Yep. Still here.

*sigh*
 
Well, then.
 
April was intense. May was even more intense. Let me tell you about it.
 
The first April crisis was that Caroline and I both got malaria. Well, technically, we already *had* malaria, seeing as the malaria prophylaxis that all Peace Corps Volunteers are required to take just keeps the malaria parasite from reproducing in your bloodstream. But when you combine several days of high stress with poor nutrition, strenuous travel, and little sleep, even the best prophylaxis in the world can’t keep your immune system from throwing in the towel. So, we both got malaria, right as we were returning to my site from KSO.
 
What is malaria like, you may wonder? Well, it kinda sneaks up on you. For a day or so, I felt mildly ill, but well enough to take care of Caroline. The next day, however, I felt like I had the flu: joint and muscle aches, fever, general malaise, and tiredness. Then, the headaches started and the fever really ramped itself up.
 
Imagine having the inside of your head scraped out with a rusty shovel. Imagine it happening at random. Then, throw in a fever of 103 and all of the aforementioned symptoms, and add really weird hallucinations whenever you try to sleep. That’s what malaria was like for me. The sad thing is that it comes and goes in cycles, so that you almost begin to feel better, and then it hits you again and you’re back to being totally incapacitated.
 
Luckily, at that point, Caroline was feeling well enough to take care of me and make me take my Coartem (the drug we use to treat malaria).
 
Coartem is a really effective drug. It is so effective that after my second dose, I was feeling well enough to get on a tro-tro with Caroline and come back to KSO… which is when she started having a high fever and chills. So she took *her* Coartem. And after several days of having malaria and then recovering from it, we both felt like someone had run us through a garbage disposal. In fact, my first training run after recovering was easily the most difficult 5K run I have ever done.
 
Anyway, we eventually recuperated and started to feel human again, and I managed to get all of my final exams marked. I also  got some good work done on the freedom toaster, and even found time to plan some things for my mother’s visit in May. And that’s when the second crisis happened…
 
Caroline’s roof blew off in a thunderstorm.
 
Yep. Blew. off. And her ceiling caved in, too.
 
She was not hurt, and she had the good sense of mind to put all of her electronics and books into her giant wardrobe once her ceiling started to leak like a running faucet. The only things she needed to replace were her towels (which she put down on the floor to prevent her slipping and breaking her neck) and her pots and pans (which she was using to catch water when she thought it was just a leak, and which got crushed by the ceiling after it caved in). I left my site to come help with the cleanup effort as soon as I could get out of town, and she ended up coming back to my site for a week while the school repaired her ceiling and roof.
 
The last week of April was the All-Volunteer Conference at Chances Hotel in Ho, Volta Region. After the preceeding events of April, this was a welcome relief. I got to spend time with friends, eat meals I didn’t have to cook, do a little gaming, and learn a little bit about what my colleagues have been doing at their sites.
 
After All-Vols, the remaining members of my training group had our Close-of-Service Conference, where we discussed how to say goodbye at our sites and prepare for returning to the U.S. This is a topic for another blog post in the future, but it was sobering and a little bit sad, while at the same time being fun and exciting. I look forward to seeing you all in September, when Caroline and I return to the U.S. as RPCVs.
 
This brings us to May, when Caroline and I met our mothers at the airport for a two week trip around Ghana. There is much to say about this trip. We laughed; we cried; we got sick; we got better. All in all, it was an experience that none of us will ever forget. I will write more about this when I get a chance to sit down and process it in more depth.
 
Alright, that’s all I’ve got for now. I promise to not get malaria again and keep the updates regular.
 

In which I ask some very important questions

The first question I asked was of Caroline. She was taking a nap, and I entered the bedroom with a little ring box. She woke up and saw the box, and after a little nervous fumbling, I got down on one knee and asked the most important question I’ve ever asked anyone:

“Will you marry me?”

Thankfully, for my sake, she said yes. Actually, it was more like “YES!!!”

Anyway, I am now engaged. That’s the first important question I have to talk about.

———-

The remaining questions I have to ask are from my students. We’ve been studying the internet this term, and at the beginning of the term, we did a group project where I posed the following scenario to them:

Pretend that you have been asked by the government to represent the youth of Ghana at a congress of world youth. Every country in the world is sending a delegation of their best and brightest students to represent them. As part of the congress, you will be asked to give a 20-minute presentation on any topic you like. There will also be a question period where you can ask 5 questions for the other congress attendees to answer.

I then asked them, in groups, to write down:

a.) the topic that they would present
b.) their 5 questions for the rest of the congress

I went around to all 8 of my classes and had the students vote on their favorite topics and questions, and told them the winners would be posted on the internet for the whole world to see.

So, now I make good on my promise, and let you see their questions. I’ve organized them by classes, so you can see the similarities and differences between each.

—–

3 Arts 1
Winning topic: Teenage Pregnancy
Winning questions:
1. What can we do to limit and reduce unemployment?
2. How can we make sure that the schools provide adequate ICT education?
3. How can we deal with the problem of street children?
4. How can we prevent deforestation?
5. How can we avoid teenage pregnancy?

—–

3 Business
Winning topic: Teenage Pregnancy
Winning questions:
1. What are the causes of increased teenage pregnancy in Ghana?
2. What can we do to prevent the spread of HIV/AIDS?
3. Why do African countries find it difficult to develop?
4. Why should students have access to the internet?
5. Why are foreign industries developing faster than local industries in Ghana?

