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July 31, 2007 at 9:53
tags: rwanda
It has been pitch black for most of my nights in Rwanda, but last night was different. Yesterday’s rain must have cleared the dust from the air and the full moon was beaming through the cloudless sky and illuminated the path home.
Like most paths in the bush, there are always bits of vegetation on the path. For obvious reasons, I try not to step on anything that could be conceivably be equipped with fangs and venom. At the same time, there are a lot of such snake-like items on the path, so when it’s inevitable that I’ll place my feet close to some number of them.
I’ve only heard of three instances of snake encounters in Rwinkwavu. There was a poisonous snake killed in the hospital a few months back, one of the PIHers on her first night ran into a snake in her bedroom and finally, one of the Rwandan staff stepped on a snake (with no side effects) some time ago.
I was about halfway to the Major’s house my brain fired off a message.
“Yaw? You just walked by a gigantic snake. You probably want to turn on your flashlight now. It’s not a big deal or anything, but given that your foot was a few inches from stepping on it, I thought you might want to know in case you wanted to prevent death. Like I said, no biggie…”
The message didn’t register as terribly urgent so I took a few more steps, flicked on my flashlight, before it sunk in. Right. Snake.
I swung the flashlight around and lying on the side of the path was a seven foot long black snake (methinks it was the deadly black mamba). It was curled up lazily at the side of the path and once the light reached its head, I saw it reared up and pointed some very beady eyes in my direction.
I felt my body starting giving up control of my bladder and bowels, but my brain was still working fine. It fired off another message.
“Dude. No one is going to believe this story. Get closer and take a picture.”
I actually started to take my off backpack before the lessons I had learned during my middle school science fair project on snakes came to me. This was likely a venomous snake on the prowl for one of the many mice I’d seen on the path. Given the length of the creature, it was apparently successful at killing its prey and a camera’s flash would either scare it into fleeing (likely) or striking (unlikely).
Given my luck thus far, I decided not to press my good fortune. Instead of reaching for the camera, I kept the light on the snake and it swung its head towards the bush, uncurling as it slithered into the darkness.
As I turned around and headed home, I knew the organs I’d saved from possible death would not let me forget this chance to risk my life (see previous post) for a photo, especially given my mocking of Adrienne.
I did not have to wait long for another brain message came across the wire.
“Wuss.”
July 23, 2007 at 0:32
tags: rwanda
I woke up this morning to Adrienne and Katie talking about something exciting. I got up and popped my head out of the door and saw Katie grabbing Adrienne’s towel from her room and gently heading towards the front door. As she passed by my door, I noticed what the commotion was about — on the towel was the biggest spider I’ve ever seen.
You can’t get the sense of how big this thing was from the picture, but when spread out it would sit neatly on a CD (or DVD). Apparently, Adrienne was about to head to the terrorist shower (see previous post) when she felt something furry on the towel. I’d expect most people to faint, scream, curse or find Jesus, but most people are not Adrienne. Instead, Adrienne reached for her phone and sent a ‘help’ text to Katie (whose room is maybe 20 ft way). Hilarious.
In other Adrienne news, she can ride a unicycle, juggle and has the best Skype phone ever.
July 22, 2007 at 3:26
tags: rwanda
Prisoners in Rwanda wear bright pink jumpsuits when they are out working. We see a lot of them because the prison is near the hospital either working or getting treatment. When I get up the courage to take pictures of unchained violent criminals out on the town, I’ll post a few.
On a related note, prisoners in the Philippines have re-enacted Michael Jackson’s Thriller.
July 21, 2007 at 2:54
tags: rwanda
I spent the last week upgrading satellite dishes in all the sites. In addition to the district hospital, I also upgraded the remote health clinics (Kirehe, Rukira, Rusumo, Nyarubuye, Mulindi). Emeka, a Nigerian tech working for the Israeli company we are using came out to lead the install.
This is my first experience with satellites and the process should be pretty simple. You first find out where the satellite is in the sky from the ISP. You disconnect the dish from the modem and plug the DVD-LNB into the transmitter. The DVD-LNB is basically a DVD player attached to a screen. It communicates with the transmitter over coax and reports signal strength. You point the dish at those coordinates and adjust elevation and azimuth until you get the best signal possible (about 50% for a 1.8m dish). You then connect the modem back to the transmitter and change the IP settings and tweak with the ISP until you maximize your speeds. Whole thing shouldn’t take more than 30 minutes.
