ictdchick

My friend Marian did a brief summary of what’s going on, with a couple of links and pointers to some things you can do to intervene.  In her words (with a couple of edits here and there):

There is a crisis in Eastern Congo around Goma.  The rebel army, CNDP, lead by Nkunda advanced from the north all the way to the outskirts of Goma, the provencial capital.  More than 50,000 people fled to Goma.  Behind the CNDP lines, credible reports document that the rebels have broken up IDP (internally displaced peoples camps) and burned them to the ground, further displacing 50,000 + more people.  Aid agencies haven’t been able to reach many of the displaced, until now, and hunger and starvation are very real, as there is no food. It is wet, muddy, and raining.  Many are sick. Below are a few articles that do a good job analyzing the conflict.

How we fuel Africa’s Bloodiest War
http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/johann-hari/johann-hari-how-we-fuel-africas-bloodiest-war-978461.html

The Rape of a Nation (~10 min documentary that explains some history)
http://mediastorm.org/0022.htm

Update on UN’s role
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/oct/31/congo-unitednations-miliband

This conflict is more than what is frequently cited as “tribal” or “ethnic,” rather it is economic.  Eastern Congo is rich in natural resources: copper, diamonds, gold, and coltan.  Coltan is used in laptop computers and cell phones — multinational companies benefit. Attached is a form letter to send to your senators calling for conflict-free coltan regulations.  Send a letter to our senators and representatives.  The form letter is “Coltan Letter.pdf”

Here are the links to the CA Senators
Senator Boxer: 
https://boxer.senate.gov/contact/email/policy.cfm
Senator Feinstein:
http://feinstein.senate.gov/public/index.cfm?FuseAction=ContactUs.EmailMe

Secondly, it is women and children who suffer the most during this conflict.  Troops from both sides are raping and pillaging.  The people of Congo need security and to be able to return to their homes, their villages, their fields in order to produce food!  One million people are displaced in North Kivu, and they cannot be taken care of.  They’re dispersed, and putting huge strain on the existing towns and cities as they try to feed them.  WFP’s rations are one quarter of what is needed to survive.  MONUC (UN peacekeeping mission) doesn’t’ have the resources to provide protection.  Support is needed from the international community in order to help these organizations do what their mandate is: feed and protect. Attached is a petition drafted by HEAL Africa you can sign.  To sign, email your Name, Affiliation, Country to [editor’s note: instructions for participating in the petition are available on the HEALAfrica “Four Ways to Help” website]

Finally, to encourage the international community to do something about this humanitarian disaster, attached is a form letter (thanks to Andrew Hoeksema) to send to your senators calling for them to do something and influence the UN Security Council, rather than sit back and ignore.

“As the UN Security Council will be briefed on the situation in eastern D.R. Congo.  Please work with fellow Senators to encourage the U.S. delegation to the UN to push for further intervention on behalf of the innocents who are affected by this fighting.  Great humanitarian aid is needed for the 100s of 1000s who have been displaced in recent months.  Tell the UN Security Council to increase humanitarian aid in this emergency situation to the displaced peoples in the major city of Goma.  Also, have the UN Security Council increase the mandate of the peacekeeping troops to further intervention to stop and push back the advances of Nkunda’s rebel forces.  The UN Security Council also must work to push negotiations between presidents of D.R. Congo and Rwanda who are both involved in this crisis.”

Thank you for taking time to learn more about this catastrophe.
Thank you for praying fervently for peace and for taking  a step to end the atrocities and injustice.

Marian

So I’ve been perusing the paper NYTimes more often lately because I’m curious to see what makes it into print and what doesn’t.  While there’s inches and inches dedicated to how much Obama’s personal life has changed now that he’s the president-elect (his barber has to come to him now) there is now no longer any mention of the conflict in the Democratic Republic of Congo.

I’ve been meaning to cross-post all of HEAL Africa’s updates here, but just have been swamped with travel, etc.  I suppose it’s not too late to start.  Here’s the latest update from Judy Anderson’s conversation with Joseph Ciza:

November 14, 2008. 

