Monday, the first day of our training, seemed to go really well and incredibly smoothly, probably because I was so freaked out and nervous the day before that I could only imagine the worst, and there's no way it was going to be that bad. (It didn't help my anxiety to spend Saturday preparing a party for the Geekcorps coordinator, who's leaving Mali next week, spend Saturday night hosting it, staying up until 5:00 a.m., and getting four hours of sleep.)

Today's training was a little rougher going (we had some logistical problems with the coffee breaks and lunch) but the last session of the day was a role-playing exercise, and it was fun and effective. Each of the four participants led a 10-minute training session on the topic of their choice, from how to operate a minidisk player to how to cook tigadege. Everyone enjoyed it and we ended on a high note.

Another highlight from today: I worked one-on-one for a while with the sole woman in the group, who wasn't clear enough on the concept of syndications -- i.e., RSS files or newsfeeds -- to explain it to her board. (The radio stations' sites use RSS to pull headlines from other sites into a sidebar on their homepages, like the AllAfrica headlines you see on this page.)

I explained the concept of syndication -- not particularly easy in English, let alone in French -- and I knew she got it when she said, "Oh! You know what would be even better than seeing these headlines on my website? Getting them directly in my inbox!" Not only had she grasped the concept of syndicated content, but she was thinking already of a better way to process the information.

Now if she had her own computer with Thunderbird installed, that would be a piece of cake (since Thunderbird has a built-in newsreader) but I'm not sure how to do it with just a Yahoo account. Let me know if you have any ideas ...

By the way, I've posted a whole set of pictures from Spain, some of which you will see at the top of this page.