OSI Report

http://michaelgballard.com/osi/MGB_OSI.pdf

Goodbye Kenya!

Thank you Parsons & OSI for the most fulfilling experience of my life.

Never a disappointment in Kenya

Friday: I went to the slums expecting to fight back tears but instead found myself laughing in the matatu back to the office. Denise told me this would happen but I just thought she was patronizingly trying to make light of a grim situation. Of course there were plenty of horrors in Kibera but the people I met were gracious, outgoing and seemingly happy. Right as I walked in, a kid, with the biggest and most genuine smile I think I have ever seen, ran up to me, cheered “muzungu”, grabbed onto my leg and wouldn’t let go until his laughing mother pulled him off and apologized. The interviews went very well but the kiswahili responses are going to take a while to translate which means I probably won’t finish the documentary while I am still in Kenya. Here’s a happy picture from Kibera, I’ll show the sad ones to my cousin when she starts complaining about not having enough ponies.

Saturday/Sunday: Since I had already been on what I thought was the best safari ever, I prepared myself for disappointment ahead of my trip to Maasai Mara where I would be meeting up with Denise. But as usual, Kenya took pity on this New Englander, so used to endless winters and raining Summer weekends in Cape Cod, by providing perfect weather for a spectacular safari full of cool animal action and beautiful scenery. This place was ridiculous and I completely understand why the British were so enamored. Anyway, I’m not going to inundate you with photographs this time but here are a couple G-rated highlights:

The usual gripe with PROOF: This site is painfully slow for the bandwidth challenged. And do you know what site is also slow? The stopstockouts site. What do you think these two sites have in common that they do not have in common with my personal parsons DRUPAL blog which loads its front page, full of images, faster than the osi wp-admin page even though its hosted in the same server? Yes, that’s a long sentence and yes, the answer of course, is WORDPRESS because it ファキング　サークス! (But I still think its a good starting point for Boot students.)

Press Conference

We had a press conference yesterday. I made a dramatic loop video that played while members of the press were walking in and did a live demonstration. I set up everything in a Parsons-certified aesthetically pleasing manner until a hyperactive AIDS activist came in started ordering everyone around. He made me move the projector aaaaaallllll the way to the back of the room so the projection was massive, cut off, and completely warped due to the change in angle. He didn’t care. I spent a half hour with the “keystone” and all those other esoteric projector settings until it at least resembled a square on the screen. Then someone kicked the plug out and I had to start all over. The hotel internet also kicked out right when it was time to do the live demonstration. It was quite embarrassing. Just as I was starting to sweat profusely, someone made a joke… then I remembered that I was in Kenya and no one actually expected the internet to work properly. Fortunately I had my cellular modem and dialed up in what seemed like an hour and continued on.

I would say that the press conference was successful although the journalists kept asking about swine flu (the first confirmed case in Kenya was on Monday) as if we would have anything to say about that. The hyperactive AIDS activist, who is kind of famous around here, condescendingly accused the media of having a penchant for sensationalism and they stopped with the swine flue questions.

The story has been picked up by some blogs and Kenyan news media:

A shout-out to Parsons DT!

Capital FM’s piece

Television piece

By the way:
1. I was up until 1 last night because two of the Pentecostal people living here were speaking (shouting) in tongues.
2. I found a tiny folded up piece of paper in my backpack that says “Nice Eyes” and a phone number. Should I call?

Far from perfect.

So… while I was frolicking with the elephants and dodging monkey poop, the SMS system was placing stock-out dots in the middle of the sea. I didn’t build a good enough error checking system (ok, I didn’t build one at all) so incorrectly formatted texts full of weird symbols and spaces were interpreted by the script as 0° 0°. Creating an error checking system was not difficult (can’t believe I didn’t do it in the first place) but retrieving, reinterpreting and reentering the first weird text and all subsequent texts, which were effected by it, has been laborious. In addition, when I went to show everyone the interface for the press conference TOMORROW, one of the leaders of the campaign asked me how to get the dots to show individual clinic names. There are now over 250 stock-out reports in the system and not a single one of them is tied to a specific clinic. Clinic names were not recorded because I was told not to record them. From my understanding, it was the intention of the campaign to highlight a government problem rather than to tarnish the reputation of individual clinics and pharmacies. So it kind of seemed like I was letting everyone down when I said it could not be done before the press conference but fortunately the Boss spoke up in my defense.

