Sunday, July 09, 2006
Soft Launch and Nyungwe
Yes, I know that you've all been patiently waiting for another blog post. Well, here it is. There are too many things to write about, but I'll just focus on the two main events of last week, the soft launch of our telecenter and a day trip to Nyungwe National Forest.
Things have finally started to come together for our telecenter. (In America, we call telecenters "internet cafes.") The coffee cooperative has assigned a few people to be members of the steering committee, the manager girls are receiving basic computer training in Butare, and the network is up and running. We had to buy a new router a few weeks ago because the old one kept dropping the laptops from the network. Now that we bought a new one, though, we've only lost our connection a few times in a two week period. We ordered a bunch of equipment using the project budget, and it's started to trickle in from Kigali and abroad. We should have furniture at the start of this next week, and we just received a shipment with an external floppy drive, floppies, speakers, a Skype headset, replacement printer cartridges, and office supplies.
On Wednesday of last week, we had our soft launch. We opened our doors to the public and had a day full of open house demonstrations of services. I was in charge of planning the whole day, so I set up each of our six laptops to showcase a different service. Here's what each one did:
In the evening of the soft launch day, we had a free screening of 2Fast2Furious. We rented the DVD from a place in town, figuring that the people would like to see something with a lot of action and relatively simple dialog. Once it got dark outside, we set up a projector outside and shined the movie up on one of the walls. There were at least 50 people who came to enjoy the show. Some of them had obviously never seen a movie before, asking if the events were taking place live. They really loved the fight scenes and the car crashes, and they were surprised to see so many white people. I think movie screenings will be a popular service for our telecenter.
This weekend we took a trip to Nyungwe National Forest. We went with a PhD student from Cal Berkely named Mike Demmer. He's been working with us all during the past week on a related project, and we've hung out a lot. We left early in the morning, drove two hours to the park, and bought our permits. We were assigned a guide, and we took off on a four hour hike. It was great! Nyungwe is the largest rainforest in the Great Lakes Region, and it is known for its diverse plant life. Our guide's name was Vedaste, and he explained to us how each plant has medicinal uses. He also talked about how poaching has caused many problems for the health of the forest. Keeping poachers out is the main goal of the park staff. Our trek was about 7 miles long, and we pretty much climbed down one small mountain and up another. Along the way, we were able to see four waterfalls. The park used to have elephants (until they were all poached), but now the only significant wildlife are birds and monkeys. We were able to see a bunch of the birds and hear even more. We only saw one monkey during our hike, but we spotted a bunch on our drives into and out of the park. It was a wonderful trip, and we were all very tired by the end of the day. Even the drive between Butare and Nyungwe was very beautiful. I hope to post pictures later today or early tomorrow.
Last time I wrote quite a bit about our problems with obtaining GPRS cards. Well, we still haven't found an acceptable solution. We received three different shipments of hardware, but there's always a different type of problem with prevents us from being able to get them connected to the Internet. This week we sent Jean-Claude Habimana to Kigali twice to try to get the MTN USB GPRS cards to work, but they were unable to do anything more than we had already accomplished. Next we went to Terracom to try out an EZCall EVDO solution. They were reluctant to give us an EZCall phone to play with, but we pretty much demanded that they give it to us. After fiddling with the installation for a while (with a huge amount of help from Mike Demmer), we were able to use the EZCall like a modem to call a phone number. Now we're waiting for a Terracom technician to visit us and tell us the phone number, user name, and password we'll need to access the network.
Since we've had so many problems with hardware and logistics, we've decided to put the whole remote site portion of our mission on the back burner. This was the main goal for Ashley and I, so we're pretty disappointed that we weren't able to accomplish much. If we can get something to work in the next couple of days, we will still try to write an operation manual and cirriculum so someone else can go to the villages and get the cooperatives connected to the Net. In the mean time, we've been doing a lot of work to support Jutta with starting the telecenter. She is very busy every day, so Ashley's taken charge of training our manager ladies while I've been working on network troubleshooting guides and getting the computers ready for opening day. Our telecenter (which the cooperative has chosen to call the "Maraba Vision Telecenter," by the way) was open with reduced hours on Thursday and Friday of last week, an I was in charge of monitoring the computers and taking money, as well.
For the coming week, our last week, we have so much to do. I'm in charge of planning the opening day festivities, which include schedules, invitiations, press releases, etc. Should be pretty fun. I also have to get DeepFreeze installed on these computers, which has been a story in itself. Jutta is in charge of meeting with the stakeholder groups and writing the business plan. Ashley is working on the operational manual and overseeing the training of our manager ladies.
Okay, my hour of Internet is almost up. (I'm in a cybercafe in Butare as I write this.) Hopefully, I can write again soon.
