Marouen Bloggin' his Life

After missing the first Tunisian Blogger Meetup, I'll be missing the second one which will take place on May 22th in a café in Sidi Bou Said. I think it's a good ocasion for al the tunisian bloggers to meet each other and try to discuss some topics far from the digital life. This makes me remember the IRC users meetings (especially Dalnet) I was attending some years ago. EVen if I was a little bit disconnected from that way of comminication, I saw that a real community was born and was growing. Maybe now it's time for the "Blogger community" ?

Ref: http://www.subzeroblue.com/archives/002374.html

During UNESCO's meeting, I was invited by a young reporter working on a private FM radio in “Korofina Nord” called "Radio Patriot 88.0 FM" to participate on Sunday on his radio show "CyberSono". The theme of this week was "the Free and Open Source Software" commonly called in French "Logiciels libres". What I understood at the beginning that it was a debate concerning this question with many guests. And that the radio was available online. It was all wrong.

I was afraid to be late, so I arrived one hour before the show that means at 12:00 Bamako time. I was surprised to find the radio inside a small room on the second floor of a building with external accesses to the apartments.

The called "studio" is a self-done studio in the same room divided into two small rooms one for the equipments and the other is the sound-isolated room. Only one air conditioner was dedicated for the two rooms but it was not working. The door between the two mini rooms was open all the time. Even the floor for the “guests” was done with a … small speaker …; I think

The presenter came 10 minutes before the show and gave me the outline: an article of 10 pages speaking about the FOSS and printed from a website. It was clear that who wrote the article was a pro FOSS because he was using some odd ways to convince the reader of the advantages of the FOSS like the hegemony of Microsoft and their philosophy to gain money. The problem was also that the presenter was going to read all the 10 pages as "introduction". I did a very fast revision of the document to remove all the examples and the personal opinions but hopefully (for the listeners) the presenter had a problem on one of the eyes and wasn't able to read all the text. After the first page he gave me the floor to continue the presentation of the Free and Open Source Software and to explain the relation between the notion of freedom and gratuitousness of the softwares.

At the end of the show, the presenter promised, without asking me, to the listeners that I’ll be back to explain more many points concerning Opensource world.

This Friday, I attended with my housemate a concert organized by the "Centre Culturel Français" to celebrate he anniversary of the death of the king of Reggae music "Bob Marley"

While I was waiting for my housemate, I was subject to a lot of requests from the young sellers to buy some Bob "souvenir" goods. I asked one of my friends I met there (he was French): "Are they focusing on us because we are supposed to be toubabs (means "white people" in Bambara)?". I liked his answer when he told me:"Yes, but I think it's more because we do not have any of the signs of Rasta people!”. In fact it was real because even he was wearing some sportive clothes, I was looking ridiculous with my "official" clothes and a leather shoes. One of the sellers insisted on me to buy 2 photographs of the "King" and wanted even to know why I don't want to do it. I told him that I'm not even "Rasta". He looked surprised by my answer, and he replied "If you are not Rasta, that means you are Babylon, and Babylon is our enemy. In case you do not know, Babylon on the Rasta community means the "System", called also "Babylon System" with all its bad points and representatives link the governments, the big companies, the order, etc...

The concert started after half an hour; with a small presentation of the "Rasta philosophy" that ends with "Rasta man never dies". It was a good show with a god music performed by a Malian group. Many of Bob Marley's songs were performed and even if I'm not expert on this category of music, I think they have also performed some of their own reggae titles. Many of the spectators were so integrated with the music that they never stopped dancing all along the one hour and a half delay of the concert.

At the end of the concert, all the spectators were invited to join the "Rasta community" May 11 at the Martyrs pyramid of Bamako in celebrating this "big" event.

Yesterday I finally decided to use flickr.com services to create my photoblog. It's more easy to use and I'll not have to worry all the time about the hosting space remaining on my account. the URL to my photoblog is http://www.flickr.com/photos/marouen/ . A random picture is shown on every page of the blog. Now I have to make a less easy project : to buy a digital camera

Today I was invited to a picnic organized by a the Malian students who where studying in Tunisia. As usual, at the beginning all of them thought that I am French. I said “as usual” because here in Mali no one believes me when I say I’m not French or I’ve been in France only 3 days in my life. But during this picnic; it was more easy to convince them that I am a “real” Tunisian because this time these Malians where all experts in “Tunisian dialect” and some of them were even experts in Arabic because they were attending Islamic courses in Tunisia during their studies.

It was a very good experience, especially for them, because for some persons, it was the first time they meet a Tunisian in their country “Mali”. So they were finally able to ask me the question they were used to hear in Tunisia : “Do you like Tunisia ?”. All of them asked me “Do you like Mali ?”

It was also an occasion for them to practice the Arabic they learned in Tunisia. And even some of them have lost some words, they were almost all following the discussion and when one of them forget a word or an expression, all the other try to help him. I did a great effort to avoid to fix their errors because it was clear they were happy to speak about their experiences and the good “crazy” days they have spent in their “second” home Tunisia.

We spoke about almost everything, from Ramadan nights in Tunis to the African Soccer Cup of Nations. But we spent a long time comparing the level of development between Tunisia and Mali. Many of them are representatives of Tunisian companies in Mali like Poulina Group or the distribution of softwares made in Tunisia.

At the end I have to say that lunch was great, especially when eating directly with the hands wasn’t an option