I just spent time with Joseph Ciza on the phone.  (He’s in Goma, I’m in Seattle).  You haven’t heard from HEAL Africa for a few days.  It doesn’t mean that things have “settled down” in Goma.  The military action continues all around, people are increasingly unsettled, and troops from Angola and Zimbabwe are reportedly in Congo.  This doesn’t bode well at all.   Joseph said he’d heard from someone that military troops were heard in the dark, so they wait to hear what will happen in the morning.

I don’t want to inundate you with email.  We are working to consolidate our databases so you won’t get four messages from us, but thank you for your patience with us!  Thank you for your support; we need it!!!

Joseph has spent the past week and a half visiting with nurses, clinics, Nehemiah Committee members, IDPs, military and militia and rebel leaders, and with humanitarian organizations assessing the needs for their own organization to begin work in Goma, North Kivu, DR Congo.

It is deeply personal work for him.  For the past many years he has been involved in providing training and equipment to rural health clinics in North Kivu.  He has been a tireless advocate and encourager; he has visited every military group that operates in North Kivu.  In the past week he has visited looted clinics, visited community leaders in hiding, in IDP camps.  They cannot go home.  The future is very uncertain, especially with foreign troops coming in from various countries.

He has picked up wounded and brought them to the hospital for treatment.  Today he was southwest of Goma, visiting the hospital at Kirotshe, and stopped at Bweremana.    He was taken to see two women, and said “They  were shot in the legs by FARDC soldiers as they were retreating from Goma toward Bukavu.  The women were in a car coming from the market; the soldiers stopped them to commandeer the car.  The women suffered severe injuries when they were shot in the legs by the soldiers.”  The women are now at HEAL Africa’s hospital.

The number of wounded related to the present crisis today at the hospital is 127.   This is in addition to the normal number of around 180 patients.  He continued,   ” 82% of the new cases are raped women.  45 women are victims of rape from Kibati refugee camp.  45 were raped in town.  There are about 30,000 extra people in Goma town right now.”  This is in addition to the IDP camp on the northern edge of town, Kibati.  And does not include the camps to the west and southwest of town…Mugunga, Bulengo and others.

I asked him how he sees the future, “The best hope I see is that we get good leadership.  I don’t see who can lead correctly.  Both leaders (Kabila and Nkunda) were in the same military movement in 96-98″ (that displaced the Mobutu regime and installed Laurent Kabila as President, father of the present elected Joseph Kabila).   “This is a very complicated, complex situation.  We are condemned to live together. The challenge is how to live in peace and be reconciled, especially with all the violence that is happening on all sides now.  That is the real work of HEAL Africa”.

When I asked him how we can support him, he mentioned: 

• Financial support for HEAL Africa.  “The people who are coming to the hospital are very vulnerable people.  They cannot pay for the care they get; we cannot refuse to treat them.”    www.healafrica.org .
• Pray for the people working in such conditions.  Pray for Joseph and the various HEAL Africa teams.
• Pray for the ONE MILLION people in North Kivu who are displaced or lost, children and parents as well as the inhabitants of Goma.  Many parents are affected.  Joseph said, “FARDC soldiers came to rob my neighbor.  They also took the daughter from the hands of the parents.  They were unable to protect their daughter…you can understand how they feel.  What if it happened to me?”

 .

Thank you for standing with our Congolese sisters and brothers.

Peace for Congo, peace to you.

Judy

As many of you know, Goma, DRC is the site of much mineral wealth - as well as much conflict, both over this wealth, and ethnic conflicts, including remnants of the Hutu/Tutsi hatred that resulted in the Rwandan genocide.

Just as diamonds are mined to finance these conflicts - coltan (used in the Sony PS2 and mobile phone chips) is another scarce resource that can be traded for weapons or other supplies.

