On Way Home

This is my last morning in Lilongwe. I am looking forward to going home. Once I get home I will change all my passwords! I will also vet my bills - it looks like my hotel at the sunbird charged me twice. Good thing I payed with american express - they will take care of me. I am not sure when the Ministry of Health will roll out to the new sites. We were supposed to do it this week, but they have not been returning phone calls. Since, I will not be here for the final roll out, I am hoping to hire a local developer who will oversee the final roll out. I am really going to push for this.

Anyway I am looking forward to returning home and taking care of logistical issues.

Sloop John B

I've been here a month in Malawi. That means a month of blogging daily. Upon returning to the USA I may consider making my blog posts more topic oriented. But, I may also discard that thought in favor of writing the blogging equivalent to finnegan's wake. I plan to continue subverting tag etiquette. Today is my first day using blogger spell check. I really love it. Blogger spell check highlights all misspelled words in your document and allows you to edit at your leisure. I prefer this to the serial spell check of all word processing programs.

RapidSMS Malawi
I have a beta cut of the new Malawi RapidSMS Malnutrition app. We demoed to the Ministry of Health yesterday, who were very pleased with the project. Yesterday, I updated the server with django and related apps. I am having problems using git on the Malawi server because of some firewall issue. I am considering blowing away the .bashrc and .bash_profile files because they set display commands that make it impossible to use sftp.

But enough jargon. The project is wildly successful. I am thoroughly exhausted. Tonight it is is Shona's last night in Lilongwe, so we are going to party over at diplomats. But first I am going to gorge myself on pasta since I finally have cash again after being near destitute for 4 days.

Thursday I go to the field for more training and HSA visits. I was supposed to go to Mzuzu today-Thurs to hold a mini bar camp at Mzuzu University. This was canceled when Stanley came back from vacation and decided to plan a field visit for Thursday. What can you do?

Passed Kenyatta road on the way to work this morning,and thanks to "The Fate of Africa" I now know who Kenyatta was. We took a short cut to work this morning, driving down a pedestrian dirt road. It makes me wonder where the other pedestrian dirt roads are. There are secret roads everywhere!

I was reminded of Gilbert Ryles Mind Body theory today. The question is -where is the mind?: Analogously we ask: where is the Hey University? And you take me to Hey's library, and classrooms, athletic facilities and dormatories. And I say, this is all nice, but you have not taken me to the 'University' where is the university. And you say, well the whole thing is the university. Or I say, show me team spirit, and you take me to a soccer match and show me people with facepaint, and cheerleaders, and players hugging each other after a goal. But where is the spirit? Well - there is no spirit, all of these things are expression of spirt. Same thing, where is the mind, I show you all these things like memories, and emotions, and rational decisions, and irrational decisions, and you say nice - but where is the mind. And Gilbert Ryle says, well its a category mistake, mind is like team spirit and the university - it is not a thing, but a description of an aggregate of things or a state of being - an abstract class, an interface, the walrus.

I am thoroughly exhausted. I am happy with the project. Say no to vaporware.