragged his air mattress to our tech talk room. I let them get away with it.

Having had no experience working with high school students, I made the mistake of trying to be their friend instead of their teacher. After 4 or 5 days of being unable to control their jabbering, I finally had to lay down the law. I implemented the conch shell for a session on respecting each other and fixing our group dynamic. For those of you who've read Lord of the Flies, you understand the conch shell concept. It keeps order in a group, because only the person holding the shell is allowed to speak. I used a roll of tape, but it was the same concept.

Things improved a little bit after that, although I still lost my patience a few times. But as the kids got to spend more time with each other outside of our sessions, they had less to talk about inside our sessions. It also helped that we introduced Future Solutions, a group project not unlike the science fair that got them interested in working together. We had the Expo on Sunday, and one of my groups even made it to the Top 3 in their category, but ultimately lost.

The conference was about 90% boys, so the girls who attended seemed to have a good time fending them off. All of my girls were pretty and popular, and each appeared to strike up a special friendship with one of the guys in the group.

Unfortunately, things ended with a bit of a sour note when one of my students was dismissed from the conference on the last day. I won't say any more about that, except to repeat the official stance of my organization. He made a very poor decision.

In the meantime, we had some pretty cool speakers, seminars, and site visits. With 1200 students, it's impossible to take all of them to their first choices for industry sites. Half of them want to go to Google, and they don't even know why. So students were split into groups of about 50-100 to visit different places, and we the faculty advisors were also split. I went to two universities and an industry site.

The first visit was a disaster. Four faculty advisors including me escorted 100 students to San Jose State University, walking distance from where we were staying. Unfortunately, the university forgot we were coming. There was no one there to greet us, and we were unable to reach our points of contact. We entertained the students for half an hour, while diligent Dawn called everyone she could think of. Finally our speaker arrived, but was obviously unprepared. After the talk, we were supposed to have four tour guides taking groups of 25 around the campus. But the college could only scrounge up two guides, neither of whom knew anything about our conference. Our guide seemed to think that these kids were all prospective students, so she walked them around saying, "This is where you'll take psychology. This is where you'll take math." And my favorite: "This is the student health center where you can be issued up to four free condoms a day."

The next day went much better. We went to NVIDIA, a company highly regarded for its graphics processors. I had no clue who they were, so it baffled me that so many students were excited to go. Then I found out they made the X-Box. And their chip will be used in the Playstation 3. After getting a tour of the facilities, they gave us snacks and free T-shirts. I saw students wearing them at dinner that night, and some of them hardly took theirs off for the rest of the conference. Mine is a large, so it doesn't even fit. But I have enough geek friends that I'm sure I can find a worthy recipient.

On the third day, I went to Santa Cruz University with 150 students and 6 faculty advisors. They gave us a tour of their engineering labs and had several current students talk about the program. It was really interesting, and I think the kids enjoyed it.

We also had three days of plenary speakers. Two out of three were excellent. On the first day, we had Bob Rice, Tommy Tallarico, and Jack Wall - all pioneers in the music for video games industry. They were fantastic presenters. Two of them invented a concert series called "Video Games Live", an interactive experience featuring the best video game music over the decades. I don't even play video games, and I want to see it!

Our best speaker was Blake Ross, the 21-year old cofounder of Firefox Web Browser. He started volunteering to code for the Mozilla Project when he was in his early teens, and got hired on by Netscape before he could drive. He was really funny and gave the students a different perspective on the world of technology. I immediately felt guilt for having been too lazy up until that point to actually download Firefox. But I have corrected the error. And it's way cooler than Internet Explorer. SPREAD FIREFOX!

I'm now in Carson City spending a few more days with Dad and Karen before returning to Virginia. It was so nice getting the chance to work again, especially in the non-profit realm. I made very little money, but I felt good about what I was doing!

Google Group

Some of you have been telling me you preferred my correspondence "old school", that is a group e-mail sent to your account pretty much weekly. Now that I'm a blog, it's easy to forget to check for new entries. That's why I'm introducing a Google Group. Join the group, and you'll receive an e-mail every time I post something. Fancy.

