Departure

Four of us are leaving this evening, including myself. Curtis is scheduled to depart next week. Robert was supposed to depart with the rest of us, but is still waiting for his visa. He's originally from Cameroon and I believe had to send his paperwork to the Kenyan consulate there. That was over six weeks ago. In fact, the rest of us only received our visas last Thursday.

Zahir, Bilha, Marta, and I have a layover in London for about 12 hours. We're planning on going into the city for the day. But again, there might be an issue because Bilha can't just get a entry visa on the spot because she's from Kenya. I can't believe England doesn't have more
streamlined visa process with members of its own commonwealth. She might be able to get a transit visa, though.

I think we're on a code shared British Airways flight. Both legs will take about 15 hours combined. My last international flight was on Singapore Air. They had a pretty great on-demand movie, music, and video game console in each seat, good food, and of course have a famous throwback policy of strictly hiring attractive stewardesses.

I've got plenty of reading material for the flight. My sister gave me a good book called "The Shadow of the Sun" by Ryszard Kapuscinski, about a Polish journalist who has traveled in Africa since the 1950's. It's good so far. I also made some Swahili flashcards to practice with. For bonus entertainment, Marta is turning 21 while we're mid-air. It might be a moot point, though, since the plane might technically be British soil, where the drinking age is 18.

External Drive Housings

I found a useful product for travelers or people who've upgraded laptops recently. You can buy an external hard drive housing for about $20-30 and convert any internal IDE drive to an external USB hard drive. It's much cheaper than buying a dedicated external drive, and it's a real convenient way to keep data around from an old computer. Plus, you can always put the drive back into a laptop later on. It took about five minutes to pull the old drive and install it in the casing.

This will be useful for backing up and transferring data where power and network outages are common, or where bandwidth is limited or non-existent. We also have a nice little 1gig flash thumb drive for the same purpose, but it was quite expensive.

I18N Tutorial

I created a tutorial on code internationalization, including PowerPoint slides, sample code, and a lab. It could be useful for students to know how to localize existing software into Swahili or other dialects.

African Virtual University

I found out we'll be working with the African Virtual University in Nairobi. This is the organization we will be delivering the OCW curriculum to.

Local Entrepreneurship

I like the Water Hippo Roller as an example of local innovation and entrepeneurship. It's basically a water barrel on its side with a handle like a lawnmower. People use hippo rollers instead of carrying regular barrels by hand (or more frequently, on their head). It's a simple design that is cheap to build with locally produced or scavanged materials.

My friend Mathias Craig's company BlueEnergy operates on similar principles. They build small-scale windmills in rural parts of third-world countries using parts that can be manufactured locally. They can be built by a skilled team in under a week. The only parts that need to be imported are the magnets for the generator. They're still working out a pay-per-use system to make these windmills economically viable.

I came acrosse the Village Enterprise Fund, which is one organization that trains and funds microenterprise. They operate in Kenya, Uganda, and Tanzania.

A note on OCW

All the course material we will be teaching in Africa is available on MIT's OpenCourseWare (OCW). Several advanced students will participate in AITI's self-learning program by using OCW. Unfortunately, a big constraint in East Africa is bandwidth.

There are currently no fiber optic undersea cables serving the East African coast. As a result, most outgoing internet connections are through satellite links. A country like Uganda has a total outgoing bandwidth of about 10Mbps, shared by a population of 27 million. Downloading PDF files or video lectures from MIT is not going to be feasible.

Instead, we are tentatively planning on copying the entire OCW site onto a hard disk and installing it at a Kenyan university. Local students will be able to access it without going over slow satellite connections.

Howdy

In lieu of sending out periodic e-mails, I'm going to post pictures and stories of my upcoming summer teaching in Kenya to this blog. I am part of a six-person team that will be teaching Java, internet technology, and entrepreneurship at a Kenyan high school and university as part of the MIT Africa Internet Technology Initiative (AITI). My teammates are Marta Luczynska, Curtis Van der Puije, Bilha Ndirangu, Zahir Dossa, and Robert Leke. (I'm sure I'll post some pictures of everyone soon enough.) Other teams will be teaching in Ghana and Ethiopia.

Right now I am in the midst of arranging for DHL to pick up several computers for the computer lab at Alliance High School, which is one of the schools we'll be teaching at. We'll also be teaching at Strathmore University. Alliance's lab has original Pentium computers that have been in constant use for over a decade. Past AITI teams have had some major issues with getting them to work.

So, we decided to collect some donated machines, refurbish them, and ship them to Alliance. We collected decomissioned Pentium III machines from MIT, salvaged as much as we could, and installed Linux on them. We're also sending a few iMacs to a community computing center in Laare. I'd like to thank MIT's equipment exchange and the CSAIL Infrastructure group for their donations. I'd also like to thank Matt Papi for installing and configuring Linux on the machines. (FYI, Partimage worked quite well if you ever need to do this kind of installation.)

While I'm at it, I'd like to thank Mark Dwight, CEO of Timbuk2 bags, for his donation to our team. We're teaching an entrepreneurship component to the course that includes a business plan competition. I asked my friend Chris Gorog, a Stanford GSB alumni, if he had any good sample plans. Mark responded to a solicitation that Chris sent to a GSB mailing list and also gave us a generous donation of Timbuk2 bags for our trip. These bags are great and I highly recommend them. By the way, thanks to the many other people who responded to Chris' request -- it was overwhelming and will be quite useful.

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Originally uploaded by sweis.