Ndi li tulo
In Chechewa/Nyanja that means "I have been having a problem staying awake". Awake enough to update this blog. Anyway nice lull, rest, flakiness. The web is very distracting.
Onward to the update. Surprisingly enough nearly half-way through the whole Zambia stint. True to the saying, once your finally adjusted its going to be time to hit the road again. Doh. Work is rolling along in SmartCareLand, albeit on Africa time. Still fairly scattered in daily activities, Training, Testing, and odds and ends. The PC presence has also swelled, another PCV has joined the project, with one more in the pipeline. So how many PCVs does it take to change a light-bulb? They could teach someone to build a solar still though.
Back when I first came to Zambia I had a vision of my job. Living not in the bush, but in a provincial capital, fanning out from there to directly support SmartCare in surrounding villages and clinics. The system is meant to be a nation-wide thing, everyone with a Smartcard holding their health history. Much like my vision for youth center in CV this ideal has undergone revision. Currently its in our collective strategy to do something similar, but mobilize PCVs already in the field to "Monitor and Evaluate". Picture one day a strange black box appears in the village. The clinician remembers their district boss mentioning something about computers at a training six months back, but the deployment was delayed by 4 months, due to roads being washed out, and the computer being "lost" and found half-way back to the capital. The clinic has electricity (solar panels) but the voltage needs to be changed for the computer to work. In fact how do you turn the computer on? The user manual was eaten by a goat, or used as toilet paper. Fortunately a PCV (or their trained Zambian counter-part/friend) bikes in to get some mealie-meal, and utilizes the magical power of "skills-transfer" to teach how to power on the machine. Repeat visits, training, and support ensue until the community is comfortable with the tech and kicking solitaire playing youth off the computer. The volunteer/counterpart reports success and disasters back to the SmartCare mother-ship in Lusaka, and metrics are weighed and pondered.
Thats the grand plan how we can be most effective here. The SmartCare PCVs been attempting to get things organized and formalized in between our other miscellaneous tasks and Lusaka living. I'll blab a bit more about the motivation/philosophy behind the above proposal after this 4 day weekend. Happy Easter. They do have Cadbury cream eggs at the Spar here. Thank God.
posted by Brent at 3/20/2008 12:34:00 PM | permalink |
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