Rural Africa

Its amazing how quickly you adapt to your surroundings, and how quickly your reality can be swept away. I awoke this morning to the bleating of goats, the crows of roosters, and the screaming of children. Here, in the rural town of Luangwa, I truly feel like I am in Africa. From my room, I overlook the confluence of the Luangwa and Zambezi rivers, dividing the land into Mozambique, Zimbabwe, and Zambia. A warm breeze blows off the river, cooling the hot afternoon. Dusty green and brown trees cover the rolling hills. The occasional baobob tree stands out in the distance as a link to ancestral times.

My room is sparse. It has two beds with mosquito nets dangling over them, swaying in the afternoon breeze. The stuffing is coming out of the worn sponge mattress. A barren light bulb dangles in the center of the room, wiring akimbo. There is a table with two chairs. A curtain divides the bathroom - an open concrete floor with a showerhead, a sink, and a toilet. This place is plush - toilet seats are a luxury, and when the water is running, the toilet flushes! There is no hot water, but the need for warm water is questionable in this heat. Cleanliness is a state of mind.

There are animals of all sorts in my room. Tiny ants with attention-deficit-disorder cover the bathroom floor, moving to and fro randomly at amazing speeds. Larger ants, not nearly as numerous, have taken over the bathroom walls. A few poor out of the sink faucet when the water is first turned on. Even larger ants, only a few, can be found hiding in the main room, taking refuge from spiders of all shapes and sizes, geckos on the walls - both inside and outside the room - and a few wasps unhappily trapped inside the screen windows, confused and frustrated. There is a cockroach that inhabits the recess behind the shower faucet. Forget about the large animals thatare occasionally spotted outside - lions, elephants, and hippos.

My room overlooks a hidden valley along the river, and from a secluded rock outcropping I can peer down on village life - safe from the stares of kids who have only ever seen a handful of white folk and the incessant greetings of kids proudly practicing their English. Twenty circular mud huts with conical grass roofs are dotted along a dirt hillside which drops to the river. The architecture is the same as my room, just smaller, with no windows and I doubt a toilet with a seat. The garden is full of kids shuttling buckets of water from the river to the straight green rows of vegetables. Clothes hanging on lines add color to the landscape, swinging softly in the breeze. Screams and hollers abound. A young kid runs over to the edge of the village, his pants around his ankles in the blink of an eye. Off he runs to join his friends, his business done. Chickens and goats mind themselves among the huts, avoiding roving gangs of children. Women
stroll from hut to hut, or have gathered to prepare a meal.

I check my email on my phone.

The scene is entrancing, soothing - or perhaps that's the cool wind bringing peace to the end of a string of long days. We installed solar power in a nearby clinic today. We installed our shiny, new
solar panel next to three old ones on the roof. Each looked like the panel itself still worked, but the lighting and radio systems they supported do not. I'm told they are only a few years old, but the batteries are trashed, the light bulbs burned out. A charge controller and 1kW inverted sit by idly, unconnected, unloved, and collecting dust. The work may not have been shoddy to begin with, but looks it now, with wires hanging left and right, some spliced randomly together in unexpected ways. The power provided by Luangwa town, not more than a 10 minute drive from the clinic, is unavailable. The nearest power line is probably within 1-2 km of the clinic. The thermal power produced in the area is exported to Mozambique, but not connected to villages just as close by.

There are many things here that warm the heat, and many that tear it apart.

During our stay a part of the generator for the town's electricity failed, and a replacement needed to be shipped from the capital. The power company, Zesco, kindly posted hand-written fliers on trees throughout town explaining the issue. When the note mentions the need to find alternative means to find fresh food - you know it could be awhile before you hear the hum of electricity again...

Dirty Guinea Pigs and Spider's Brains: Teaching Computers in Rural Africa

Ten blank, staring faces answered my question for me, 'Who has ever
used a computer before?'

It took some thought, a bit of trial and error, some creativity, and lots of patience during my first week of trainings in Zambia. We are installing a data entry system using touch screen computers in rural Zambian clinics. The touch screen is connected to a server that uses the local cell network to communicate with a central server in the capital, relaying messages back and forth between clinics and the cell phones of Community Health Workers (CHWs) - members of the community trained in basic first aid and health care, who walk or bike between villages referring the sick to the clinic and following up with patients sent home from the clinic to find out whether or not they got better. The week encompassed training both the clinic workers on entering paper forms into a touch screen computer, and teaching CHWs how to use their phone to electronically record referrals and follow ups.

Many of those attending the trainings traveled incredible distances - biking up to 25km one way from home - getting up at 4am to be somewhere by 7:30am - hoping to get a meal or some sort of sustenance at the training session. Early morning energy and enthusiasm quickly faded mid afternoon as people started thinking about the journey home and their stomachs began to grumble. This left a short window within which to train. I discovered that a large chunk of the window on the first day needed to be dedicated to introductions, games, ice breakers, or anything that gets people involved, willing to ask questions, or happy to share their thoughts. Used to rote learning, I was not going to teach a class of parrots: "Repeat after me…" Breaking this habit, if for only one or two days, was challenging, to say the least.

I thought it would help speaking the national language - English. My opaquely thick American accent, however, often drew blank looks until my words were translated from American English to Zambian English - or Nyanja - or Bemba - or Tonga depending on the trainees origins. I
found that I needed to got creative.

To illustrate the term guinea pig, I created the analogy of an extremely dirty local rodent, and testing a new soap. If the soap cleaned the rodent, it worked. If the rodent remained dirty, the soap was a failure. Seeing those 'aha' moments makes it completely worth it - and hopefully I didn't unintentionally give the impression animal testing isn't overly abundant back home...

I explained a computer network as a spider's web, with the spider knowing where each of 10 flies on the web were located and whether they were ready to be eaten or not. This was our central server communicating via the 'web' to each of the clinics.

I used the age old ice breaker of spelling your name with your hips.

All in all - I think everyone left the training sessions enriched, myself included. There is now a growing cadre of tech savvy Zambians, at first afraid to touch a touch screen computer. Hopefully they learned something valuable, both in terms of using technology to make their jobs easier, and how to use it to improve health outcomes in rural Zambia.