Doing a whole lot of NOT walking around.
Preface from the night before: Unfortunately, I apparently picked up an abrasion on my left foot climbing onto or off of the rocks in Bassins Bleu… and then put that abrasion into a wet sock, into a wet shoe… and proceeded to hike back to the dump truck. As a result, I got myself a genuine infected blister on the side of my left foot, which became increasingly more inflamed and painful to walk on.
Not everyone does well with medical anomalies in photographic form, so here is an externally hosted photo of the “Surgery Room” (the porch) whereat my brother Steven and Andrea (a registered nurse from the IL group) used a alcohol-sterilized pocket knife to excise the infected pus and clean the wound. You can see the inflamed red circle with the white pus in the middle on the side of my foot in the photo, just prior to its cleansing. It wasn’t pleasant, that I can guarantee. But it needed to be done the night of Day 3, to let it air out and be able to start to heal… on Day 4, as I made sure to not walk a lot or put weight on it. As such: expect a much shorter and less photo-laden post for today!
The local (Internet) radio station
So I spent most of my day working on laptops brought to the guest house for me, after sneaking over to take a closer look at the Radio Concordia International setup, the third of three portions to the church compound (alongside the church and computer school). This station has been in the works for a while now, and is still not up and running. It costs something like $800 per month to run this station (though it was not made clear to me how that cost breaks down into fees versus power consumption or the like), and it was my understanding that the radio is just starting to run. That said, at the same time as the main radio antenna, I believe that the back room of the computer school is the mixing booth for the associated Internet radio station. I headed back there to ask for a couple of power cables for the laptops I was taking to work on; you can imagine my delight at seeing that guys and girls both were contributing to the radio show at the time!! It is my understanding that this radio station is predominantly for spreading the Christian gospels, in the Lutheran/Haitian mode, which is a noble cause by itself for the growing church there. It is my contention that once better established, the radio station could take on the additional responsibility of sending out public health missives to the listeners, many of whom have no source whatsoever for good health practices. Diabetes and high blood pressure are the two of the biggest health concerns in Haiti, and those problems are firmly in the realm of “could be prevented by habit and diet change” whereas a disease like cholera requires medicine to cure, and cannot simply be removed from the local water supply. Perhaps one day, I’d like to think, the radio station could pair the good news of the Gospel with the good advice of healthier living for the body.
Teaching Haitians about computer repair and administration
So, armed with laptops and their associated power cords, I limped my way back over to the guest house, whereat I found the remainder of the team making a PILE of PB&J to take to a feeding program:
I didn’t want to push them out of the way, but I also wanted to both get started with the repairs for the day, and also to get the chance to teach my local Haitian friend Williamson about computer administration as much as I could in French. With Williamson and other Haitians, I did my best to not only do the work of fixing software, adjusting hardware, and generally trying to set their machines up for long term success – I wanted to try, in the limited way that I could given the language barrier (my technical French is, frankly, non-existent), to teach the how and why of the computers at hand. It is only part of the problem, that the computers stop working. In my eyes, entrusting the care of the computers to their owners requires the key to true ownership: understanding how to fix what you’ve got. I was genuinely touched by how much the trust I was investing in my impromptu students seemed to really make them glow with a certain pride. In my own small way with the computers, I was emulating the pattern that Steven took with ESL and other programs, in which outsiders came to teach and help but MOSTLY to help Haitians become able to teach and help themselves and their fellows. In doing this repair project, I feel that I managed to escape the thousands of pages of international development criticism and pitfalls I learned about in my first master’s degree – I created no local dependencies, and instead created the core of some local experts. It is my hope, however, to go back next year better armed with specific gear and some lesson plans to set up a genuine core of educated computer gurus – this is very exciting to me!!
The following rant is based on being a computer science minor/almost-major and generally from having worked on computers for a very long time: Windows and Mac operating systems are generally incompatible with developing countries if you want to run them in a safe sort of way. Their software updates in general are wastefully gigantic – if you’re in a place like the guest house, you’ll have intermittent electricity and Internet connectivity that maxes out at 300 kb/sec… and isn’t always running even if the electrical grid is working. So, as you can imagine, a culture which is all about sharing data and software and doesn’t entirely understand the best practices for preventing computer viruses… is in the weird situation whereby viruses are less prevalent due to lower Internet connectivity… but are also more easily able to spread as infected files are shared. You can understand my frustration, then, being faced with 15 laptops in need of reformatting and generally being updated… and struggling to even download a single antivirus update on a single machine, much less the whole set of 15. This is one of the core reasons why I brought down one of my own laptops to donate and some CDs to install the Lubuntu flavor of Linux. Lubuntu is designed to run on very old computer hardware and thus it is a very lightweight operating system; as a Linux OS, it also doesn’t find itself susceptible to the viruses which have long plagued Windows and are beginning to plague Mac. Perhaps equally importantly: it is 100% free and legal to use by all interested parties, which is an important standard to begin to set as the Haitian people grind their way to a better economy and a better life.
That said… the Lubuntu option was appealing to a couple of local pastors whose machines I fixed (“faster and virus-free? Why don’t we all have this!??”); but not to the teacher of the computer school, who rightly insisted on having a Windows environment to teach Microsoft Office. I am just glad that I was able to teach the teacher about the importance of careful administration of all the laptops in the classroom. Just like the other sustainable programs my brother sought to set up over time to keep running long after our teams had departed… by setting the laptops up freshly and safely, and teaching the local teaching how to maintain the laptops software and hardware alike, it is my hope that my volunteered time will help dozens, and then hundreds, and perhaps one day thousands of Haitians in that area of Jacmel learn the computer skills which could get them a job and change their lives. One of my followup projects after getting home is getting a set of 15 laptop cooling pads donated and brought down to the computer school, as it is FAR too hot and humid for those laptops to last a long time without some extra active cooling. More on THIS as it develops!
So: a short blog post for what was a single-task sort of day (namely, healing… with any spare time spent working on those laptops in the heat). The day which followed… was one of the busiest and most emotionally-draining of the week. Keep an eye out for the next post.
A Jaunt Around the World - Haiti 