Wednesday was my last day in Ghana!

My flight wasn’t until the evening, but wanted to stay near Accra just in case there were transportation or other problems which may prevent me getting to the airport on time. Beth Lynn and Nancy got up bright and early to meet up with professor Ayorkor Korsah at Ashesi University College, Nancy writes about it here: Adventure is winding down

I went with Daniel, Dave and Kwaku to the port of Tema to get the computers unloaded from the shipping container.

On my way I was treated to an unexpected treat, we drove through the town of Teshie! I read about it before coming to Ghana, they are the home of world-famous coffins. The coffins are famous because they come in all kinds of shapes and sizes based on the profession and loves of the occupant, ones I saw included fish, planes, birds, bugs and an elephant.

Elephant and other coffins, another shop photo here

As we approached the port, we passed an area where a great deal of fishing is done. Fishing and sales are done early in the morning, so at 11AM when we passed by they were wrapping up their day, boats pulled up on the beach and their owners selling the last of their ship by the side of the road.

Fishing canoes

You can also see in the above photo a lot of ships in the distance, they are lined up for unloading in the port of Tema, our destination!

There are shipping containers lined up for miles around the port, photos aren’t allowed in the port itself, but I snapped a few on our approach.

We met with the shipper and were finally able to see and open the container with the computers in it! I stuck around for about 3 hours of the process so I was actually able to see the container be opened and have the unloading begin. The estimate for unloading was 3 hours, then there was hiring of the truck to take out the computers and the rest of the items in the shipment and bring them to our warehouse. It was around 2PM at this time so I decided to head back to the hotel with Kwaku so Nancy and I could do a bit more training with him and Eric.

I arrived to a tuna fish sandwich, juice and a cookie (thanks Beth Lynn and Nancy!) and we were quickly able to get to training and I spent some time finishing packing. My suitcase ended up being on the heavy side, but I wasn’t sure how heavy so I loaded up some things in my carry-on and ended up wearing my heavy boots. We left the hotel around 6PM, putting us at the airport around 6:40 so I was able to check in, clear immigration, customs and security by a little after 7. They gave me a lounge pass so I was able to relax for a bit in the surprisingly posh Akwaaba Lounge until they called us for the flight.

The journey home was the longest one I’ve ever done, leaving Accra on Wednesday at 21:05 UTC and not getting in to San Francisco until 23:10 UTC – that’s over 26 hours! Add in the 4 hours of taxi and check-in on the Accra side and BART ride home we’re at 30 hours. Part of this is due to the 3 hour layovers in Frankfurt and Zurich, and the fact that I did stop twice in Europe rather than being able to find a cheap one stop flight. The layovers were nice though, the Lufthansa Senator Lounge in Frankfurt gave me the opportunity to take a hot shower in their spiffy new facilities as well as have a quiet breakfast of fruit and yogurt. The staff at the Panorama Lounge in Zurich was helpful and even offered to reprint my boarding pass so it would scan properly (the printing job in Accra wasn’t great). The long route also gave me the chance to give Swiss Airlines a try – very nice!

Last night before crashing to bed at 8PM, I uploaded a ton (over 400) of photos from my trip:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/pleia2/sets/72157631856200209/

The trip was quite an adventure but I’m glad to be home. Today I’m spending the day doing laundry, catching up on a bunch of things online and packing for my trip to Copenhagen tomorrow for the Ubuntu Developer Summit. I’ve enjoyed much kitty snuggle time and MJ comes home from a conference tonight so I’ll have a few precious hours to spend with him too.

On Tuesday Nancy and I finished up training with some of the Africa ICT Right (the non-profit we’re working with here in Ghana) volunteers we’re working with while Dave, Daniel and Beth Lynn went down to the port to handle transactions there to move the process of the release of the computers along.