—–

3 Agric
Winning Topic: Teenage Pregnancy
Winning questions:
1. How can we avoid teenage pregnancy?
2. How can we bring teenage pregnancy under control?
3. As future leaders, what can we do to stop HIV/AIDS?
4. Is teenage pregnancy only an African problem?
5. What is the world doing to curb the effects of global warming?

—–

3 Arts 2
Winning topic: 3 year vs. 4 year high school education
Winning questions:
1. How can we prevent bush fires?
2. What punishment should be given to those who start bush fires?
3. Can the government of Ghana provide enough infrastructure for a 4 year SHS system?
4. What can we do to control teenage pregnancy?
5. Why is teenage pregnancy such a big problem?

—–

2 Arts 1
Winning topic: Teenage pregnancy
Winning questions:
1. Why is it important to educate our children?
2. What can we do to eliminate malaria in Ghana and the rest of Africa?
3. How can we support democracy in Africa?
4. Will there be enough security at the 2010 World Cup in South Africa?
5. Why do Ghanaians have freedom of speech, but other countries don’t?

—–

2 Agric
Winning topic: Girl-child education
Winning questions:
1. What can the government do to create more jobs?
2. Why do we put so much money into football?
3. Why are farmers poor?
4. Is HIPC a good fund, and should African countries join it?
5. Why can’t university graduates in Ghana find jobs?

—–

2 Business
Winning topic: Education
Winning questions:
1. How can we prevent corruption?
2. How can we prevent serious accidents in our countries?
3. Why don’t Europeans like Africans?
4. Why did HIV/AIDS spread so quickly?
5. How can we improve education?

—–

2 Arts 2
Winning Topic: Bush Burning
Winning questions:
1. How can we prevent deforestation?
2. Why is Africa the “poverty continent”?
3. How can we prevent bush burning?
4. What can we do to improve the standard of education world-wide?
5. How can we prevent HIV/AIDS from spreading?

—–

Now, it’s my turn. How would you answer these questions? What questions would you ask my students? What questions do you have for me? If you send me your answers, or things you want to ask my students, I will pass them on.

Cheers,
Grant

And now, I pour a little out for my homies

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.

In which our intrepid hero shakes hands and imparts the wisdom of the ages

I would like to begin this email with a prepared statement:

Dear sweet mother of everything holy and awesome, I have the *worst* craving for pancakes and (due to a lack of baking powder) no way to rectify it. I hope you all appreciate your proximity to places that serve breakfast 24 hours a day.

I taught my first lesson last Monday to a class of very eager, very intimidated form 2 students. It went well, but I caught myself rushing a few times and noticed that I get pedantic when I’m nervous. My second lesson on Wednesday was much better, and by Thursday afternoon, I felt like I was beginning to accomplish something.

We’ve begun with a basic overview of how human beings communicate using technology, which covers things like broadcast media, print media, and computers. This week, I’m going to start introducing computers, specifically the stuff they need to know in order to practice mouse usage and typing. My main goal right now is to get the students to a point where they can actually use a computer without too much
handholding, so that I can feel confident in moving on to to more complex material next term.

My average class size is about 90 students. Right now, I’m teaching remedial ICT to forms 2 and 3, which gives me about 180 students. When the form 1 students arrive, I’ll have 300 students in total for this term, which ends on 19 December. Next term, ICT will be an elective course for forms 2 and 3, which will result in fewer students for me to
worry about.

Thursday afternoon and almost all of Friday was spent with the headmaster, traveling around to different government offices and talking to various people in an effort to find out why the construction of our computer lab was being held up. We think we figured it out; it has to do with the construction funding. A few in-person conversations, a few well-placed phone calls, and now we’re supposed to be expecting a contractor sometime this week or next week. Just goes to show that it’s not what you know; it’s who you know.

Alright, that’s enough out of me. Enjoy your week, everyone.

In which our intrepid hero shakes hands and imparts the wisdom of the ages

I would like to begin this email with a prepared statement:

Dear sweet mother of everything holy and awesome, I have the *worst* craving for pancakes and (due to a lack of baking powder) no way to rectify it. I hope you all appreciate your proximity to places that serve breakfast 24 hours a day.

I taught my first lesson last Monday to a class of very eager, very
intimidated form 2 students. It went well, but I caught myself rushing a
few times and noticed that I get pedantic when I’m nervous. My second
lesson on Wednesday was much better, and by Thursday afternoon, I felt
like I was beginning to accomplish something.

We’ve begun with a basic overview of how human beings communicate using
technology, which covers things like broadcast media, print media, and
computers. This week, I’m going to start introducing computers,
specifically the stuff they need to know in order to practice mouse
usage and typing. My main goal right now is to get the students to a
point where they can actually use a computer without too much
handholding, so that I can feel confident in moving on to to more
complex material next term.

My average class size is about 90 students. Right now, I’m teaching
remedial ICT to forms 2 and 3, which gives me about 180 students. When
the form 1 students arrive, I’ll have 300 students in total for this
term, which ends on 19 December. Next term, ICT will be an elective
course for forms 2 and 3, which will result in fewer students for me to
worry about.

Thursday afternoon and almost all of Friday was spent with the
headmaster, traveling around to different government offices and
talking to various people in an effort to find out why the construction
of our computer lab was being held up. We think we figured it out; it has to do with the construction funding. A few in-person conversations, a few well-placed phone calls, and now we’re supposed to be expecting a contractor sometime this week or next week. Just goes to show that it’s not what you know; it’s who you know.

Alright, that’s enough out of me. Enjoy your week everyone.