If you're interested in joining, send me an e-mail or leave a comment on this page. I need to "invite" you. Or, if you have a G-mail account, you can go to this site and apply for membership:

http://groups.google.com/group/amys-friends

Working in San Jose

There's no better way to start your first job in 8 months than to miss your plane and show up a day late. Yes, it's true. And here's the sad thing. I got to the airport two hours early. It was just the wrong airport. I was in Newport News, while my plane was boarding 30 miles away in Norfolk. When I realized my mistake, it was too late to catch Carole, the friend who'd just dropped me off. So I rushed around like a madwoman trying to figure out the quickest way to get there, finally calling my Williamsburg posse for assistance. They sent Mike, perhaps the brightest but not best choice, as he just moved to Virginia a month ago and had never been to the airport. It took him a while to find me, which was good, since in my panic I had left my laptop sitting at a curb, where it was promptly collected by the police. I spent a few minutes getting it back, and Mike met me curbside shortly after that. At this point, there was less than an hour before my plane was to take off, but we decided to take a stab at it. Mike's reasoning: "The only thing we'll lose is time, and tomorrow – they’ll make more." The radio promised 20-30 minutes of traffic going through the Hampton Roads tunnel, so we decided to try the “alternate route” over the Monitor-Merrimac. As it turns out, that adds about 40 miles to the trip. We made it to the airport exit about the time the gates were closing, so I called the airline and booked the earliest flight I could the next morning. The good news is this gave me the opportunity to celebrate Canada Day with my friends in Williamsburg. Then Jim, Mike, and I headed to the airport again around 4 the next morning.

I got to San Jose about 4 hours late for the first day of training. It was pretty intimidating walking into a room of 50 faculty advisors, where it seemed most people had already formed friendships. But everyone has been cool. I am pleasantly surprised at how accomplished and adventurous my coworkers are. There are at least two other former Peace Corps volunteers, one who served in Ukraine and another in Mongolia. The latter just returned last Thursday! We were joking yesterday about our pat responses for that same old question, “How was Peace Corps?” He has two answers. The first, for people he doesn’t know that well, is “It was cold and the food sucked.” For his closer friends, his response is, “I don’t really want to tell you, and you don’t really want to know.”

There is also a guy originally from Ghana, and I’ve enjoyed comparing Africa stories with him. It seems like the majority of people are teachers or have some extensive experience with it. That’s a little intimidating, as they seem to have lots of ideas on how to structure talks. The workload promises to be pretty intense, at least the first few days. We will be meeting with our groups of 25 students for a few hours each day, escorting them to talks and site visits, posting ourselves around to help students and keep an eye on them, and performing security checks every night at 11. Basically, we’ll have 15 hour days once the forum begins.

We are headquartered at the Fairmont Hotel in San Jose, probably the nicest place I’ve ever stayed. The luxury makes me a bit uncomfortable, and most of us are in no position to avail ourselves of it. I’ve been told that if we even move anything in the mini-bar, sensors will pick it up and charge us for it. $4.00 for a can of coke. The only affordable thing on the room service menu is the back page, which lists treats for the traveling pet. I wonder if the doggie pizza wedges are suitable for human consumption. I’ve also been told there’s something called an “intimacy kit” (condoms) available for a charge, and there’s a sign in the bathroom that says they’ll provide special containers for our syringes. What kind of place are they running here anyway? Do members of The Rolling Stones routinely stay here?

The bar scene here is a bit sketchy. In my first experience with the nightlife, I saw a prostitute and a transvestite in a matter of minutes. Then we went to the salsa club. I’d barely made it to the top of the stairs when an old man in a feathered cap grabbed me and said he wanted to dance. Luckily, I had Danielle there to protect me. She’s 6’3”, so you don’t want to mess with her. She pulled me away from him and announced, “She’s with me.” The man’s response was too vulgar to publish. Good times.

I now have two days off before the conference begins. It’s not really relaxing, since I have talks to prepare, plus I’ve decided to host an hour presentation on IT in developing countries. Another volunteer has asked to do it with me, so that should make me less nervous!