Senate Bill 3058 endeavors to do what we’ve already done with diamonds - to enforce restrictions to make sure that we don’t end up with conflict coltan in our mobile phones. Kerry Gough from my church has drafted a letter that you can use to urge your senator to sponsor this bill.  You can download word documents for Senator Feinstein or Senator Boxer (California) here, or you can just copy the text from below and use it for your own senator.
Letter to Senator Boxer
Letter to Senator Feinstein

Honorable Diane Feinstein
331 Hart Senate Office Building
Washington, D.C. 20510

Re: Rape & Exploitation in the Democratic Republic of Congo

Dear Senator Feinstein:

The Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) is one of the worst places in the world to be a girl or woman. Everyday women as old as 87 and babies as young as 10 months are raped by militiamen, soldiers, policemen and civilians. There are hundreds of thousands of victims—2000 RAPES were reported in June, 2008, in just one Province (North Kivu) of the DRC. There is a pervasive atmosphere of impunity that encourages rape at will.

Although the recently passed House Resolution 1227 condemns the ongoing epidemic of sexual violence in the Congo, such resolutions carry no sanctions and are ignored by the governmental powers in the DRC. Legislation with some teeth in it is necessary, such as the Conflict Coltan and Cassiterite Act of 2008 (SB 3058). Similar to the legislation banning importation of blood diamonds, SB 3058 will require that coltan be certified as conflict free before being imported. Coltan is a necessary ingredient for the manufacture of cell phones, computer games, monitors and numerous other high tech instruments. Restrictions on its import would compel not only Congolese government to take action to eliminate coltan related conflict, but also would put pressure upon the U.S. manufacturers of technological instruments to ensure that their products are conflict-free.

The Congolese live in dire life threatening and life ending conditions because DRC is entangled in 10 years of war which has contributed to the death of over 5.4 million people to date. This conflict is not just an internal African implosion but rather it is a battle for coltan, diamonds, cassiterite and gold, destined for sale in London, New York and Paris - the metals that make our technological society vibrate and ring and bling. In addition to high death rates, the war has lead to the use of child soldiers, child slavery in mines, the mass displacement of peoples, and the widespread use of rape as a weapon of war and the transmission of HIV infection by rape. Shockingly, notwithstanding the epidemic of HIV in the DRC, of the $45 billion dollars authorized by Congress to fight HIV (PEPFAR) only $15 million is allocated for the DRC.

I urge you to join as a co-sponsor of SB 3058, legislation that is essential to put meaningful sanctions behind well-meaning resolutions.

Let me know if you have any questions and I’d be happy to point you to some people that can tell you more about the bill!

Melissa

I’m posting this here mostly for my own future reference:

I’ve been using tri-band antennas from Wilson Antennas, but unfortunately they don’t actually work in the places where you need the antennas because, well they’re made for the US-based frequencies (e.g. 1900, rather than 1800)

Jeff Wishnie from Inveneo points out this antenna for boosting signal strength:

This high gain, wide band, directional antenna covers the GSM900 and GSM1800 / UMTS bands. The kit contains the antenna with 7 m cable and the Universal Cellphone Adapter packaged into a sturdy box with detail instructions on installation and use. This antenna covers the 900 and 1800 MHz band which is used in built up areas.

Features:

* Broadband
* Covers various international cellular bands.
* Robust and weatherproof.

This antenna can be bought with the applicable cables for the different cards. Versions are available for:

* Vodacom OPTION Card
* Vodacom NOVATEL Card
* Vodacom HUAWEI Card
* MTN Sierra Wireless Card
* MTN HUAWEI Card
* Cell C NOVATEL Card

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I’m pretty gadget heavy on this trip. In terms of power stuff I have:

1 solar flexible-panel charger (retail $99-ish) for 4 AA batteries
2 solio solar chargers, for mobile phones and usb devices
(can be charged via solar or grid power. I only have one adapter
for grid power) (retail about $80 each)
1 inverter (retail about $40)
1 potenco pull cord charger for charging car batteries (on loan)

plus lots of portable cell phone chargers (that can double as flashlights, $25ish) using AA batteries, and a few $5 LED book lights with hard-to-replace batteries. I also have two sidewinders (retail $25) which are wind-up flashlights+cellphone chargers. They aren’t
particularly useful for charging cell phones, but they are better than nothing in a pinch.

