Grant Dobbe

This week was marked by a sad event. BJ (formerly Prince BJ, who had abdicated his title upon leaving Old Tafo) has made the decision to return to the United States due to the serious illness of a family member. At this point, his return to Ghana is possible, but unlikely.

I received a phone call from him on Monday informing me of this news. After some plotting, scheming, and massaging of my teaching schedule, I was able to arrange a mad dash to Kumasi on Thursday to see him as he passed through on his way to Accra. We came, drank beer, ate cheeseburgers, talked, laughed, commiserated, and got the opportunity to say goodbye.

I am deeply saddened by his leaving, and can only hope that the events at home come to a happy conclusion that allow his return to Ghana.

In other news, I had my first site visit from my Associate Peace Corps Director, Mary Noorah. All in all, it was a good visit; she brought me the pleasant surprise of mail, including a package from home and my first batch of letters from my Coverdell classroom. She also got to watch me teach a class, see my fledgling computer lab, and check out all of the work I’ve been putting into my home.

I’ve also managed to keep racking up the miles on my bike, as well as adding to my ever-growing knowledge of bicycle repair. As soon as payday rolls around, my bike will be getting new brake pads, a new chain, and a replacement cogset. (No, I’m not going to explain cogsets. That would take all the fun out of it.) Indeed, one of my favorite parts of the market is the section where they sell and repair bicycles; it’s a marked contrast with the rest of the market in that it’s a place of quiet, steady, peaceful industry.

It’s an interesting fact of life in this country that a bicycle is just as useful as (if not more so than) a car, and makes life possible in places that would otherwise be unreachable. Indeed, as someone who hauls his drinking water in a jerry can via mountain bike, I have experienced this firsthand. It’s a common sight to see both men and women ride out into the bush on an old Royal Mail bicycle, farm-bound and outfitted with a jug of water on the cargo rack, a machete strapped to the frame, and a shotgun slung over their backs. It’s also a common sight to see people on bicycles passing cars and trucks on the road simply because it’s easier to navigate between the potholes and troughs in the road.

To say that I have rediscovered a love of bicycles and cycling would be an obvious statement, but it is not because of obvious reasons. For all of its simplicity as a machine when compared to its motorized equivalents, it has an incredible impact. Without a bicycle, some of my students would not be able to come to school. Without a bicycle, some people in my village would not be able to travel the distance to their farms on a daily basis, and would thus have serious difficulty in feeding their families. Most people in this country cannot — and will never be able to — afford a car or motorcycle, but can easily buy one or two bicycles. Having witnessed the huge, though mostly silent impact that a bicycle can have on someone’s life, I will never think about them in the same way again.

Alright, that’s enough out of me. It’s time for me to do stuff that doesn’t involve a computer.

This week has been an interesting progression from illness to wellness. On Monday, I barely wanted to leave the house; yesterday, I went for a 16-mile bike ride and could have kept going if the sun hadn’t gone down. My boil is now completely gone, I’ve finished my course of antibiotics, and I am now clean-shaven.

That’s right. I shaved my goatee. Initially, it was purely functional — it’s too hard to bandage a giant oozing boil on your face when the tape won’t stick. Now, though, I’ve become rather fond of how I look being clean-shaven, and it feels considerably cooler.

I shaved on Sunday morning. I returned to teaching class on Monday, and went into Sunyani on Tuesday to resupply on rare stuff, pay my internet bill, and get out of town for a bit. While there, I discovered something that made me very happy — cheddar cheese. Words cannot describe how happy I was to pay GHC6 for 1/2 pound of cheddar cheese. Expensive: yes. Worth it: absolutely. There is nothing that will improve your spirits or take an 8/10 day to a 10 like good food.

