Leave for Change in Botswana

So, I got back on Sunday afternoon after what felt like an eternity in airplanes. I have to apologize to the lovely couple sitting next to me on the last flight into Toronto. In my haste to get out of the plane I may have been a tad ruder than warranted. No excuses!

In any event, here’s a few of the pictures I threw together today to make-up some of the last events that took place in Botswana.

On the drive back to Maun, Jason and I stopped off at the Maun Educational Park. It’s essentially a big park in the middle of the city teeming with all sorts of (supposedly) non-violent animals. We spent about 2 hours wandering around and here are a few shots.

It took about 10 minutes until we saw any animals. When we did, we literally stumbled into a herd of zebras. Unsurprisingly, they can run pretty fast.

Zebra

We originally went to the park in the hopes of catching some giraffe. Thankfully, about 20 minutes in we ran into a baby giraffe. We didn’t realize that the parents were close by until we startled one of them and it took off running. I can’t speak for Jason, but seeing such a large animal appear as if out of nowhere startled me a bit as well.

Baby giraffe

Afterward, we were lucky enough to catch the whole family as they made their way to the closest river for a drink. There were about 5 in total (including the baby above, which is how we found out it was a baby) and it was truly an amazing sight.

Goofy guy in front of parent giraffe

Once off from Maun, I spent the next night in Gaborone. The following day was the debriefing with WUSC (and more computer work in their offices) and then I met up with another volunteer, Richard. He works for Deloitte in Toronto and we attended the same Leave for Change training prior to departure.

He was stationed in Gaborone for his mandate and while there he organized a fundraiser to purchase a football (soccer) kit for a local kids under-17 team. This is the team opening the kit with their coach in the foreground.

Local football/soccer team for kit hand-off

That was pretty much the last event in Botswana.

I just wanted to take this opportunity to thank Shex and the rest of the staff at TOCaDI for a very memorable time. I consider myself extremely lucky to have been partnered with such a great organization and I can only hope that they were as well served in return.

Prior to me leaving Shakawe, TOCaDI was nice enough to foot the bill for a night out on the town.

Last night with the staff in Shakawe

Finally, the part I’ll miss the most is the sunset and sunrise. Botswana is a beautiful country and I only hope that April and I will get the opportunity to return.

Postcard shot

That’s it for now! Thanks everyone for reading, commenting and emailing me. I’m back at work on Thursday.

Wow. Just wow.

Jason and I swung by the Krocovango Crocodile Farm today which is about 10km outside of Shakawe. I did not expect to see the sheer number of crocodiles they currently have in residence.

While operating as a tourist attraction, they also raise crocodiles to slaughter them for their skin and meat. While I’m definitely not a fan of that particular part of their operation it is the off-season and, thankfully, we did not witness any of the “processing”.

Just a warning, this thread is full of some rather frightening pictures (at least, for me anyway)! I thought I’d start off light with a picture of some cute cats. These particular guys live on the TOCaDI property just outside the house that I’ve been staying in. I strongly suspect that the lack of snakes (so far) is thanks to them. In return, they are very well fed. Their names are Walter (aka “Stupidface”) and Mondale.

Guard cats

So, on to the crocodiles. This particular one is over 60 years old. They can live up to 120 years. The picture really doesn’t do him justice as he is easily 14-15 feet in length and just massive.

King of the crocodiles

These signs were posted all over the place. I sure have to question whether it is a running concern at the farm since the gray/green mass in the background is a bunch of crocs.

Thanks for the warning!

Yep, this pretty much sealed the deal. I brought the swim trunks for no reason. I am not getting in the water.

12x zoom is your friend

Not the best picture, I know. There were so many of them in some areas that they were crawling all over each other. In some ways they appeared to be cuddling, but not in the cute adorable sense. These are full grown adults (mostly females, the males are too aggressive in larger which makes it difficult for breeding).

Yep, still not swimming

Nice close-up shot of some really poor dentistry. I’d certainly seek a second opinion. Really though, crocs lock their jaws open in order to regulate their temperature (through their tongue).

Check out the teeth!