HELP: The stockouts site with the entire ushahidi interface on the front page was crashing older browsers and taking forever to load so the map had to be moved to a secondary page. I would really appreciate some testing because the categories selector is still giving me trouble. Please go to www.stopstockouts.org and click on the map, then zoom in/out and play with the categories… within the next 12 hours! Please.

There is something really weird going on with the server. When I make changes to wordpress .php files or change images, its not until a couple hours later that the changes are visible on the site. I have flushed all caches both local and server side a hundred times, reset browsers and deactivated plug-ins but it doesn’t seem to make a difference. Anyone have any ideas?

Sushi & Safari

The weekend started with sushi. Carol, my French/Dutch coworker, invited me to join her and her friend for dinner. Her friend turned out to be a very interesting fellow. He was a well spoken and well traveled U.S. “army” man. While he seemed to dodge most of my questions about what exactly he was doing in Kenya and why he was living in Yemen, he did reveal that his job related to “defense security.” He never told me in what division of the “army” he was enlisted but he did conveniently have an embassy badge to flash at cops when they tried to shake him down. So the “army” man had good taste as the restaurant was incredible; it was at the top of a small mountain in the middle of the woods and it took half an hour to get there but I would have driven all night for the food. We ended up having drinks at a place called Mercury and speaking euphemistically about our work.

The next day, Carol and I got up early and headed to a place called Amboseli at the Kenya/Tanzania border with our guide, Jon. I still haven’t digested this overwhelming experience nor have I even looked through all 556 pictures I took in the 48 hours I was there. We spotted over forty species of animals but the elephants were definitely the stars of the show. The landscape itself was what I had imagined Kenya to be, otherworldly. The area in which we drove was not large but within it were about a half dozen microclimates from desert to swampland and even a bit of rainforest. The animals were jam-packed but living harmoniously among each other… there were even Massai people herding goats just hundreds of feet from a small pride of lions! It wasn’t until nightfall, when the clouds started to dissipate, that I realized we were at the base of Mt. Kilimanjaro. We stayed in tents that had running hot water, proper beds, and electricity.

Sorry for all the images, I just couldn’t distill it down to a couple!

Stock-outs event

On Monday, I called the woman I was meant to interview the next day. When I told her what time the stock-out event started and that I would like to meet with her just afterward, she told me that the best way to get to her village, an hour away, was by matatu (van driven by young guys high on “mira”.) I was flying out of Mombasa that evening so of course there was no time to get to her village. This was the first of many miscommunications throughout the day and frustrations due to a lack of organization. But in the end, the event was a great success. Many people showed up and shared their stock-out stories and the impact of medical incompetence and government corruption in Kenya. We found three HIV+ people who were willing to be interviewed on camera whose stories were truly inspiring. I will be working on the documentary while continuing to support the pill check campaign (which has technically started although there is no data to show as of yet.)

Mombasa

We took the turn of the century British built Uganda Railway overnight train from Nairobi and through Tsavo National Park (home of the famed man-eating lions that killed 28 builders of the Tsavo bridge.) We had our dinner on the train, sharing a table with an ambiguously gay duo who plied us with wine and a nightcap before retiring to our cabin. It was such an incredible experience waking up in the Savannah, passing through all the little villages on the way and arriving to the tropical heat of Mombasa. We spent the weekend relaxing and preparing for our documentary interviews tomorrow. We are famous with the beach peddlers for our balcony laptop sessions.