Exciting Weekend

We had a very exciting weekend filled with trips to the Blue Lagoon, Neves (Nevish), the beach, and STeP UP’s 5th birthday party. Friday night we went to Pestana, a luxury resort with nightclub and it cost way to much money. I wasn’t excited about going when I heard it was $10 to get in the door. Anyway, we went and it was empty because no locals can afford the entry fee while still having a good time. We want to go again as an end of the trip celebration but it’s just too expensive.

STeP UP's Birthday Cake

Saturday we started nice and easy at the beach before heading to STeP UP’s 5th anniversary party. The Minister of Education was in attendance and there was great food as well as cake. After we headed to a soccer game where security was tighter than the airport; army personnel with guns, police with riot gear and a barbed wire fence surrounding the entire field. The game was calm, thankfully, but it had a lot of energy and I found myself yelling at the officials with the rest of the crowd during a few bad calls.

Fun in the sand. OLPC.

Riot Gear: These Police appeared to be the officials personal guards

Sunday we started bright and early with a trip to Neves to eat crab. Neves is located at the north west end of the island, about an hours drive. We stopped at the Lagoa Azul for a quick photo opportunity. Driving through the country shows a completely different side of Sao Tome. Despite having a much lower quality of life, fish and fruit are abundant year round on the island so no one is going hungry. We ate fantastic fresh crab and took the trip with two other Americans from Seattle who are with the Mobility Project, an international NGO setup to provide wheelchairs to third world countries. Tuesday they will deploy 60 wheelchairs as a trial run for the 200-400 they would like to bring in the future. After eating we left to go to James’ (our local contact) aunt. We had another meal (again, fantastic) and met lots of his cousins and uncle. We were witness to an impromptu dance performance at the house next door and eventually returned home.

Old Tree near the Lagoa Azul

Crab in Neves

This week we will start working with the teachers to get the ready to teach lessons using the XO.


Lots of pictures! YAY!
-XO Mike

Daily Life in Sao Tome

So far our day to day life has been much different than expected. The sun rises around 5 and sets at 6. We can accomplish actual work from around 9 until noon and 2 until 3:30 or 4. The rest of the time people are at home.

A lot of our day is spent figuring out what to eat and when to make it. Nearly everything here is imported so to save costs we go to the open markets to get the best prices. There is a general goods market where we can get any produce which is locally grown and there is a fish market to get anything from the sea (we had barracuda last night). Once we go to all the markets and find what we want (we do this everyday because our refrigerator is too small) we need to bring it home and prepare everything: gut the fish, season the fish, chop the vegetables, cook the vegetables, etc. Eating has become a full time job.

To help with the extra time life takes in Sao Tome and to give back to the economy we have hired several people around our house. We have hired a housekeeper who comes on MWF to do laundry, clean around the house and cook (if we’re home). When we moved in our house had been vacant and neglected for a year so we hired someone to clean up the yard, when he was done he asked if he could stay on as our gardener so we agreed. We also hired a night watchman and he is about the scariest person ever. It gets dark around here and with his dark skin it is impossible to see him at night. One of the first nights the power went out and Corey and I were near the front gate and I said, shouldn’t the watchman be here by now? At that time we took another step towards the gate and from inside our walls a man appeared and opened the gate thinking we wanted to leave. He had been there for a while without us knowing and I nearly wet my pants.

At night we have been relaxing playing cards (last night it was hearts and Danielle is going to teach us rummy later) or watching TV episodes and movies we have on our computers. If we want to get online we can walk 3 blocks to the national library and sit out front but the mosquitoes prohibit prolonged usage.

Another bit about African mosquitoes; while they may carry deadly diseases, their bites are way less annoying and I only get a small dot of a bump that goes away by the next night. In the US I get obnoxious bites which itch for days.

-XO Mike

TiA

Today we were scheduled to visit several schools throughout Rwanda and teach teachers how to use Scratch (an animation/math/programming application). The day did not go as planned; This is Africa (TiA) as we have learned to call it.

