jwesonga

This is one of those blog posts where I can never seem to come up with a title. Finally managed to get back to my blog, been several months since I put down a few words. A lot has been happening and I'll try summarize it in a few words:

I've rewritten this blog to work with the new rails goodies. I've also integrated it with disqus commenting system to get rid of the headache of dealing with spam plus get all the good stuff that comes with disqus. I'm yet to move the code to the live server, but that should be happening in the next few days. 

I finished the first phase of my mobile health project in Arusha, Tanzania. I had deployed an mHealth application at a clinic, the application was supposed to assist the clinical officer to diagnose and treat children under 5 years. Deployment was successful, and we've managed to collect a lot of information, as well as observe the application in the field. We are in the process of preparing for the next phase which will be at a grander scale, over 20 clinics will be involved in a 2 year study. Pretty exciting and interesting stuff.

I'm in the final weeks of wedding plans. It's been a long and demanding period but am glad that in the next few days it will be over. The dowry ceremonies were completed, can't get into the details but I can say it was more fun that I thought it would be. In a clear demonstration of how important mobile money transfer is, I just submitted the last part of the dowry via Mpesa- the safaricom money transfer service. I'm now thinking of asking safaricom to start a service, mDowry.

I finally have dedicated internet at home and so far I'm not complaining. Last night I had about 900kbps speeds, and I was able to listen to african music on my favorite music site http://www.getmziki.com/beta. When I was in Arusha, on a good day we had 10kbps, on a bad day as nasty as 10bps. If this is the fibre optic service, then I am loving it.

Looks like I'll be speaking at a mobile web conference in Feb 2010, that should be exciting. Check out this site for more info http://http://www.mobileeastafrica.com.

I'm sure I'll have more to write about in the next few days. 

 

 

Occurred to me that I haven't blogged in a while, so I'm going to change that.. Been very busy with to mHealth projects in Arusha so my energies are focused on the technical aspects of the project and the social aspects of the project. I can't post anything about the projects just yet since there's so much info to go through and figure out what goes out and what stays in, but I will continue putting up some of the interesting things I've encountered during my stay here in Arusha..

Today morning I woke up, with a mild hangover after going out last night with my workmates here in Arusha and one from Dar es Salaam, I looked at the bookshelf in my modest one bedroom apartment and what caught my eye was the books I've managed to accumulate within the last couple of weeks. I think the word accumulate conjures up the image that I have hundreds of books, but that isn't true in fact I only have 5 books, a small number compared to what other people have, the numbers are irrelevant but the content in the books is what's important. My little library, as I like to see it, consists of the following books:

1. Dreams from my father-Barrack Obama
2. It's our turn to eat- Michela Wrong
3. In the footsteps of Mr.Kurtz- Michela Wrong
4. Outliers- Malcolm Gladwell
5. Here comes everybody- Clay Shirky

As you can see nothing impressive about them, except that in the last couple of weeks my desire to read and learn as much as I can from these books has grown in leaps and bounds. Last night I told my workmate and friend,Thomas, that this sudden urge to read books comes from the fact that I recognise that in a few years I will be a father, and that I'd like to impress on my children the importance of picking up a book,reading it and gaining some knowledge, that I'd like to pass on them key lessons and values that I picked up whilst reading these books, and that at the end of the day they may recognise that ordinary people can make extraordinary contributions in this life that we live.I hope that this desire for knowledge doesn't come to an abrupt end, and that I hold on to every pearl of wisdom I extract .

Over the weekend I had the opportunity to go for camping at a maasai village about 40kms away from Arusha town. The whole trip was organised by my friend Onesmo and his partners, Onesmo runs a tour company East African Voyage in Arusha, the camping trip was a family event with Onesmo,Godson and Alex bringing their kids. I've been camping before but this was a new experience for me since it was the first time I was going to a maasai village/boma. The boma we would be at belonged to a Laibon, a maasai spiritual leader, so it was definitely a big deal. The Laibon has 26 wives and over 80 children, when we asked how many grandchildren he had the answer was "wako wengi sana.." (there are very many), the fact that there's a school in the boma just gives you an idea of the number of children there.