In actually, it can take forever to get everything working. Finding the location of the satellite takes a fair number of calculations that are easy to get wrong. Adjusting the dish and finding the signal can take up to three weeks if some equipment is bad or the satellite isn’t sending out the signal you expect. The satellite modems are also fickle and without the right firmware you can waste a lot of time.
In our case, if you were also unfortunate enough to show up to a site where the keys to the dish or modem where not around — you’d have to do the upgrade by jumping a fence to get to the dish and use the local WiFi network to configure the modem and hope when you rebooted the modem and router, you had enter the right IP information and still had WiFi.
We also had to install the dish in places like Nyarubuye (means mountain of rock) or Rukira (means city on top of a mountain with a twisty “road” that features a sheer drop on one side and car sized potholes on the other that I had to drive down in the middle of the night with an old Toyota truck…but I’m not bitter).
On the days that we had a driver and we took the Land Cruiser and had to ride in back. The Land Cruiser essentially has bench seating in back, so the two to three hour trips means you are being violently tossed around from one side to the other. Your body has no choice to tense up and it’s an exhausting journey. If the driver isn’t good, expect to puke. Violently.
All in all, things went better than expected. It took two days to get the dishes pointed and the rest of the week was spent optimizing the connections. We are using shared bandwidth on demand and now between the six Rwanda sites and three Malawi sites, we have 1.5Mbps down. I rewarded myself with a well deserved goat kebab.
July 7, 2007 at 6:18
tags: rwanda
Cell phone coverage in Rwanda is quite good. You can call, text or even use GPRS everywhere — even in the remote places. Unfortunately for us, Rwinkwavu is one of those places where coverage sucks. MTN (cell provider) did agree to install a cell extender to boost our coverage as a temporary solution, so they came out a few days ago to power and configure our new extender.
Getting things done in Rwanda (and I’m guessing Africa) tends to be slow and bureaucratic — everything requires explicit and multiple approvals have been given. Not necessarily a bad thing, but whether you are installing a cell tower or ordering food, expect long delays. I got a message from Giscard that the cell tower would have to tap into our UPS and MTN (provider) wanted verbal confirmation again. I was off site, so I headed towards the hospital.
When I got there, the grey skies had turned dark and swollen with rain. It was mostly sprinkles at first, but then the downpour started. By the hour mark, it was clear we were in for a long night. We couldn’t leave until we knew the cell tower was working and the MTN employees were working slowly due to the rain. We went inside the hospital to take shelter and wait.
We’d only been inside for a few minutes when we heard the crack of lighting and a loud explosion. Everything went dark. As the flashlights and cellphones came out, we saw smoke leaking from the walls. Whatever had happened in the last few seconds had destroyed the light switches in the room we were standing. The switches had exploded and the smoke was from the burning plastic. Nice.
We rushed to the power room to check things out. The UPS which was supposed to run the hospital for 3-4 hours was completely dead. Not damaged, but rather instantaneously drained. It seemed something in the power grid and shorted and sucked all the power out of the hospital. The generator had suffered a similar fate — all its electronic components were dead. Awesome.
The next stop was the server room. Everything was off (we run of the main UPS) but at luckily there was no burning smell. We were unplugging everything from the wall when we heard yelling. We stepped out of the server room into a deluge of reddish water. The hospital was being flooded. Great.
It was at this point that my flashlight was commandeered by the doctors. A patient was in surgery when the power went out, and the flashlights the staff had were not adequate. I snuck a peak into the operating room and the poor guy had some sort of mouth wound that they were sewing and it would take all night. Given the lack of power there was not much else to do. We had a quick chat, and called it a night.
The morning after was no easier. The lightning did very bad things to our equipment. The spike had come through the ethernet cabling and the power lines. We lost computers, monitors, printers, and routers. Even in the house close to the hospital strange things had happened. The satellite modem, despite being on a working UPS, blew both fuses and the motherboard was toast. I took it apart, but couldn’t figure out why it was dead.
At this point, we’ve reshuffled most of the network and things are sort of working. The EMR server survived and one of the two satellites is still running so we can still work. The UPS and generator are still down, and half the network is down because we’ve run out of routers and ethernet boosters. In a few weeks, we will be getting a shipment of gear that will get us back to full capacity. Everyone in Rwinkwavu is rebuilding after the storm. This ant path appeared the morning after…
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