Of course, I don’t have very many pictures of myself. You can only do so many arms-length ones before it starts feeling cheesy. 
But! My friend Paul was here (you can see him in some of my pictures) and he takes much better photographs than me. Check out his photostream for more pictures of Ghana.
Of course, my photostream is also feeling a little neglected…
I’m sitting here in the semi-dark and I realized that I still haven’t blogged about one of the more salient aspects of my time here in Ghana. Okay well. –insert sheepish grin– i actually realized that ages ago when Paul arrived and mentioned that I could have at least warned him that we only have power every other day here!
To be precise, we’re on a four day cycle that runs like this:
Day 1: Scheduled outage in the day from 6am to 6pm (12 hours)
Day 2: 24 hours of power (barring faults)
Day 3: Scheduled outage at night, from 6pm to 6am (12 hours)
Day 4: 24 hours of power
Although if you count a day as midnight to midnight, it actually seems a little more lopsided - the 24hours of power is pretty misleading. It’s actually such that you have a 12 hour daytime outage followed by 48 hours of power, and then a 12 hour night time outage followed by 24 hours of power.
The back story to this is that the water level in Lake Volta is extremely low, so the hydroelectric dam (operated by the Volta River Authority) is not giving enough power for the nation. The really sad frustrating thing is that this was entirely predictable - it happens every eight years. The power outages could have been avoided if only the government had turned off the aluminum plant (there’s lots more back story on that) on schedule instead of trying to squeeze just a little more money out of it. But at least Ghana has now struck oil!
The daytime outages aren’t so bad because the place where I’m staying is an office, and they run a generator during work hours. Except when it hits on weekends. The daytime outages are pretty much on schedule - the power always goes off on time, and then turns back on anywhere from 0-6 hours after it is supposed to turn on. The nightime outages also start on time, but generally end early, with the power turning back on at midnight or so. Although it’s 1.30am now, and the power is still out today.
I have different means of dealing with the power outages. Tonight, I’m surrounded by smartphones, using the one with the better loudspeaker as an mp3 player (actually mostly country music, not rock), another to check my email, and a third as my normal phone. Often I actually do use them as flashlights, since they are generally at hand when I need them, although tonight the guys at Arrow Networks (our collaborators on the wireless network project) set me up with a rechargeable lamp, so I don’t have to sit in the dark all night. Which is actually pretty much what I’ve been doing for the past four weeks. My little flashlights sort of work, but they don’t exactly light up a room and you really need to hold them up to see anything useful. I have found good places to prop them up though!
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One of my (many) projects here was to set up GPRS for my multitude of smartphones. Out of the array I brought with me to Africa, I selected four to bring to Ghana, picking that number so I would have two and each of Paul and Rowena could use one. The finalists: my trusty personal treo650, which gets carted around because it has all my contacts on it and (I confess), Backgammon; the E-ten Glofiish, which runs windows mobile 5, has a slider keyboard, and a very large screen, not to mention a radio, GPS, and all the other bells and whistles a phone can have; the HPs710, another slider phone, considerably smaller, with an additional numeric keyboard, but no touch screen, my current favorite, if only because it was the only one I configured to check email successfully in Uganda; and the HTCP3600, the phone with no keyboard whatsover, but for some reason actually seems to be the most stable.