In the afternoon, we all met up about a half hour north at City Waste Group, an e-waste recycling organization. Ghana has a problem with e-waste, as documented in this Frontline World report: Ghana: Digital Dumping Ground. Shippers bring in junk from Europe and the Americas to be dumped at Agbogbloshie, near Accra, where workers (including children), sort through the waste, burning some to collect the precious metals from it which they can then sell to make a living. There are serious health implications of this work, including direct exposure to lead and other highly toxic chemical fumes that come from burning plastic electronics.

Computer Reach is conscious of the problem and with all their work around the world works to confirm that all of the computers shipped have an end of life agreement in place with a reputable recycling company. The research had been done prior to coming out to City Waste to confirm they were a legitimate recycling organization, but an on site visit to show good faith on both ends to make sure the computers we send over get properly recycled was worth a trip up. When we arrived they had just come back from a tour around Agbogbloshie itself with representatives from a couple eco-friendly recycling firms in Europe who they’ve partnered with to do retrieval of precious metals in proper facilities so the smelting is done there instead of on the streets in Ghana. The recycling firm does a lot of public service to teach workers at Agbogbloshie how to properly separate materials for sale to them so they can greatly reduce their risk and get more money for the material they’re selling. They also work with families to get the children working there in to school rather than working there. The recycling center itself buys properly separated material from the workers which it can sell directly or send to their processors in Europe.

They seem to turn things around pretty quickly, they have some piles outside that were scheduled for pickup:

And inside they have bins with different components that are then shipped off to vendors and eco-friendly partners:

The visit was an inspiring one. I’m very glad that there is a legitimate recycling plan for the computers. Their field coordinator was also kind enough to set up a coffee break for us while we were there.

The rest of the day was uneventful. We headed back to the hotel as the sun was setting, we got ourselves sorted food-wise and I spent probably 45 minutes getting my luggage packed so that everything would fit into my suitcase and the gifts I bought were properly secured. I really hope my careful packing work isn’t undone by a careless inspector like it was coming out here, and I really really hope my luggage makes it home with me.

Today Beth Lynn and Nancy headed up to Ashesi University College to meet with one of our contacts and tour some of the surrounding schools for the possibility of deploying computers there during a later trip. I’ll be going along with Dave and Daniel to the port to make sure the loading of computers into the truck goes well so they can be put into storage for now (the non-profit here on the ground in Ghana will be handling some of the deployments we don’t finish). Tonight at 9:05PM my flight leaves Accra and I’ll be on my way back home to beautiful San Francisco! The rest of the team flies home tomorrow night.

On Sunday morning we enjoyed breakfast at the hotel in Ho and then had a great team meeting where we recounted some of our worst and best moments of the trip. Certainly the most disappointing part of this trip was that we haven’t accomplished what we’ve set out to do: deploy 100 computers to the community centers and schools. Having the computers getting stuck at the port due to problems with the shipper really destroyed Plan A for this trip. On the bright side, we’ve managed to make and have constructive meetings some indispensable contacts here and we’ve learned a considerable amount about deployments by visiting the previous deployments from earlier in the year, which we wouldn’t have been able to do otherwise. It’s also given us time to develop and test some basic training material on teachers and administrators who are actually in the field. And it was great to work with Daniel through all of this, he’s been an exceptional host, we’d literally be lost without him.

We got to the tro-tro station around 11AM and took the 3 hour ride back. We were back at the first hotel of our stay by 3PM, which gave us time to settle in and clean up after our journey and then head out to dinner. Unfortunately I had a headache so I took some medicine and went straight to bed after dinner, I was asleep by 8PM. Nancy wrote about the day over in her blog: Ho ho home again.

Today Daniel and Dave spent the morning trying to work through our continued shipping woes while Beth Lynn, Nancy and I headed out to swing by the Street Academy to drop off some hardware and to do some shopping at the nearby cultural arts center. Both were successful endeavors. I’m quite sure I paid too much for everything I bought, even with bargaining, but it’s all relative given the price of goods here. Bargaining is exhausting work though, you’re already in the oppressive heat and humidity, walking around shops packed with crafts, and then you spend all the time settling on a price! The shop-keepers are also quite aggressive about getting business, we went to a trio of shops owned by family members, pulled over by the “now visit my brother’s shop!” and cries of “but mine is the last shop back here you have to visit mine!” I’m happy with the trinkets, jewelry and gifts that I bought. After we did much of our shopping we stopped for a cold drink before having a look at some clothes and then heading back to the hotel to meet up with everyone.