Once you leave the adult crocodile area they walk you through the breeding areas. There are three of these large open areas with a small covered pond. In each of the areas, there are probably a few hundred crocodiles. The ones here about between 6 months to 2 years old. Interestingly enough, they startle easily. When we would walk near them they would all jump up and hide in the covered area.

Croc toddlers

It’s a bit hard to see but you’re probably looking at over a thousand baby crocodiles between the ages of 4-6 months. The survival rate for them at this age is about 80% due to sheer number of them. During feeding season, they will often pile upon one another in order to feed and crush the ones near the bottom. They have to clean these areas each day to remove the bodies.

Baby crocs

It was an interesting experience! Sadly, one of my last in Africa as I’m leaving Shakawe for Maun tomorrow as part of the first leg in the trip back to Canada.

Warning: Long post, no pictures and some technical information.

Leave for Change volunteers have a mandate in their host countries. Mine is to address some of the technical issues at TOCaDI. Also, I am attempting to pass along some of what I’m doing in order for a member of the local staff (or the next volunteer) to have a better understanding of their infrastructure and what I’ve done to address some of the concerns.

From the looks of it, TOCaDI is actually an amalgamation of a number of NGO’s. There are workstations used by people in the field, in partner organizations and personally. The mandate originally stated around 10-12 workstations but it is nearing 20 and more are popping-up every day. Not only that, as resident IT person, I am also involved in troubleshooting internet connectivity issues, printing, DVD/media playback, document scanning and user training.

I’m not complaining as the work is not terribly complicated (except for some of the viruses) and it is what I’m here for. My main concern is that It is a lot to handle in such a short time frame and still meet the existing mandate.

Internet
Unless you came abundantly prepared, without access to the internet this would be a near herculean task. Thankfully, the organization has satellite internet. However, it is still nowhere near the speeds available in North America (specifically Humber) and there is an antenna alignment issue which makes connectivity a bit spotty in the afternoons.

Downloading a single service pack takes about 2 days with stops and starts. I haven’t even bothered trying to download anything larger.

Updating Windows takes the longest amount of time. The size of Windows updates has always bothered me but, without access to a much faster internet connection, it is not just a frustration but nearly impossible. Out of the 20 workstations, I have only managed to update 4 of them completely. I’ve resorted to simply bringing them up to SP3 for XP and SP2 for Vista and leave it at that.

As for the office, there are only three cable drops and the staff require them as part of their job. I have been working a lot at night and on weekends in order to update these workstations. It is not fun walking back and forth to the office at night as it comes early (around 6pm) and gets very dark quickly (did I mention the Black Mambas?).

Hardware
As I mentioned, this is an amalgamated office environment. There are a lot of different hardware models (in fact, only two of the workstations are the same model) which have all been purchased at different times with different operating systems. There are Home, Basic and Professional versions of both Vista and XP.

Microsoft, why do you have to make this so complicated? I had to write up three different ways of disabling autorun since it is slightly different across XP flavours and entirely different in Vista.

The organization also has no locally stored physical media. I brought a few copies of Windows but I cannot even use them to replace core system files that have been overwritten by viruses as the, for instance, an XP Professional disk cannot be used on an XP Home installation. Also, without access to some of their custom applications like ArcGIS and Pastel, re-building the workstations (which would have been faster) is out of the question.

To all you hardware vendors out there (Acer and HP specifically): Stop pre-loading your workstations with so much crappy software. A lot of the workstations are using the base OS installation (as most computers do) and are so much slower than necessary due to all these pointless add-ons.

Viruses and Malware
I imagine that some of what I’ve described (and more) is felt throughout most of the developed world who lack some of the infrastructure and services that companies like Microsoft increasingly rely on. I can’t even imagine the lost time associated with some of these challenges in the developing world and I haven’t even touched on virus developers.

I just don’t get it. I’ve seen things here that we would never encounter at Humber and I imagine most large organizations have the necessary infrastructure and security to side-step it as well.

You malware developers are hurting smaller organizations like TOCaDI to a much larger extent than you might realize. For instance, the recent spate of autorun viruses that target USB drives has seriously impacted the organization. They lack any kind of centralized storage or even shared printers so they have to move a lot data (particularly documents) around through USB drives. Even if one of the machines is infected it will most likely spread to the rest in a matter of days.

