You walk out of your office after a frustrating training session with your teaching assistant. Using a f/oss version means that you don’t know it as well as you’d like, which makes it correspondingly difficult to teach the program in a coherent manner. Instead of letting you walk home by yourself, your student walks beside you, chattering about the rest of the course, will you cover how password protect pages, and why won’t I teach them advanced JavaScript?

You smile and explain, for the 50th time, that you’ll cover basic (in)security, but setting up a secure multiple-user system is beyond the scope of the course. Your student continues, and you reassure him that you’ll teach another course in the spring, and yes, you’d be glad to introduce PHP, JavaScript, etc. Finally, you part ways and you begin the walk home, exhausted after a long day of meetings, deadlines, and asking aid organisations for money.

The air is chilly. It’s midway through the rainy season, and the heat of the summer is replaced by the cold wet. You’re not actually as cold as everyone around you. 75 degrees after 8pm is actually pretty pleasant to your thin American blood. The lady from whom you buy fish for your cat knows you so well, you don’t have to say anything. A brief greeting suffices. She puts the fish in a bag, you hand her 200 cfa, and you wearily continue.

You avoid the puddles that have turned into ponds with the ease of someone who’s been doing it every day for the last several weeks. The deceptive spots on your road, the spots that look solid, but are secret pits of mud, waiting to suck you in up to the ankle in filth and slime don’t often fool you, but tonight, you misstep and find yourself ankle deep. With a resigned sigh, you dig your sandal out of the mud, and continue trudging to your house.

Instead of stopping to chat with the security guards on your street like you usually do, you mutter a brief hello, your hunched shoulders and tired stumble ample evidence of your exhaustion. Draging yourself up the stairs, you unlock the door, and dump the cat’s food on his plate without bothering to turn on any lights. After throwing your purse on the table, you find your cigarettes and light up, standing on your balcony with the dark of your unlit apartment behind you.

The nicotine assuages any hunger (you haven’t eaten since noon) and you decide to skip the work and effort of cooking dinner. You quickly strip, set up your mosquito net, and collapse into bed, welcoming the oblivion of sleep, knowing that the next day will be equally as long.

Fourteen things to learn from the Google story also apply remarkably well to development.

Because that’s the ideal, right? Creatively solve problems in a way that makes the world a better (or at least more interesting) place and puts money in people’s pockets at the same time.

Weirdly inspiring.

It was definitely weird running into some of my students last night in a club. To end my (second day of) birthday festivities, we’d finally made it downtown to dance the night away to some pretty good live music. We were in remarkably good shape, considering it was after midnight, and we’d started before six.

After stumbling in, laughing because we thought we’d gotten in free (not quite). Of course we sat down, ordered wine and juice (don’t ask), and the smokers in the crowd lit up for a much appreciated nicotine high. I’m gesticulating wildly to make a point, when all of a sudden I feel a tap on my shoulder.

“Thérèse! Comment ça va!?!?”
“Oh my God, it’s my students.” I am surprised and speechless. “Hey, y’all.”

The guys thought it was great, having only seen me out having a good time one or two times before. I was self-conscious for about ten minutes before I realized that now that these three boys had caught me smoking, I wouldn’t have any problems lighting up again the next time I went out after an English club meeting or something. Sweet!

I consider them my “students” because they attend my computer classes, but the reality is that a lot of them are just about my age. Any awkwardness disappeared once we all hit the dance floor. Beninese dancing isn’t the same as American dancing (unless we’re grinding, we take it much less seriously), and my students definitely got a kick out of watching us bounce around the floor, having a great time with whomever was lucky enough to get in our way.

Nights like last night take a lot of the edge off my frustration. If nothing else, it speaks of the incredible friends I have in the volunteer community, and my increasing integration into the Beninese community. I woke up this morning feeling like I could take on the world, and you know what? With friends like mine to stand behind me, I’m pretty sure I can.

My birthday was incredible (as they usually are). I am now, as I have been elsewhere in life, blessed with amazing friends. So thanks, everyone. I’m going to wrap up the celebrations with a small fête this weekend. The culinary preparations have commenced, and the food is going to be absolutely delicious.

In other news, I have a new laundry girl. My old laundry girl doubled as a maid/ janitor for my concession, sweeping the leaves out of the courtyard, etc. She was fired while I was up North working Stage. In the month since I’ve returned, I’ve made an admirable effort to do my clothes myself, staying up late and getting up early to manage the load. Frankly, I don’t have time to do that shit. Hiring someone to wash my clothes gives me at least two hours a week to do other things, and those two hours are more than worth the cost to my pride and my wallet.

And also, I’m participating in a cashew conference tomorrow. Life is strange.

The web design market in Benin isn’t necessarily underdeveloped; however, there’s a pretty serious lack of professionals with real design skills. There are a number of firms out there creating boring static webpages with Dreamweaver, which would be fine, except that there’s a severe lack of understanding of the underlying concepts. No problem, right? As long as they can create more-or-less professional looking pages, who cares?

Actually, it’s a big problem.

First, people often don’t really know how to use Dreamweaver, especially when modifying CSS templates. Second, people often don’t understand design (basic usability issues, color choice, limiting the number of fonts, not using a dozen marquees on a page, etc). Third, code produced by these programs is hard to maintain.

All this, in addition to unrealistic expectations on the part of clients (sounds familiar, but here it’s often bought into by designers here) adds up to a lot of mediocre websites whose owners gave up on them long ago.

The market is ripe for a couple of enthusiastic kids who understand how the web works, who can create stylish and usable sites, and who are capable of building them from the ground up . . . by hand. These designers can (and should) cut down on production costs by cutting down on the complexity and charging for SEO and simple things like emailing like sites to exchange links.

One might argue that in today’s world, a dynamic site is practically required. My response is, “No, it’s not.” Most small Beninese NGOs have neither the capacity or the time to maintain a website on a daily or even a weekly basis. Add the cost of training someone who’s barely computer literate to make constant changes, and suddenly, the site has become an enormous expense. Websites here in Benin are good for credibility (essentially, an on-line calling card) and getting the information that development organisations produce out to the people who can use it (or at least, out to other NGOs who can distribute it).

A well designed site of five or six pages is far more effective than an unusable and unupdated site of greater size. These types of sites are simple (admittedly, deceptively so), but with good work methods and experience, they’re relatively quick to produce and easy to update. The designer can either charge for changes, or train someone on staff to take care of it themselves.

Don’t get me wrong, there’s some great work out there, but the bulk of the market is saturated with firms who can create big complicated pieces of frustration. I’m pretty sure that, in a few months, a few of my students will step up to the plate and start making money designing smart websites. It won’t be their primary job, but it’s something, and anything that makes information more accessible is a good thing.

Sounds like decent development work to me.