So one Friday I set out with a mission: to set up all my phones with Areeba Data Services and Tigo GPRS/EDGE. I found the addresses of the head offices, figured out a route, and resolutely headed into the traffic. Altogether the process was a lot more hassle than strictly necessary. If they had just put the name of the access point on the website, I could have pretty much done all the work myself. Instead, I spent three hours at Areeba and another hour at Tigo, trying to convince them that I knew perfectly well how to configure my own phones, no matter how many other know-it-alls had come into their office before. :) At Tigo, I finally pulled out all four phones, handed one to the agent, and asked for the access point. I managed to configure the three in my possession and get them working while she continued to poke around the preferences on my poor treo. Okay okay, to be fair, she was extremely helpful and friendly, and I’m altogether pretty happy with Tigo customer service. With Areeba, however… the whole thing was some weird bureacratic process… and I’ve been warned that I might have to go through it again when they switchover the name of their networks to MTN (they were recently acquired). But to get to the interesting part:
How to Configure your GSM Mobile for GPRS:
As it turns out, neither Areeba nor Tigo require any authentication, nor any particular special configuration. So, if you can find the GPRS settings on your phone (under Preferencs on Palm, and under Settings -> Connections on WM) then you just need to set up a connection pointing to the right access point, and to make sure that the phone uses the right access point settings for whatever SIM card you have inserted. For Areeba, you actually do have to go to the head office, because they have to "activate" your GPRS service on the network, tied to the SIM, because they charge an activation fee of 50,000 cedis (5 Ghana cedis, aprox. $6).
Areeba Data Services
Access Point: internet.areeba.com.gh
SIM Card: 15,000 cedis, including 10,000 airtime
Airtime: 45,000 minimum balance recommended
Activation: 50,000 cedis
Charges: 19.89 cedis/kb
Tigo GPRS/EDGE
Access Point: web.tigo.com.gh
Authentication: not required, but if necessary you can use User:web/Pass:webhost
SIM Card: 15,000 cedis, including 10,000 airtime
Airtime: no recommendation (I purchased 40,000)
Activation: none
Charges: 9.2 cedis/kb
It’s been noted to me that Areeba is more expensive because they are bigger. Of course - if you are a Tigo customer and most people are on Areeba you are paying a lot more in airtime charges than Areeba customers that never talk to Tigo customers. So I guess it just depends on what your friends have. Or you can be like a lot of the people I see here and just have two SIM cards, one on each network.
Areeba was a bit of a struggle, so if you want to just be a casual Internet user, I suggest trying Tigo or possibly Kasapa (I haven’t tried Kasapa though!). They are considerably larger and seem to have set up a bureacracy around customer service. I was given a number and told to head upstairs, where I periodically shifted seats towards the front of the line and I severely objected to their as-yet-unexplained need to make a copy of my driver’s license. I wasn’t afraid they were going to steal it - I just felt it was completely unnecessary for them to take it. From there I talked to one agent, who asked me to wait while she served the other customers because it would take 40 minutes to configure my phone. I waited, and at the end of 20 minutes was told to fill out a form and go pay the activation fee. When I also mentioned that I needed another SIM card and air time… I was told that I couldn’t pay for the activation until I had a signature on the form with the sim card number and that I had to buy the airtime at yet another counter. But I couldn’t get the signature until I had paid for the SIM card. Three visits to various cashiers, and one more visit to the customer service rep later, I finally sat down, with the appropriate signatures and lots of money paid to configure the phones. After that it was relatively simple - she did some things on her computer to authorize my SIM chip, poked around and configured a phone, turned it off and on, and picked yahoo.com to show me that it worked. I was a little miffed because Yahoo.com is not exactly a small page (m.yahoo.com is okay) and I was obviously paying for the download, so I stopped the page load and picked up m.gmail.com instead, sans images. The end result though! I can now check my email even when the power goes out. Ah the miracles of technology!
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I recently (April 29, 2007) gave a talk to the Ghana Physicians and Surgeons Foundation (a group of Ghanaian doctors practicing in the US) at their annual African Healthcare Summit.
My slides are downloadable here (ppt, 10.5 MB). I gave an introduction to TIER, talking about our work using long distance WiFi (WiLDnet) for the Aravind Eye Hospitals in India, then gave an overview of our project in Ghana. Just for a bit of context, I also presented a brief introduction to network infrastructure options in Ghana.
It was a great opportunity to meet many wonderful people, including my host Grace and the many doctors actively returning to Ghana on a regular basis to provide training and do rural outreaches. I’m really looking forward to working with all of them!