I guess my point is that in the struggle for necessary security, both the good side (OS and anti-malware developers) and bad side (malware/virus developers) are not battling it out in the developed world. They’ve teamed-up to make an already desperate situation much worse.

I know, I said it was going to be a technical post. I’m still working on that one.

You’re crushed. I can tell.

Late on Monday night we were invited to the local high school to participate in their observance of Youth Day in South Africa. It is to remember the Soweto Uprising on June 16, 1976.

You can read more following the articles I linked above but, basically, the South African government diverted a large amount of financial aid from primarily black areas to augment the funding for primarily white schools. Then, they passed an act that barred black children from attending white schools.

The final insult was a decree that all black schools teach in Afrikaans and English (50-50 mix) and not their native languages.

Students walked out of class to rally and through indiscriminate force, police killed 23 people. In the resulting riots, it is estimated that over 500 people were killed.

Botswana shares this day with South Africa (and the rest of Africa) in solidarity and we were lucky to be part of it. We originally thought it was going to be a few hours in the morning (starting at 7:30am) but it wasn’t over until almost 1:30pm.

About the school event
We each had to introduce ourselves to the faculty and then the entire school audience. We were treated as most Batswana treat visitors, which is very well. We were more than a little humbled (and a little embarrassed) by their affection.

As for the show well, it was a variety show! It started with the national anthem and prayer and then different classes would prepare dramatic skits (some sad, some funny). There was also some traditional and ballroom dancing as well as just gettin’ down

This is a shot of the audience during one of the drama segments. A recurring theme through most of the skits is the topic of rape and safe sex, discrimination, violence and child abuse. There is a very strong awareness for all of these topics in Botswana (particularly regarding HIV/AIDS).

Education is power

Here’s a shot of class filing in for one of the skits.

A drama group filing into the auditorium

This is the traditional dance group. They are going to participate in Gaborone in the national competition. They were amazing.

Traditional dance group

Ballroom dancing! The audience was really loud during this segment. The kids were really good as well.

Ballroom dancing

The drummers were excellent. It’s hard to tell from the picture, but it wasn’t just a marching drill. The kids would start dancing at certain parts but it flowed quite well.

Scout group drum drill

HIV/AIDS is a huge issue in Botswana (some 1 out of 4 adults are affected) so ads, condoms etc. are everywhere. This was written on one of the main entrance walls when you leave the secondary school grounds.

Condom message on school wall

Hard to believe really.

I’ve already settled into a bit of routine, which is helping with the time difference and jet lag. It hit me hard once we arrived in Shakawe and it’s thankfully starting to wear off.

There hasn’t been a lot happening in the last two days as I’ve been working. I cut out a bit early in the afternoon yesterday to head to the post office and downtown. I’ve been coming in at night as the workstations are in use most of the day so it is easier to work on them with no one in the office.

Due to the rains earlier in the week there is a bit of a heightened awareness around malaria. I took these pictures earlier this week, but this is how I’m sleeping:

Mosquito net

It’s not bad. It’s like a fort! I keep seeing this squat brown spider in my room (it’s about twice the size of a loonie) that I’d like to vacate (and snap a picture) but the little bugger is fast and can fit through very tight openings. At least the net keeps it out as well.

Anyway, I don’t think I’ve put this picture up (apologize if it a duplicate). This is the accommodations:

House in Shakawe

It’s quite nice. You can tell it has been used a lot by students though. Lola and I spent a little while last night cleaning.

That’s it for now. I won’t bore anyone with any of the technical stuff in this post as not much has changed on that front. Apparently, the day care is in need of some assistance with their wireless access point so I might head over there next week to look into it.

Here’s a picture I snapped last night coming home. This is directly across from the front of the house.

Horses in the water

The river the horses are standing in feeds directly into the Okavango Delta. We’re hopefully going to see a bit more of it this weekend (boat trip hopefully!).

Tsamaya sentle! (Lit. Go away nicely)