Recharging after shopping

Back at the hotel we were met by Eric and Kwaku who were brought along for the day by Daniel to be trained on some of the applications in Edubuntu and on basic desktop administration. Nancy was able to walk them through the applications with the materials she had put together the night before. I winged it a bit but was able to sit down tonight and put things into a more formal document which I’ll polish up a bit more and add to before Internet-consumption.

Nancy also gave them some tips for handling students in a classroom who are working on shared computers, including that there should only be one “driver” per computer, a timeout corner and more.

Nancy writes about the shopping and training here: Ladies Day Out. The photos may look familiar – she did a better job of capturing the day than I, so I snagged her photos! ;)

We wrapped up training and were able to get cleaned up and then head out to grab an early dinner at a place near by the hotel where I had a nice continental meal – a tuna sandwich and a small piece of chocolate cake. We then had a quick meeting with another contact here who we hope can help us some with our shipping trouble. We then spent some time in the hotel pool, relaxing under the beautiful moon with a Ghanaian beer and good company.

Today was our journey to the town of Ho. We met up with Daniel at the station around 8:30. The station was a confusing series of “tro-tros” – 12 seat vans that will take people all over the place, from around the city to around the country. Fortunately Daniel could easily navigate the chaos and bought us tickets on an air-conditioned one heading to Ho within about 10 minutes.

Nancy and I in the back of the tro-tro

It perhaps goes without saying that that having air-conditioning on a tro-tro is not like having air-conditioning in a new personal car. With 12 people packed into a hot van, our weekend luggage piled on our laps and a 3 hour ride the air-conditioning merely made the journey tolerable, I was pretty sweaty and tired by the end of our journey. It was a beautiful journey though, leaving the insanity that is the capital city of Accra and finally getting to see the amazing, tropical countryside. I also got to enjoy the novelty of reading a paper book I brought along precisely for situations like these. It’s also noteworthy that during this whole trip to Ho I had data on my phone – often even 3G. The wireless network here is what people depend upon for all their phones and they don’t have the infrastructure in the vast majority of the country for anything but cellular-based internet access, so all the carriers have a better network than most rural areas of the United States. Of course at the hotel here I’m doomed to Edge, my phone really doesn’t like the hotels I’m staying at.

View of a bridge we drove over during our journey to Ho

I, however, do like the hotels we’re staying at. This Chances Hotel actually ended up to be quite a nice spot to kick back at for the weekend, in spite of the internet access they advertised not working (at least tonight). It was raining when we arrived so we were able to enjoy this evening basking in the cooler weather, when I looked in the early evening it was a beautiful 77F out! But no time to bask when we arrived this afternoon, we had much to do!

After checking in, we ventured over to the Evangelical Presbyterian Church administrative offices where we met our contact here Lydia Adajawah. She was involved with getting the 5 laptops with Edubuntu deployed here and had arranged our satisfying lunch of chicken, rice and fried plaintains at their establishment. The church runs a series of big schools here in Ho that the laptops were distributed between and we had on our schedule to visit the schools and check in on being used in the classrooms.

At one of the EP schools

It was really nice to meet with several of the administrators and others involved with computer training, the woman doing it with the younger kids certainly was leveraging the power of the laptop to directly teach the children. Unfortunately for 2 of the 3 laptops we were able to visit we discovered that dubious copies of Windows had been installed on them. I have to admit that it made my heart sink to see it, but just like with the ones we found in this condition last week it’s not something we faulted the schools for. These schools have jobs to do and they had a piece of technology they wanted to use but felt couldn’t use it in the form it was in so they did what they needed to do to make it work for them.

