First day in Ghana

There are planned power outages here every other day. They are planned for 6am-6pm and 6pm-6am on an alternating schedule (i.e. outage Sunday night, then Tuesday morning, then Thursday night, etc). Apparently, the day outages often continue well beyond 6pm. That makes it a bit difficult to do a lot of work in the lab. So while the power is on and it's cool (late night) we decided to stay in the lab and work. It's currently 11:20pm

We've spent a long time today working in the computer lab. There are 19 older PC's here. Each has anywhere from 128-256 MB of RAM and a 10GB harddrive. We will be updating and optimizing these computers. We also will be trying to add wireless networking in the next several days to span across the campus. A few of the staff members here have laptops and bring them here to the lab to connect to the internet.

Our first whole day in Ghana, and we had two special visitors. Two green mambas (snakes) were found in the two cottages immediately next to ours. The staff members were able to kill them (pictured at right). Fortunately they were small. Apparently a bite from an adult will kill a person in 15 minutes or so. Fortunately the medical clinic here on site has anitvenom available.