The village is located in between two towns, namely Makuyuni and Mto wa Mbu, and overlooks Lake Manyara. The trip to the village was nice and smooth, and once we arrived we were welcomed by the Morans (maasai warriors). We then pitched camp and proceeded to slaughter a goat which we would eat for dinner.Watching the whole process of slaughtering, bleeding the goat (where the blood is collected and will be used later on as part of the meal), and skinning was quite interesting, by the way most of the skinning is done by hand, no east feat. Once the goat had been skinned, some of the pa

 

One of the highlights of the evening was the fire starting process where the morans showed us how to start fire with nothing but a stick,wooden base and machete to support the wooden base. One of the most interesting observations was how traditional practices are at the core of the maasai but that there is also a modern influence especially in the way they communicate. It's no big secret that mobile phone penetration in Africa is huge, this was clearly demonstrated later on in the evening when after a hearty meal of goat meat and soup, the morans began exchanging video files on their mobile phones using bluetooth.  

Dinner consisted of roast goat meat, the maasai have an interesting way of roasting their meat, the meat is staked on sticks and placed round the fire instead of on top of the fire. The net effect is a juicy roast, that's soft and succulent. No salt is added to the meat, since the goat is so healthy and fresh it needs to additional seasoning. Some of the meat was mixed with the blood that had been collected earlier and we ate that also. Later on a special soup was prepared, consisted of the parts of the goat mixed with some special herbs which I was told helps with digestion of meat. The Maasai consume a large amount of red meat but don't seem to have problems with cholestrol, heart disease or gaut.

After spending the night we walk up to a light breakfast followed by a good hike up one of the hills surrounding the village. Children always impress me when it comes to hiking hills, they operate on adrenaline with little or no concern for safety,time and energy conservation, adults on the other hand operate on reason which often prevents us from fully enjoying the moment.

Once we got down the hill, we pulled down the tents and proceeded to the main boma where we would meet the Laibon. If you know anything about maasai customs and traditions you know that meeting the spiritual leader is a big deal and so the excitement was everywhere. Once we had finished the introductions we proceeded to tour the village, walking through the manyattas (traditional maasai huts). I had the opportunity to talk to one of the sons of the Laibon, he was probably in his early 30s and he told me he had already married 4 wives, that made me fell quite inadequate.

We crowned of the whole weekend by heading to the near by town for lunch and fruits.

I posted all the pics on facebook:

1. http://tr.im/rmvU
2. http://tr.im/rmwd
3. http://tr.im/rmwr 

I've spent the last 2 weeks in Dar es Salaam,Tanzania, helping setting up a mobile health project for one of the local NGOs,D-Tree International. The project is known as e-IMCI (more on that later).This has been one of the most interesting projects I've been involved in. I got involved in this project after I met Neal Lesh of Dimagi in NewYork early this year, what began as an email exchange between the two of us,ended up with me diving head first into this project. Essentially mHealth involves usage of mobile phones/technology in the area of health management.disease surveillance etc.

In this case we are using mobile phones to implement standard health protocol commonly known as IMCI-Integrated Management of Childhood Illness, I won't go into the details of the protocol since I'm not an expert in the public health field, but in a nutshell we are taking what is primarily a long paper based processed and pushing it to mobile phones,equipping and training clinicians with the necessary tools to administer the protocol effectively and efficiently. IMCI had previously been implemented on PDAs by Neal Lesh and other team members in South Africa a while back, the project had been very successful, scaling the project using PDAs was an obvious challenge considering the cost of the device and so they're arose the need to port the application to devices that were cost effective and readily available. A decision was made to redo the application using JavaRosa, the open source platform that Dimagi has spearheaded.

JavaRosa is a good platform, though not perfect it still offers the best option for a standardised method of data collection using mobile phones

We hope to launch this project in Arusha within the next few weeks, and see how the uptake will be in the field. The effectiveness of any technology is measured by the uptake and continued usage even after the initial launch.