Given this situation, we launched into explaining the 3-step plan we’ve been solidifying these past several days:

Information. The tools that come with Edubuntu and the philosophies of open source that have made me fly halfway around the world are not things that are obvious. We explained our mission to the school administrators, why we’re using Edubuntu and don’t support Windows and the benefits that can be delivered to the students with the free educational software we were providing.

Training. Tomorrow morning at 8:30AM we’ve invited several of the teachers from the schools to join us for training. Nancy will be doing a short presentation on the key components from a teaching perspective and then we’ll be sitting down one-on-one like we did at the Street Academy to get them familiar with the desktop and the key tools they can use in their classrooms.

Support. The LUG contacts here in Ghana have been quite the blessing. In addition to Daniel, we now have not only the LUG in Accra itself, but friends of theirs across the country who wish to help with support. There will be coordination moving forward with that network of folks to get the schools the on the ground support they need should any questions or problems arise.

Tonight Beth Lynn ended up randomly running into another Ubuntu user while taking a walk outside the hotel! He came to dinner and he talked about his work as an ITC teacher in a nearby school and the possibility of us getting computers to his school in the future. He’s going to try to come by training tomorrow so he can get the other local Linux users involved in the school (hello support!).

After dinner we headed up to one of the rooms to re-image the 2 laptops with our Edubuntu image. Installfest fun!

Nancy’s post about the day is here: Tro tro to Ho

The weather tonight is nice, but I’m feeling a little queasy. Time to get some rest, training bright and early tomorrow.

This morning we went over to the Street Academy for our last time this trip. We were met by journalists from a local newspaper who had been told about our visit, so there was a photo op and Dave was interviewed about our work and the deployments.

We then set up the laptops in the room that still had electricity and spent more time working with the teachers on the applications and showing off some of the ideas that Nancy had for teaching the children how to use the word processor.

Laptops set up for training!

I also spent more time today talking to my new friend Isaac. He’s a college student who does volunteer work in the form of training at the school. He does a lot of graphics work so he’s quite attached to the Adobe suite of applications he uses on Windows, but is interested in checking out Ubuntu on his personal netbook. Unfortunately I didn’t bring a version of 12.04 on a USB stick and the hotel internet wasn’t good enough to download and prep one last night. I gave him a CD and my card instead, promising if he emailed me that I’d send him instructions to get him sorted.

Then we got a picture before we left for the day!

It was then back to the hotel for some freshening up and an attempt at lunch. Time is a problem here in Ghana, meeting appointment times seem to be more of a suggestion, there rarely are regular schedules for things and restaurants usually take a very long time to bring food. In this case, we waited over an hour for our lunch and ended up having to wrap it up after a few bites so we could get to our 3PM meeting.

Our 3PM meeting (which actually started at 3:40, see above) was at the small Google office in Accra. We were meeting with Estelle Akofio-Sowah about some of the work Google has been doing in developing nations to help get businesses online, promotion of strong female technical leaders in Africa (since our team is 3/4 female) and other work. Computer Reach in Pittsburgh has worked closely with Google on projects, so it was nice to have a meeting on the ground here. Oh, and we got awesome t-shirts!

Tonight we got more news about the status of the computers that were shipped over. It seems that customs issues have been mostly been worked through and we have our fingers crossed that we’ll have them in our hands by Monday. That will give us a bit of time to at least do the deployments planned for here in Accra before we have to leave next week.

As mentioned in my last post, we’re leaving tomorrow to head up to Ho to check out another existing deployment. There may also be some monkeys in my future.

Finally, lest my posts be full of too many smiles and excitement, Nancy has been a bit more honest when it comes to the conditions here. In posts here and here she writes about the heat, dirt, noise, smells and other less savory portions of our trip. While I am enjoying this adventure, I have to be truthful and admit that staying in a developing country is not easy for a pampered American like me. I wasn’t quite sure what people meant when they said a trip like this changes you, but now I do, there was some major culture shock for me here that I had to adjust to. No amount of reading about conditions in a place really prepares you for the inescapable reality of it.