the potenco pull cord charger is also a lot of work to charge a car battery - you wouldn’t want to use it unless you could hire some kids to pull at it on a regular basis for cheaper than you could pay for the equivalent work’s worth of fuel. It’s a great device tho, and
could easily be hooked up to a bike or a windmill (not too fast of a windmill tho). To charge a car battery, basically you bolt the charger to a wall, grab the two ends of a rope, and then you swing your arms like you are on a nordic track. Some lights come on and the
battery starts charging.

I haven’t tried it yet because I don’t have a car battery yet. I’ll try it next week when I go to Rubindi and I’m staying in the rural health clinic overnight. By some miracle I haven’t experienced a single power cut yet.

It’s also been raining, so the solio chargers and the AA batterycharger don’t seem to have charged fully yet, although maybe they would if I put them outside directly instead of just in my window..  I suspect the AA battery charger’s 4 hour claim for 2 batteries only works for the standard AA rechargeables and not my super-high capacity 2700 mAH batteries, because they only every charged up halfway.   In the end they really just work well as capacitors for grid power. =P

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Since I’m about to do this to my VMware installation of windows I thought it would be a good time to write a quick blog post on how to prevent your Windows computer from being infected by cds, dvds, and usb drives.

Of course this means that when you pop in a cd/dvd, it will no longer automatically launch some nice little installer application for you - you’ll have to go to "My Computer" and explicitly do that yourself.  But you’re better off doing things that way anyways. Trust me!

Last time I was in Uganda (November 2007) I managed to infect my usb drive, and then subsequently infect several laptops and PCs with my drive, when I tried to copy some files from a school computer. Basically some virus copied itself onto my drive, and then when I inserted it into a new computer, the computer automatically ran a special file called "autorun.inf", which launched the virus.  There were a couple of variants, including a funny one that made all of my folders hidden, and created a bunch of executable files with the same names as my folders, that had icons that looked like folders.  I mistakenly double-clicked on the "folders", and voila - another infection.  Insidious little trojan horses…  To make a long story short, I ended up spending a lot of time downloading AVG Free Anti-virus and installing it everywhere, since that was the only freely available anti-virus software that was up-to-date enough to remove these worms and viruses.. =)

Now we could have avoided all of these problems, if only execution of autorun.inf were disabled!

There’s a few sets of instructions on the web for how to do that.  Most of them just tell you how to do it for cd roms, a few give instructions that will disable it for both cdroms and usb drives:

http://www.tildemark.com/tips/disable-autorun-on-cdrom-or-usb-drives.html
http://www.howtogeek.com/howto/windows/disable-autoplay-of-audio-cds-and-usb-drives/

The general gist of both sets of instructions is as follows:

1. Run the Group Policy Editor by typing "gpedit.msc" in the run box ("Start->Run")
2. Navigate to Local Computer Policy -> Computer Configuration -> Administrative Template-> System
3. Double-clinic "Turn Off Autoplay"
4. Select Enabled, and specify that you want to turn off autoplan for "All drives"
5. Click OK, Close the Group Policy Editor.

Do it!  Do it now!

The other thing you should do, is that anytime you are not actually copying files to your usb drive, and you are just giving files to someone else, make sure to make your usb drive read only (if possible), so if their computer is infected, they can’t infect your usb drive.

I’ve also thought about carrying around a copy of anti-virus software, but I’m feeling dis-enchanted with AVG-Free (it’s bloated, they have started running nagware for their paid services, and it’s not that straightforward to update if you don’t have a direct internet connection).  I’ve also OSX-ified myself, so have since stopped paying as much attention to Windows…. But if anyone has recommendations for good, solid, affordable anti-virus software I can give out to people in Africa, I’d be happy to check them out!

