New Story 4

A little while ago, there was an attack in Mali. It was in Bamako, the capital, where we stayed a number of times. The attack was apparently made by Muslim extemists, and it was done on a hotel. A lot of the victims were tourists.

I finished my last session of New Story Training. When I originally saw their schedule, and saw that the fourth session was a month away from the third, I thought it was just bad scheduling. Like, the room was available three days in a row, and then the next availability was a month later. But they actually wanted to act as facilitators, and to give us the chance to work on and follow up with our partners before coming back together to review how the facilitation process went.

My phone has become very difficult to charge. When it first started giving me trouble, it was a matter of me placing the plug very precisely within it and then not disturbing it. Eventually, it needed to be angled in a way that wouldn't allow for standard positioning, so I'd prop the plug on a pen so the charger was at an incline which allowed it to fuel the phone. Now it needs to have pressure applied to it or it won't charge. I solved this problem by taping a pen to the charger to create handles, then wrapping a rubber band around the handles and then the top of the phone to create consistent applied pressure without me holding it. Still, if it's becoming this difficult this fast, I worry that it will regress to a point that I can't use it.

I think the problem is the plug to my phone, and not the plug of the charger, because I've tried another charger on my phone and it had the same issues.

I really rely on my phone. One time I was walking home to catch a bus late at night and my phone was dead. When I got to the bus stop, I decided to do an EasyGo text to see when the next arrival would be. Then I realized that I needed my phone to send the text. I didn't think that was a big deal, after all, it was at most an hour wait, so I'd just check the time and track the hour. But I use my phone for the time, so that didn't work. I wanted to check to see if there were still buses at that time of night, but of course I can't verify that without my phone. I thought, worst come to worst, I'll go to a pay phone and call a cab. But I didn't know the cab number, their number was in the contact list in my phone.