Water

I spilled a few drops of water near (ok, on) my laptop while working yesterday. It appears I’ve fried the backspace button which is a pain as I use it a lot! It would just kind of kick in whenever it wanted to and do all kinds of weird things including not allowing me to access my Benin documents. My computer geek husband (who swears I’m an extremely unlucky charm any time I get close to computers) managed to find some software that would allow me to disable the backspace key. Funny how used we become to certain things. I miss the backspace key. A lot. I’m now trying desperately to get used to using the delete key instead.

Water seemed to be in the stars yesterday as we also ran out of water. But it’s not like Rwanda where if you run out of water you’re SOL. Nope, here you call the Embassy and they send over a water truck to fill up your big black water tank that I’m sure is the envy of Ghanaians during the dry season (which is now). It’s odd -- that coupled with the generator which kicks in when the rest of Accra or the neighborhood does not have any power definitely helps take the “hardship” out of “hardship post”. I mean it’s nice, but it’s definitely a change from my days in Butare when you just made do. Funny that.

Keeping cool in my home office with an ice-coffee as I prep my workshop for next week. I’ll be traveling to Benin Monday to do a 3-day workshop for broadcast journalists. Topic? Election reporting. This is in light of the country’s upcoming presidential elections where the current president has been in power (except for a couple years break) for decades and is being forced out as the constitution says you can’t be more than 70 years old. He’s 72.