Feb 26, 2008
Kigali 2
One thing I can say for Rwanda… at least Kigali, is that it has some beautiful weather. Its typically “mild” by most standards with temps in the 70s and 80s °F. Yesterday we have big rain storm at the end of the day, that was great. With our huge drought in N.C. it is nice to see a heavy rain again. It was coming down in sheets and after it was all over there was that post-rain smell. Nice.
I started yesterday morning with a trip to one of the local mobile phone providers. The office I ended up in turned out to be a customer service center and it was packed with people. It was as crazy as any customer service center at home, except almost no one spoke English, and my passing Spanish might have been more useless had I tried. My few phrases of French didn’t get me anywhere either. Still, I persevered and ended up talking to Laurent who had very good English. He translated with the person who knew what I needed to know. Did I mention that the office was close to 100°F? I was hot the rest of the day from that office alone.
I spent the rest of the working day at the Twubakane office working with my friend and colleague Jana and meeting all the people there I need to meet. These next couple of days will be like that, then on Thursday I will have the real “kick off” meeting for the Twubakane staff – I’m hoping they all will see the benefit and want to jump in where they can. I’m also going to be hiring a local developer to work on the team and thanks to some employee searches that had already taken place for the Capacity project down the street (also Intrahealth) I already have a very strong candidate and hope to meet with him sometime this week. The guy has what seems like great experience with MySQL, PHP, and even doing some data collecting and pushing via SMS on mobiles. Nice!
On Thursday afternoon I will be heading to one of the district health centers. I’m not entirely sure where it is yet – but outside of the city finally. This is where the workers who would use the system we are building work and would actually put it into practice. I’m going to go get a feel for their current workflow (paper based) and what they want/need out of the system (besides reliability). I’m looking forward to that trip – its where the real work is happening.
OK on to important things… food. I’ve had some really decent food so far. I’m not convinced I’ve had anything “authentic” to Rwanda yet… and I don’t even know what that would be. However, I do have a line on a place. Indian food is everywhere. For lunch Jana and I went to a great little street cafe and got samosas – damn good ones too. Last night we went back to Mille Colliene to their rooftop open restaurant – great nighttime views of the city. Yeah – its a rough life.
I’ve done fairly well with the sleep/jetlag factor so far. It will only get better now I suppose. mah succumbed to the demon lag after performing admirably the first two days. At least the coffee is exceptionally good here!