All was going well on a beautiful Thursday afternoon in Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso.  I was teaching English to the French-speaking students that I still couldn’t remember the names of . . . I just didn’t understand how teachers back home could have all their students names memorized in under two weeks!  Anyways, all was going well, the students were focused on their work, and I wasn’t having any problems with them being off-task.  Then disaster struck.  It wasn’t a gradual diminishing effect, it didn’t having any prior warnings such as flickering light . . . All of the sudden, every piece of networking equipment that could make a whirring sound audibly shut off.  I looked up at the wireless router that normally flashed blue lights in order to display connection status, and it was black.
The batteries on the laptops were good for about 1.5 to three hours, and that was a generous estimate.  With the Internet down, we could no longer use Rosetta Stone, which meant that I was going to have to resort to using a more battery-intensive program that ran off the CD-drive.  All in all, we had five classes left in the day, and only enough battery for about two of the 45-minute classes.
We ran them dry, each and every computer was drained of its life by the end of the two classes.
So for the next three classes, we practiced our vocational skills, mostly by singing in front of the class.  Yes, I did have to sing one or two songs . . . and because I didn’t really know any Akon or Lil’ Wayne (that’s what they wanted me to sing), I was forced to resort to the age-old tactic of singing a song that I had written.  It wasn’t actually half bad, and the classes actually clapped for me once I had finished.
We just received the Internet back on Saturday night, very late, so if some of you are wondering why I haven’t been posting, that’s it, we haven’t had internet, or for that matter, even time, to post.  I apologize for the lack of information that has been relayed, but I had to explain, even to my mom, “Such is Africa”.

Veston Di Donato
Systems Support, English Language Institute, Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso