I'm right now in a guest house in Ouagadougou, the capital of Burkina Faso, the third poorest country in the world as measured by the World Bank among others... On the edge of the Sahel and bordered by some of the currently/recently unsettled countries of the region--Mali, Ivory Coast, Niger... I'm doing some background work for a significant Community Informatics project that the e-Africa division of NEPAD/the African Union wishes to undertake throughout sub-Saharan Africa.
This afternoon between appointments I went for a walk in the centre of the city towards the Grand Mosque, a very Moorish structure in desert coloured sandstone. It was around 4 pm and as I was walking I came across rows of men undertaking one of their daily prayers only this time in public led by what looked like a lay preacher. As I walked further I kept coming across these street corner prayer sessions--perhaps 3 or 4 within a three block radius and not more than two blocks from the main Mosque in Ouga. This evening I'm back at the guest house doing things on the reasonably good Internet connection. It is getting late--now it is about 1.30 am local time. I've just e-published the most recent issue of the online Journal of Community Informatics. http://ci-journal.net/index.php/ciej/editor/issueToc/30 Glocality: Thinking about Community Informatics and the Local in the Global and the Global in the Local. For the last half hour or so I've been hearing the sounds of jet planes flying low overhead--back and forth, back and forth. At first I thought they might be commercial planes coming in to land--but this is Burkina Faso where there are probably no more than a dozen flights in and out a day and I would guess none of them are scheduled for 1 am. Mike _______________________________________________ Futurework mailing list [email protected] https://lists.uwaterloo.ca/mailman/listinfo/futurework