Yesterday and today have been nothing short of fantastic — yesterday, I  held my two classes, came home, and went for a nice, long, happy 26km bike ride. I came home, took a bath, and made some pasta for dinner. Today, I went to market, bought everything I needed and still had money left over in my pocket, and went to school to supervise the computer lab. I’m nothing short of pleased; my kids are learning incredibly fast, considering that 95% of them have never used a computer before and they get about 20 minutes a week total computer time. I’ve got a stack of homework papers to grade and a test to write, so we’ll see how they do when it comes to the terminology.

Another interesting development comes in the clothing department. Before I left for Ghana, I was wearing a size 38 waistline. I now wear a 34, and even that is beginning to get a little loose. It would seem that biking like a mad man, handwashing all of my clothes, and hauling my drinking water is beginning to have an effect. Needless to say, I’m pleased, and I’ve taken advantage of this by having a lot of clothing tailor-made. I just took the tailor two yards of fabric to make a shirt, and I need to take a couple pair of pants to be altered. Next week’s email will be about Ghanaian clothing, so that’s all I’m going to say for now.

And that’s about all I’ve got. I’m going to go to bed early so I can ride the wheels off my bike tomorrow. Until next week…

I wanted to document my school’s technology situation, and how I have chosen to tackle the gargantuan task of teaching computer skills to 300 kids with 5 computers. Rather than doing this in an email, which is a waste of bandwidth and would fill the inboxes of those who don’t care/don’t understand, I have decided to do it as a blog post.

I came to Nkoranman Senior High School in late July of 2008 on site visit as a then-Peace Corps Trainee. I was presented a pile of computer equipment and told “this is what we have.” I had a pile of approximately 15 computers, split between Dell Optiplex GXpro 200s and Compaq Deskpro 5400s. In addition, I also had 3 computers that had been tasked for use in the administrative offices, mostly for word processing.

HARDWARE

My first task was to figure out what worked. I removed the parts from pretty much all the machines, set up a couple of testing stations, and proceeded to identify the working hardware. Out of the 15 machines, 6 of them worked — 5 Dells and an AST Advantage. I also had a tidy pile of spare parts — hard drives, video cards, network cards, memory, CD-ROM drives, and a couple of spare power supplies. I took these, set them aside, made a list of parts I needed to make the 5 Dell machines usable, and stripped down the rest. I did save one of the Compaq machines, as well as some of its parts, for use in teaching hardware. As for the AST machine, I decided to save it for a later project in which I try turning it into a router using the LEAF Project’s software.

My next task was to get the machines I did have to an operational state. They turned on, they would start to boot, but they didn’t do anything. After a trip to Kumasi to pick up more hard drives, and a few donated floppy diskettes (remember those?), I was able to put together some computers that were ready for software.

At this point, my 5 machines had roughly the following hardware specs:
- Pentium Pro with MMX 200MHz
- 32-64 MB of EDO DRAM, depending on the machine
- 3-10GB Hard disk space, again depending on the machine
- Onboard USB 1.1 (except for one machine)
- Onboard 10/100 network interface cards
- 16X CD-ROM Drive
- 1.44MB 3.5″ Floppy Drive

The far end of trailing-edge hardware. The rare memory and lack of it made doing anything fancy out of the question; these machines were not going to run Windows XP. At the same time, I was reluctant to try anything like Windows 98, due to the fact that it’s no longer supported. It looked like Linux was about my only option.

SOFTWARE

At first, I was limited to what I brought with me: Ubuntu and Xubuntu. Both of these ended in resounding failure, due to the ridiculous amount of resources required by Xorg and Gnome. Luckily, about the time I cleaned up the remnants of Xubuntu, I had internet access at site. I thus began to download and test the following distributions:
- Damn Small Linux
- Puppy Linux
- cAos
- TinyMe
- Debian Etch (netinstall)

In the end, Debian won out. The rest were either too rigid or difficult for me to work with, and Debian allowed me to install only what I needed to teach. Due to the homogenous nature of my hardware, I also had the added benefit of being able to create one “build” of Debian, which I could then copy to all of my machines almost verbatim.