At 4:45am we awoke from our night at the Casino and headed down to the bus which was expected to arrive at 5:35 for our breakfast at the Hilltop Hotel. Our busses were expected to leave for our school sites at 6:30. 5:35 came and went… 5:45… 6:00… 6:15… 6:30… 6:40 the bus comes to take us to Hilltop and we are almost expecting our busses to have left by now. We sat down and ate while we waited for the busses to get ready to leave, they still weren’t ready to go to the sites. Our sheet said we would leave for the site at 6:30 and arrive at 8. We left at 6:50 and arrived at 7. WHAT???

Children begin bringing in desks to prepare our room and about 8am teachers start arriving. The morning was incredibly slow as the teachers had not touched an XO before (or even a computer) and Scratch is a very advanced program. We spent three full hours grinding away before we started to make any progress and broke for lunch at noon. We had two hours for lunch as everyone goes home and we walked to our contact’s house nearby to wait for the food which was late and was expected to arrive at noon. 12:15… 12:30… 12:45… 1:00… 1:15… 1:30… This entire time the company is telling us 5 more minutes every five minutes we call. Our OLPC contacts finally give up and go out and buy us lunch which arrives at 1:45. We eat and head back to school to see our food arriving at 2; TiA.

All of the teachers are arriving at this point and the food at the same time just creates confusion. The delivery company won’t leave until we drink all the sodas because they need to return the glass bottles so we give what’s left away to the teachers. At about 2:40 we can finally start on the second half of the day and the teachers ask to review other applications. We introduced Record (the camera program), Write, Paint and a few others and this part went really well. Teachers were trying new things and teaching each other as they learned.

Throughout the day as we saw kids I was snapping pictures of them and they LOVE to see their pictures. Justin, a kid from the University of Minnesota deploying in Senegal, took a picture of about 30 kids and knelt down to show them and he got swarmed. I have a picture of him in the center of a million heads. On Monday we will be working with 5th grade kids handing out laptops and it should make for a lot more good pictures.

TiA
-XO Mike

Less than two weeks!

Corey and I leave for Kigali two weeks from last Friday. Tomorrow several members of the team and I start a non-credited course at the University to jump start language learning. We will be in class two hours per day M-F with homework (wait, didn't I just finish the semester?!?!). I hope this will help prepare me to be able to better communicate with the locals. I don't expect to be fluent but I think they will be impressed and feel like we are trying to do more than drop off some computers if we can introduce ourselves and communicate a few basic phrases.

Tomorrow we should come close to our final budget and the money from OLPC should be in our account and we will begin purchasing equipment. Our equipment is dependent on the number of sites that we visit which will also be decided tomorrow. We are required to provide additional equipment we will need on site which will include Buffalo router/access points for each site. We chose this type because it features an internal amplifier and powerful antenna to hopefully broadcast beyond the schoolyard.

Buffalo WHR-HP-G54 - The wireless access point which we will use at each site.

Tomorrow should be a big decision day for our group as we select the sites, or at least how we will select the sites once we see the actual conditions. OLPC wants the saturation to be one laptop per child, whereas with our current plan it could be as many as one laptop per 5 children. We are thinking about giving each child a flash drive to allow them to save their work and share the computer to create it but the costs of the flash drive ($6.25 per drive) will likely prohibit this plan.

I'll update with any new details tomorrow.

-XO Mike

Extra Equipment

We are still planning away and have narrowed down our deployment to cover no more than 5 sites. We looked into adding printers for our deployment but have rejected the idea because the XO operating system does not offer print options such as "File>Print".

I was excited to hear about the new equipment we will be receiving in Kigali. We will be receiving an XS which is a server for the XO laptops.

The XS server. It is quite small, about the size of a piece of paper and two inches thick. It weighs only five pounds and uses the case as a heatsink to eliminate fans which can wear out and get dust in the system.

Another tool which we will be using during the trip is a Flip HD camera which OLPC will be providing on loan for the summer. The Flip HD camera is a micro camcorder which records 720p HD video onto digital memory and can be imported to the computer using the onboard USB plug.

The camera is really small but records good quality video. To get a perspective of scall, look at the USB plug in relation to the entire camera. It's a standard USB plug!

That's all for today. We had a meeting with our "boss" at OLPC yesterday and he also thinks we are on a path to success.

-XO Mike