Surveys, Centers and What-Not

Wow, has it really been two weeks since my last post? Sorry for the long wait. The internet has been down in Sandema for the past week, and I'm posting this from an internet cafe in Bolgatanga.


Last week on Wednesday, we went on an excursion to Kadema, a neighboring town to Sandema, to shadow some of our compatriots as they administered a survey to some subsistence farmers in the town, to gather data for the G-Roots project. The survey is newly constructed and is intended to gather knowledge about things like what sources of income the farmers have and how many of their children attend school. These surveys are going to be administered to a wide sample of the farmers in Kadema, and this research is meant to provide the hard data which G-Roots will use to plan their project for next year. To get there, six of us rode on the backs of motorcycles driven by four others over a bumpy road that was sometimes paved but mostly made of dirt. The ride was nerve-wracking for about the first two minutes, but after that I was able to relax my grip on the rider in front of me and begin to enjoy the ride. The wind in my face was a welcome relief on what was another day of sweltering heat, and it was an excellent experience to watch the green African countryside fly by.



We stopped on the way in the Kadema town square. Kadema is a much smaller, less-developed town than Sandema, and the square made Sandema's look cosmopolitan by comparison. It consisted of a few tall trees for shade and a handful of tiny shacks, out of which a few people ran businesses. Until I was told, I didn't even realize it was a town square. We bought a lunch of rice balls and ground nut soup (ground nuts are peanuts) from a cheerful old woman operating out of one of the shacks, and then continued on.



We finally arrived at the farm, and there observed as Misbah interviewed members of the two families who lived there. As the farmers spoke only Buli, he did this with the help of an interpreter. We learned that these were subsistence farmers, who consumed essentially all of the food that they grew, and as a result had family incomes of a few dozen cedi a year (again, one cedi is about sixty-five cents). Nonetheless, they were very cheerful, and they laughed and joked in Buli as we spoke wiht them in the shady, thatch-roofed gazebo that they'd built from tree branches outside their home. After the survey was complete, they showed us the home itself. Unfortunately my camera's battery was charging at home so I couldn't take any pictures. Like many of the farmhouses we'd seen around the north, it was a small mud home, but it was built with a high degree of artistry, and it was almost startling in how rustically picturesque it was. I hope to get a chance to take some pictures of similar homes later on.



So wednesday was a pretty cool day. Other than that, I've started doing some work at the Sandema Resource Center, a free computer lab in the town square that is run by the HCC. Their public terminals were donated to them about five years ago. They're all about ten years old, and of the roughly nine or ten that there are, only two worked when I arrived. Most of the others were beyond my powers to repair (and probably beyond repair entirely) but I was able to fix one of them, bringing the count up to three.



The innards of the three computers were caked with red dust, so I gave them as thorough a dusting as I could with my breath and some paintbrushes, and put them back together. Also, despite the SRC's lack of internet, the three computers all were bogged down by adware and seemed to be suffering from viral infections. I assume this had been spread via flash drives, probably from computers in the local internet cafe, many of which share the same symptoms. I suspect that a lack of computer literacy makes computers here in Sandema especially vulnerable to such attacks.



While I'm by no means a security expert, I'm going to try to make the machines a bit more resistant and useful by adding partitions with Ubuntu Linux to each of them and setting them up so that only the center operators will have administrator access. I've set up the operators with laptops running Ubuntu so that they can try it and discover any technology and usability issues, and if there's nothing I can't resolve I'll go ahead with this plan. I'm also going to put some freshly-downloaded free AV software on the Windows partitions (I'm thinking Avast), which should provide some temporary protection.


That's all for now. Next time I'll write about the surveys of farmers that we've been doing, and of course about any other cool things that happen between now and then. I'll try to post a bit more frequently henceforth as well. Cheers!