First post in NYC

So after 24 hours in transit I am home in lovely NYC. I am holding up rather well. My husband however wants to nap - I dont think he has been sleeping well this past month.

Before I left Lilongwe, we finally had a meeting with the Ministry of Health. They finally got funds to go into the field and engage with training. Let me say that this rapidsms system we are deploying is essentially a new system built in 3 weeks and the MoH wants to roll it out without any testing! In the future, I think it is important to build testing time and deployment time into these RapidSMS projects and to help stakeholders understand that this is not a trivial task to build and deploy one of these systems.

I sat down with the MoH and we revised the deployment plan. Rather than start monday and roll out to all 15 sites, they are going to roll out to 5 sites monday. I will monitor from NY - and bug fix the following week. If I am happy with the program - the MoH will roll out to the other 10 sites the following week. If necessary the MoH will also redeploy to the initial 5 sites.

I think this will be fine - all that matters is that the sms messages generate appropriate responses. I am not even concerned with if everything flows properly through the db - although it should. Worst comes to worst, I am logging all messages with the logger app - so we can go a post process the messages later. The most important thing is that the sms service works as expected for the heath workers and the trainers.

I think the travel is starting to catch up with me - my head is swimming -

Travel to Africa

Here at the office, putting some final touches to the malnutrition application. This weekend I will integrating data from the existing rapidSMS system, and some more data munging with the historical data so all data will conform to my new data model.

I built a kind of insane layout/flow manager that I think should be autogenerated at runtime to import the apps in the rapidsms.ini. It needs a bit reengineering, but I think the foundation is solid.

There is trade off between realtime calculations and storing the calulations in a database table, (data storages vs. speed and ease of programming). As a result I am storing patient status and boolean values for various levels of malnutrition (MAM, SAM, SAM+). This makes my job easier when generating reports because I dont have to calculate these values I just have to pull them from a db.

The excel download functionality is partially wonky,and should probably be converted to a jQuery/Javascript function. That way, you load the data in your page once - and via js - you both display the data and download it as excel. I think the javascript classes for rapidsms probably need to be built out a bit.

Next week I train the ministry of health in the system and supposedly go to Mzuzu where I will be holding workshops. I hope to have a workshop also next friday at Baobab before I go to the airport! Yes I am leaving in one week. I love it here, but I miss home - and i am sort of sick of trying to tune out the myriad coackroaches and malaria carrying mosquitoes that cohabitate with me. Also, I am running over budget - basically my budget did not take into account wifi and food.
I could probably have spent less money on accomidations if I was able to find a houes to share, but I think there were less people in Lilongwe this year due to NGO cutbacks. Also I think I was sort of limited in my living arrangement, because I dont have a car.

Anyway, when you go to africa here are somethings you should bring:

CASH! - you have to pay 16% sur charge if you use credit (including for hotel rooms)
soldering iron
wirestrippers/allegator clips
extra power adapters
extra soap (dr bonners)
listerine
sandals
gnu bars/seitan strips/little bitsize pieces of chocolate (i lov choklat)
extra clothing/shoes/old electronics - you can barter with these at the market
malarone - pay extra
ditch the adapters and use usb power when possible
usb harddrive - I use this A LOT
dont worry about wearing long sleeve shirts/long pants - no matter what the mosquitoes will get you

i have not used my candle, my water uv disinfectant, my rope
i did bring a sleeping bag - which I use - if my hotel room seems nasty.

i have my kindle - and i've had no problems

Free Jazz

i've been listening to lots of Don Cherry thanks to Chris Barker - it turns even the most delapidated hotelroom into a hep nite spot