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I’m on my way back out to Uganda, this time to run a pilot study of the software, working out some of the details of the design (co-design?) with the people in the management agency and the clinics, and doing a comparative study between a bunch of possible device platforms: Palm 680, Palm Centro, Blackberry Curve, Nokia n810 Internet Tablets, and the Asus EeePC with a GPRS modem.

But mostly, I’m making plans for my main dissertation research: one year of fieldwork starting in January of next year, in which the first 6 months will be allocated towards design, deployment, and training around the claims management system. For the last six months, I’m hoping to have handed off all training and implementation to the project partners - I’ll be geographically available, but mostly I’m sticking around to observe what happens when I let the ICTD project sit around and mature - how will my project partners appropriate the technologies?  How will their work practices and social dynamics reformulate themselves around a new system?  What will change, and what will stay the same?  What aspects of the project will fall into disuse, and what things might happen that I never could have anticipated?  I think by being intricately involved in a deployment, dedicated to making something that works for my collaborators, and willing to stick around to see what happens after the culmination of the project, I’ll have the opportunity to learn some really interesting things about what it might mean to have ICTs deliberately introduced into the practice of small health clinics.

So for now… I need to plan out that trip, set up housing, a schedule, line up my ducks, etc. I’ll test out some of my survey instruments: periodic surveys that I’ll repeat monthly throughout my stay as "checkpoints", and test out some of the equipment.  For this trip, I also have an undergraduate research assisstant, Emmanuel Owusu, with me.  We’ve been working on a first cut of "ClaimMobile", the application, so we’ll demo that for the partners, and get some initial feedback from the users on how it looks, how the form should be formatted, and everything, so we can start finalizing a digital equivalent of the paper form.  The hard part on this is actually formalizing in code what is currently a very implicit set of rules on what makes a valid claim and what doesn’t.

I think… none of this blog post makes any sense if you haven’t seen me present about my project. =) Oh well.

The long and short of it is that I’m in Uganda for a month, and I’ll be going out again for a year in January…

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This is a bit belated (I’m something like 6 months behind on blog posts) but my group got an honorable mention at this year’s Bear’s Breaking Boundaries IT for Society competition. Our project, led by Laura Stachel (MD, studying for a DrPH in the School of Public Health) proposes to provide sufficient reliable power for lighting, diagnostic equipment, and communications to support emergency obstetric care for a rural hospital in Zaria, Northern Nigeria. It’s a really cool proposal - basically coming up with a series (aka "menu") of solar lighting and power packages for different climates. Lighting is provided through led flood-lamps, power is intended for diagnostic equipment, and charging of communications equipment, with everything completely independent of the main power system of the hospital (minimizing exposure to power spikes and unwanted drainages). I think the other good thing about this proposal is that it targets emergency care - an oft-neglected and sorely critical aspect of healthcare in developing regions. For more info, there’s a flyer here and you can contact us at wheretheresnolight at googlegroups dot com.

My friend Neema pointed out AfriGadget, a blog showcasing African ingenuity. The posts currently on the front page feature everything from biodiesel and renewable energy to simpsons toys to mobile phones made from recycled parts.

So with all the recent news on Kenya’s elections and subsequent (concurrent?) riots, it crosses my mind that there is a great need for transparent+verifiable, reliable, and low-cost voting systems in developing countries. I know that a lot of people at UC Berkeley and other universities are working on e-voting, both on the implementation/computer science side, and on the policy side. But of course much of this work is targeted towards federal United States voting requirements, which entail all sorts of things like audit trails, voter anonymity (both to protect individuals, and to prevent them from selling votes), as well as probably lots more esoteric accessibility requirements, not to mention our weird electoral system and lots of absentee ballots.
Imagine if Diebold or Pitney-Bowes came up with a low cost electronic voting system that could not be compromised (okay, given, that’s still a hard problem) and could be used by governments of developing countries to hold reliable elections. Read the rest of this entry »