The next task was figuring out what software I needed within Debian. I needed something that wouldn’t be too intimidating for a first-time computer user, but would still run smoothly on the hardware I had. I also needed a few basic apps for teaching keyboard skills and mouse usage, and a way to make everything accessible graphically. The whole setup had to be secure and contained, so that I could control the computing experience without the kids changing the wallpaper or screwing with settings as they became more familiar with the setup. Finally, I needed to make the user interface look aesthetically similar to Windows so that my students wouldn’t be incredibly confused the first time they used a Windows box.

In the end, I opted to use a combination of Xorg, IceWM, and iDesk to give me a Windows-like feel that I could keep somewhat locked-down. I also installed XDM to present a graphical logon, and customized it a bit to make it look less like XDM. The only two applications I have installed at present are TuxTyping 2 and TuxPaint. I figure that if I have nothing else installed, it’s nothing else that can turn back and shoot me in the face.

INSTALLATION

I finished tweaking the settings, gave it revision number 0.1, and moved on to the arduous process of getting the software from 1 computer to 5. Rather than configure each box by hand, and because my hardware is pretty much all the same, I opted to use disk imaging for my lab. I used the System Rescue CD 0.2.19 live CD and my trusty USB pen drive to create the image, then deployed it to my 4 other classroom machines in the same way. Once the imaging was complete, I’d reboot, change the hostname (I’m using lab01 through lab05) and reconfigure X to use the proper resolutions for that monitor.

There were a few snags in this plan. First off, I had to rob memory out of all of the machines in order to provide the machine I was imaging at the time with the 128MB required to boot the live CD. Second, not all of the machines had CD-ROM drives that were CD-RW friendly (one of the more useful tools I brought to Ghana), so I had to install a drive that was in order to boot the live CD. Finally, I have one machine that doesn’t have USB, which resulted in me using two CD-ROM drives and two CD-RWs to install the image. All things considered, the process was cumbersome, but I’d expect any first-run system to be so.

TRIAL BY FIRE

The only true way to test software is to give it to users. In an educational setting, that means sitting a kid down in front of the machine and letting them bang on it. It has been nothing short of a resounding success — the kids love to use TuxPaint, and they scramble for the opportunity to play TuxTyping games. The first night I had the lab open, I came home feeling like a king. These kids finally have the chance to learn practical computer skills, and I managed to do it without any horrible crash-and-burn failures.

THOUGHTS AND NEXT STEPS

I’ve been using this build for about three weeks now, and it’s been surprisingly issue-free. I do have some cosmetic gripes, of course — I want to find a display manager that’s more user-friendly than XDM, I need to find a way to lock the icon position on the desktop, and so on. I also would like to optimize memory usage, both by compiling a custom kernel and removing unnecessary services from boot. Finally, I’d like to set up another small linux system just for re-imaging the machines, so that I don’t have to go through the cumbersome process of frankensteining together hardware every time I deploy a software update.

I also still have the administration machines to worry about. Right now, they work, so I’m trying not to change them until I have a reason to. At some point, however, I’ll probably end up deploying some sort of system for storing documents in a central location, as well as some sort of student information system — whether that ends up being a glorified spreadsheet or something more meaty is yet to be seen.

Greetings from my courtyard. Yes, my house has a courtyard. Don’t get too excited: it’s just a walled-in back porch. For some reason, Ghanaians call it a courtyard. If I were you, I’d get more excited about things like indoor plumbing and extra-sharp cheddar cheese.

Anyway, here I am. I’ve moved my lounge chair outside because for the last few days, I’ve been stuck indoors due to a boil on my face. For those of you who have never had the joy of a soft-tissue infection, a boil is basically an infection of the hair follicle. They’re angry, painful, merciless things, and this one happened to take over half my left cheek, give me a low-grade fever, and keep my mouth from opening wide enough to do anything useful (like eat solid food, brush my teeth, and spit) for about two days. Luckily, thanks to some antibiotics and a schedule of hot compresses that makes the Berlin airlift look disorganized, my boil (which I’ve named Gus) has started to reduce in size and let me do fun things like eat again. (Aren’t you glad I’m done with the parentheses for this paragraph?)

