Teach a man to fish...

There's something a little ironic about flying out of Afghanistan, where you've been working 18 hour days of your own volition for more than a month, and sitting at a cafe with your laptop in the Dubai airport listening to a choral group practice Michael Jackson's "Heal the World" ad-nauseum about 40 feet to your left. I feel a little like I'm in a bad Unicef ad... While I could go on about the irony of this for a while (the opportunities are numerous), what I really want to talk about is momentum.

As those of you reading this regularly know, about three weeks ago most of the expat crew made their way home, Amy had to leave too about a week later, leaving me with Brandon, the Nurestani (sp?) look-alike from the last post, for two weeks to ensure that everything we've worked so hard for over the last couple of months didn't melt away the moment we left. In the immortal words of a wise man: "If you give a man a fish, he eats for a day. If you teach him to fish, he eats for a lietime." I've eaten the fish out of the Kabul river and the result on a scale of 1-Cholera was darn-near Cholera, so instead I started teaching the Fab Labbers to FabFi in earnest. No holds barred-- IP addressing, parabolas, linux, laser cutting acrylic, the whole 9 yards.

At first the response was "you make me antenna?" To which my response is always, "No, YOU make YOU antenna", but once they grasped that I really was going, I could feel the attention double. It took a month to prove how cool FabFi really is, but they get it now and man do they want in. After three days of intensive instruction, they might even be close enough to make the dream of a user-implemented community wireless network come true. Though really, it's all up to Brandon for a while to keep the communication going until the Fab Labbers make their first links. Here's the Presentation I gave them, sadly without my playful stage antics.

Gotta catch a plane...