Things have finally started to come together for our telecenter. (In America, we call telecenters "internet cafes.") The coffee cooperative has assigned a few people to be members of the steering committee, the manager girls are receiving basic computer training in Butare, and the network is up and running. We had to buy a new router a few weeks ago because the old one kept dropping the laptops from the network. Now that we bought a new one, though, we've only lost our connection a few times in a two week period. We ordered a bunch of equipment using the project budget, and it's started to trickle in from Kigali and abroad. We should have furniture at the start of this next week, and we just received a shipment with an external floppy drive, floppies, speakers, a Skype headset, replacement printer cartridges, and office supplies.
On Wednesday of last week, we had our soft launch. We opened our doors to the public and had a day full of open house demonstrations of services. I was in charge of planning the whole day, so I set up each of our six laptops to showcase a different service. Here's what each one did:
- Email (signing up people for Yahoo.fr accounts)
- General Internet Browsing (how to search the web with Google)
- Skype (letting people try out the test call)
- Google Earth (a tour of landmarks in Africa, Europe, and America, ending with my house)
- Multimedia (Rwandan and American music videos)
- Photo Studio
In the evening of the soft launch day, we had a free screening of 2Fast2Furious. We rented the DVD from a place in town, figuring that the people would like to see something with a lot of action and relatively simple dialog. Once it got dark outside, we set up a projector outside and shined the movie up on one of the walls. There were at least 50 people who came to enjoy the show. Some of them had obviously never seen a movie before, asking if the events were taking place live. They really loved the fight scenes and the car crashes, and they were surprised to see so many white people. I think movie screenings will be a popular service for our telecenter.
This weekend we took a trip to Nyungwe National Forest. We went with a PhD student from Cal Berkely named Mike Demmer. He's been working with us all during the past week on a related project, and we've hung out a lot. We left early in the morning, drove two hours to the park, and bought our permits. We were assigned a guide, and we took off on a four hour hike. It was great! Nyungwe is the largest rainforest in the Great Lakes Region, and it is known for its diverse plant life. Our guide's name was Vedaste, and he explained to us how each plant has medicinal uses. He also talked about how poaching has caused many problems for the health of the forest. Keeping poachers out is the main goal of the park staff. Our trek was about 7 miles long, and we pretty much climbed down one small mountain and up another. Along the way, we were able to see four waterfalls. The park used to have elephants (until they were all poached), but now the only significant wildlife are birds and monkeys. We were able to see a bunch of the birds and hear even more. We only saw one monkey during our hike, but we spotted a bunch on our drives into and out of the park. It was a wonderful trip, and we were all very tired by the end of the day. Even the drive between Butare and Nyungwe was very beautiful. I hope to post pictures later today or early tomorrow.
Last time I wrote quite a bit about our problems with obtaining GPRS cards. Well, we still haven't found an acceptable solution. We received three different shipments of hardware, but there's always a different type of problem with prevents us from being able to get them connected to the Internet. This week we sent Jean-Claude Habimana to Kigali twice to try to get the MTN USB GPRS cards to work, but they were unable to do anything more than we had already accomplished. Next we went to Terracom to try out an EZCall EVDO solution. They were reluctant to give us an EZCall phone to play with, but we pretty much demanded that they give it to us. After fiddling with the installation for a while (with a huge amount of help from Mike Demmer), we were able to use the EZCall like a modem to call a phone number. Now we're waiting for a Terracom technician to visit us and tell us the phone number, user name, and password we'll need to access the network.
Since we've had so many problems with hardware and logistics, we've decided to put the whole remote site portion of our mission on the back burner. This was the main goal for Ashley and I, so we're pretty disappointed that we weren't able to accomplish much. If we can get something to work in the next couple of days, we will still try to write an operation manual and cirriculum so someone else can go to the villages and get the cooperatives connected to the Net. In the mean time, we've been doing a lot of work to support Jutta with starting the telecenter. She is very busy every day, so Ashley's taken charge of training our manager ladies while I've been working on network troubleshooting guides and getting the computers ready for opening day. Our telecenter (which the cooperative has chosen to call the "Maraba Vision Telecenter," by the way) was open with reduced hours on Thursday and Friday of last week, an I was in charge of monitoring the computers and taking money, as well.
For the coming week, our last week, we have so much to do. I'm in charge of planning the opening day festivities, which include schedules, invitiations, press releases, etc. Should be pretty fun. I also have to get DeepFreeze installed on these computers, which has been a story in itself. Jutta is in charge of meeting with the stakeholder groups and writing the business plan. Ashley is working on the operational manual and overseeing the training of our manager ladies.
Okay, my hour of Internet is almost up. (I'm in a cybercafe in Butare as I write this.) Hopefully, I can write again soon.
permaLink posted by Kylan @ 2:21 AM 
