It is now the 17 th here in Sri Lanka, which means I only have 10 days left in this wonderful country. So I decided it would be fitting to put together a top 10 list of things that have been going on lately to commemorate the milestone.   10. I now have a little brother. My team lead has a little 2 year-old and he is totally in love with me. He is part Pilipino and he calls me Kuya which means brother in Tagalong. 9. I recently saw my first gem pit. It was really cool to see...

Greetings all. Well I have another official announcement to make. Today was our final workshop of the consultancy. I do not mean that I won’t be doing instruction in the month or so I have left here. What I do mean is we have now fulfilled our major mandate by completing our trainings. 15 trainings and 9 provinces later we have provided some foundational expertise to provincial trainers in Moodle in the use and development of computer assisted learning. I feel very good and extremely ful...

Yes, ladies and gentlemen it is official. I only have about 40 days and 40 nights left here in Sri Lanka before I return home to NM. I am very excited about the whole thing especially since I will be home in time for the holidays. I will return on the 27th of December so I will be having a late Christmas and celebrating New Year’s with my family. I am very happy that the workshops we have been delivering are 1 away from being complete. It is a very fulfilling and amazing feeling t...

Today I had quite the experience. I was walking along the beach and I saw a massive amount of coral that was just strewn about. It was quite an amazing and hurtful sight. I could hardly believe that there was so much life there at one time and that it was now no more than a collection of neat looking stones. Some of the coral even had some of its color left. I was distraught when I saw all of this and it really made me realize just how much damage mankind has been doing to the whole of nature. ...

As I sit here in the main lobby of the St. Andrews Hotel in Newara Eliya, I decided to reflect on my recent life and times out here in Sri Lanka. I suppose I will start with the most recent of development. I am in a very rural town called Newara Eliya which is in the heart of tea country. There are literally tea plantations for as far as the eye can see. I could take a short stroll and pick my own tea leaves. It is really quite amazing. The thing about these plantations that I didn’t expe...

That’s right folks, this week I was so blessed to see both of these animals. I was very surprised to see both of them right in the city. Near where I work at the NIE there are quite a number of large trees with vines on them. Well on Wednesday I noticed some activity in the trees. It turns out there were two monkeys playing in the trees. I had heard previously that they play in the trees around work but I had never seen them before. I was so excited I got out my camera right away. However...

Greetings all! Wow it is hard to believe so much time has passed since I last made an entry here. Time for me has been passing so fast I can hardly believe it. However, as I look forward to my departure date I think it is going to be such a long time coming in the future that it might not ever get here. However, it is the 1 st of October and now it is just a matter of going from event to event in order to parcel the time and make things go a bit faster. This month there are a couple of th...

Clove sticks and stems that is! I just came up from working out and I saw one of my buddies at the front desk. He was sitting down checking out this large pile of brown stuff. I said hello and walked on over and he asked me if I knew what it was he was picking through. I told him I had no idea and he told me that he had a big pile of cloves and the sticks and stems they grow on sitting in front of him. Cloves are actually the flowers of a plant if some of you didn't know. He picke...

Time for another weekly installment from your Norteño in Asia! Well this week was very eventful. Our main objective this week was to make sure our training happened tomorrow. The big wig at the MoE contacted the provincial IT managers on Monday and told them our criteria for participants. My team lead and I were a bit skeptical given the complexity of the bureaucracy here in Sri Lanka. We were pleasantly surprised to meet with our big wig and have him hand us a participant list on ...

Well this week was filled with excitement. The best thing that happened was that I was finally able to fix my new computer. However, it took restoring it to the factory defaults to get the darn thing to work. I guess sometimes computers can just be a headache. I got everything running the right way again on Wednesday. I was very pleased and I am happy to be clicking along as should have been the case before. I have now disabled my automatic Windows Updates and I will leave them off until Micros...

Wow, what a week. Looking back on things it just seems kind of crazy thinking about all the things I did and just how fast time went by. The first thing we had go on was the workshop I mentioned in a previous post. This went really good. I was very pleased with the group and things went extremely well for my first go at MC. I did several presentations on instructional applications of the web and other technologically based tools to the secondary classroom. It seemed like people really liked the...

Hello everyone! Well we had quite a day at our workshop today. I am all after the outcome. That is another article though. On Sunday I embarked on my first trip as a solo "resident" of Sri Lanka. I was working like mad on Sunday on the presentation and Moodle site for today. I was questioning if I should go out or not but I eventually said heck with it and decided to take a break. I really needed it. I called a cab and they came in about 15 minutes. My main objective was to...

OK everyone, it has been about a week since I last wrote. So did you guess what the Ocean Girl was all about? Drum roll please… Baywatch! Surprised? I sure was. I suppose Pam Anderson’s plastic chest is much more influential than I first thought. I guess sex sells no matter what culture you are talking about. Well I must say that I had a good week. It was highlighted by our meeting with the Project Director on Thursday. I found out after the meeting that this was ...

Sunday evening here in Sri Lanka. It was cloudy day here, which was nice for a change. I really appreciated it because I was out of the house for most of the day. I went to a birthday gathering for my mentor's sister. It was her 50th and they had lots of people come over. Their family really reminded me of a Mexican family in that they have tons of cousins that do many different things. Very interesting how to very different cultures can have the same basic structure of family and concept of ha...

Wow, what a week that was! I know I still have one day to go but it will be chill compared to the last 4. I have loved every moment of it though. I spent my time working with SMEs to develop presentations for our Monday workshop and designing training aids for Moodle. Good stuff. I have met all of my deadlines so far and there is only one workshop left to finalize tomorrow. I am also applying for my resident visa tomorrow. The good thing about that is when it is granted I will get resident pric...