Ok, that’s enough of the medical stuff (I put the fun in furuncle!) — let’s talk about computers. After several weeks of downloading, installing, redownloading, borrowing memory in order to boot install CDs, weeping, and gnashing of teeth, I finally got my 5 computers up and running for the student body of my school. For those of you who are interested in what I’m running, I’m going to post a more detailed report to my blog later today or tomorrow.

Anyway, I have set up the computers in the staff common room and told the kids that they can come in to use them any time I’m in there. So far, it’s been one of the more popular after-school activities I’ve seen. And it’s an incredibly rewarding thing to see your students finally see what the big deal is, even though all they’re doing is drawing a picture or playing a typing game. The closest these kids have ever come to a computer is reading about it in their science textbooks, and I felt nigh on jubilant on Monday evening as I walked home because I managed to help them take their first steps toward computer literacy. I win so hard.

The storm clouds are inching ever-closer to me, and the last time I checked, my laptop doesn’t like water. Therefore, I think I’d better head indoors and start the next round of hot compresses. As always, take care and don’t forget to write.

Good evening, and welcome to this week’s email/blog post/missive from your favorite Peace Corps Volunteer.

I spent the week finalizing the software for my computers, teaching ICT, and plotting for a trip to Berekum for (among other things) corn flakes and raspberry jam. I never thought I’d ever have a two-hour round-trip expedition to buy corn flakes, but it’s worth it.

I was informed last Sunday that I had a package waiting for me at the Kumasi Sub-office. I spent most of the week scheming about how to get said package, as well as resupply things like bug spray, sunscreen, band-aids, and multi-vitamins (your tax dollars at work). I decided that I would leave as early as possible on Saturday, go to Kumasi, spend the day looking for a few key household items, pick up my stuff at the KSO, and then head back to Seikwa if possible. On Tuesday, I called Accra to let them know that I was going to Kumasi and might need to stay the night. On Friday, I set my alarm for 5am, laid out the few things I’d need to take with me, forgot to turn on my alarm clock, and went to bed.

I awoke at 7am, refreshed and with no chance whatsoever of making the first or second car to Berekum. I waited until 12:30, and managed to get a spot on the third car. Needless to say, I spent the night in Kumasi, and returned today. But, I now have several new books to read (thanks, Nicole!), a few new friends, and a tin full of baking powder. This means that I can now make (and subsequently eat) pancakes. Score.

And now, a fun anecdote:

Most Ghanaians cook and heat water using either charcoal or good ol’ fashioned firewood. The charcoal is made in giant earthen mounds, which look like giant smoking ant-hills. When the charcoal is ready, it’s broken into pieces ranging from hand- to arm-size and placed into 50lb burlap sacks. The nice thing about it is that you can cook with steady, high heat and little smoke. The downside is that it’s a serious chore to light unless you’ve got the proper equipment (read: kerosene or palmnut fuzz).

As for the firewood — anything goes. You take your machete (called a cutlass here), head out into the bush, and find something that looks like it will burn. Most of the time, it’s just whatever dead timber happens to be lying around. Sometimes, however, it’s a young tree that happens to be in the middle of some potential farmland. And because all of the farms are out in the bush outside of town, it means that firewood is carried into town.

Ghanaians aren’t a people to waste anything. When you cut firewood, you don’t leave the twigs and leaves in the bush. Thus, it has come to pass that I will be riding my bike down the road and see what looks like a tree walking along ahead of me. Sometimes, the tree will have company, and as I go past, the tree will turn into a Ghanaian boy carrying fresh firewood.

Well, that’s all I’ve got. See you next week.