My Internship Experience

Today I started my new internship placement. My prior placement fell through, so I started today at SWAA (Society for Women against AIDS in Africa). They are an organization that does educational activities for people in the West Senegal area, including presentations on sanitation, HIV/AIDS testing, and Sexual Violence prevention. Im helping translate materials including websites and brochures from French to English.

To get to the internship I take a car rapide over the bridge and then walk through a smaller pretty neighborhood of Dakar. The people at the site are really nice and helpful. I spent about half an hour in one of my manager's office learning about the projects that the organization is involved in. Im helping set up data into graphs for one of their recent reports on the gender population breakdown of people living with HIV/AIDS. Its pretty cool for now, and im hoping to try designing or creating posters for future campains that SWAA supports. Although I do not have a deep interest in public health and HIV/AIDS research, I am able to find something about the organization that I can get excited about. Plus, there is always tons of things to learn from every experience that might not be obvious from the beginning of the experience. The workspace has a large table with laptops and a balcony/porch area. The supervisor's offices are upstairs, all equiped with fans as the building has no air-conditioning. Sometimes we lose power at the site, so there are a ton of batteries that the computers run off of.

Today was full of funny situations that made me laugh and everyone else laugh too. I was up in my supervisor's office, and he wanted me to take a look at a document that I was supposed to translate. He told me in French to go downstairs and look in the yellow folder for the document. So I went down to the lab and started hunting around for the yellow folder. I couldn't seem to find it even though I was looking in desk drawers and file cabinets. No yellow folders. So I trudged upstairs to tell my supervisor guy that I couldn't find the folder. He smiled and sent one of his helper people to assist in my search for the missing folder. The guy walked into the room, flipped open the laptop that was sitting on the table, and pointed to the yellow folder that had the same title as the one that the supervisor had specified. At that moment all I could was laugh, at myself and at the situation. Its just like in Zoolander when Hansel gets confused and says to himself, "Oh, the files . . . They're IN the computer". Yep, go me.