The planners were up early and all off for interviews at the airport. Elves (pronounced Elvis, and yes his last name means king), our interpreter, chatted with us to understand the purpose of our trip. Then he introduced us to airport administrative staff and translated for us throughout our interviews. Elves is a great help to us.
Later, we enjoyed a late lunch at an old airplane-turned restaurant where we ate marlin, red fish, some vegetables, and banana fries. After lunch we headed back to the airport for one more interview. Then we strategically timed our dash across the airport runway (right after an airplane landed) on our way to the fishing village. We saw the preliminary construction of the airport fence and entered the fishing village furthest to the west called Praia Cruz. As we walked to the village beach, the sun was setting creating beautiful scenery. Elves led us through the village to a main fisherman sitting on a fishing boat named Alfonso. Villagers were hanging out and were curious as to why we were there. As they listened intently, Elves helped explain our intentions. A lively conversation ensued where thirty plus villagers gathered around us expressing their concerns and wishes for clean water, a place to dump their trash, latrines, and transportation to the school and to town. People in the village were very lively. For example, we asked them who the best fisher in the village was and they responded by saying, “we are all the best.” We left early because Elves needed to administer a statistics test at the local college, but we promised them we would come back tomorrow for more discussion.
Angie
Meanwhile, the GSLIS group also had a busy day. Martin and Ashley spent their time at Step-UP a local NGO focused on filling economic and educational gaps for the community through training programs and computer access. Martin taught volunteers many of the concepts he covers in his Introduction to Networked Systems class, concepts of servers, routers and computer hardware and software. Ashley worked with a group of students, teaching them English and helping them with Internet use and emailing, including setting up their own accounts.
Jake and Stephanie were in the Biblioteca National, one of the sites we installed last semester. They found the computer lab had been moved to a dedicated space now, and one of the computers needed maintenance, which they provided. Additionally, they installed five more computers, to increase the lab to nine. They interviewed the librarians to discover they organize the books in literature by Dewey Decimal Classification, and the technical books by CDU (Catalogue Decimal Universaire) for shelf order only, as they have no catalog, written or electronic.
Chris and I spent our day at Sao Tome High School, which has roughly 5,000 students. School was not in session but the school was busy, as students were picking up their final test scores. The school has quite a bit of computer equipment that has died, and they piled in a storeroom 8 feet high. We began sifting through the pile and repairing the equipment. We are hoping to setup our lab from these computers and the ones that we brought and install it in their library, which is more secure than the classrooms, and has enough power to handle the lab of eight computers.
After working all day the GSLIS students returned to the house and Paul made dinner for us and six of our friends from Step-UP, noodles and homemade spaghetti sauce- since we did not find any on the island. We discussed their NGO and the positive impact it is having in the community. The planners returned late, having dined out, and we met to discuss our day and our strategy for the upcoming week, heading to bed after midnight.
Beth
Keep up the good work.
Happy 4th of July to you all in Sao Tome! I hope you celebrated with lots of wonderful fish and Sagres.
Sister! Great blog! It is really fun to hear about all the great things you guys are doing. It is also exciting to hear the villagers are excited! Happy Fourth! Don’t forget to have fun!
Any patterns to the equipment failures? Are failures electricity-noise related? Just curious, because this sort of problem is probably something I can learn from re: equipment in tropical environments. Selfish me.
– Bill
Hi Bill,
I’ve encountered different problems at different sites. Some do not have enough amperage, while others do not have constant power so the computers turn on and off, or there is not power for many hours at a time in some locations. The other problem we have had was in finding monitors- since they run on 220V over here, we can not bring any from Illinois- and finding some has been a challenge.