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Peace Corps to Wire Senegal
An anonymous submitter wrote: "Peace Corps Online is reporting on the White House's Digital Freedom Initiative that will place volunteers from the Peace Corps, Hewlett-Packard and Cisco in a pilot program in Senegal where they will leverage nearly 200 cybercafes and 10,000 telecenters to provide opportunities for small businesses and entrepreneurs. The idea isn't new - David Rothman proposed an Electronic Peace Corps in 1984, the Geek Corps has been doing this kind of work in Ghana for years, and the Peace Corps already has about 1,500 volunteers working in information technology."
Must learn to string a sentence together...
Ok, What's your address? I'll be right over.
Seconds later, she was confronted with a familiar sight.
"I heard a bang on the roof, and when I went outside to look, I saw it was a plastic bag full of human waste," she said, gesturing towards her dwelling in the slums of Nairobi.
"You might just be relaxing in your house, then you hear a noise on your roof and someone has thrown a bag of sewage up there," said Njoki, 27, wrinkling her nose with disgust.
There are only five toilets for the more than 2,000 people living in the slum known as "Ghetto" - a fetid labyrinth of claustrophobic dirt lanes and streams of stinking effluent.
For most people here, the "flying toilets" are the only way of answering nature's call: you simply use a plastic bag, then fling it as far out of sight as possible.
Walk into "Ghetto", or any one of scores of slum settlements housing two million people in the Kenyan capital, and the scale of the task for one African city alone seems staggering.
At almost every turn, a sickly sweet stench of urine wafts from between the huts. Barefoot children play by trenches frothing with scum. The edges are strewn with telltale bags.
"First thing in the morning, the flying toilets are rampant," said Njoki, as a gaggle of other women in a courtyard nodded in agreement. "Sometimes you are walking down the path and you see human waste, people have just thrown it there."