dave.ofmassdestruction.com

On Friday I am off to Rwanda. Finally. This trip was supposed to happen… um… back in September I think. Then contracts weren’t signed, paperwork got complicated – other work came up. So the trip was rescheduled for the 15th of Feb. But Dave… its the 20th today! Very true. After all the months of postponement, after we scheduled the 15th and booked hotel rooms, we were informed that we have been kicked out of those rooms to make way for Dubya and his enormous entourage (we’re talking thousands of people here). So great, the President has just been in Rwanda and I’ve got to follow up behind him?? Did he piss them off? Did he say anything untoward to their President? Am I going to have to hear about it?

For the curious. I will be starting work on a project in which we will be building a system that allows health workers to collect public health information door to door via cell phone/pda. They collect this data already on paper and we want to take advantage of Rwanda’s very strong mobile phone network to make the process easier and quicker. I’d tell you more if the funders would only approve an announcement (red tape – mumble mumble). Oh, like everything else we do, this will be open source and the Rwanda Ministry of Health’s to own.

To put it very succinctly – internet access going out of Africa is bad. Very bad. Don’t believe all the hype of all the cool new ways of opening up Africa with the Internet. Its not here yet, and won’t be without some major investment. At any rate, I’ll try to post some while I am there but I doubt I’ll have the patience to put any photos up. Hmmm… maybe I will reacquaint myself with text browsers!