Thursday, March 5, 2009

Thoughts on Sierra Leone - From Ray

Our good intentions to blog each day were met with the challenge of not having access to the internet for much of the time that we were in Sierra Leone. So now, afer the fact, we will each provide our own personal summary of the trip, what we accomplished, and where we go from here. I will leave it up to George and Bob to summarize the Safe Passages Training Workshop but will just add that it was very successful with close to 80 Sierra Leonean healthcare workers trained.

Sierra Leone is a beautiful country with wonderfully friendly and open people. We were warmly embraced everywhere we went. It was quickly apparent, however, that this is a country that is in need of much help. I will attempt over the next week to add some more blog entries about some of our experiences and will add some photos.

As for our technology demonstration project, it ended up being somewhat disappointing, but not a complete loss. The intent of the trip was one of discovery ... to determine the infrastructure, technical, and human resource challenges that we need to face if we are to successfully implement distance learning technologies in Sierra Leone. We discovered early in our trip that access to the internet is very limited, controlled primarily from ISPs located in Freetown, and the bandwidth is very poor. They are working now somewhere in the 56K to 128K bandwidth arena ... possibly as high as 256K at times. They hope that will double in the City of Bo during this next year. While we were able to access the internet, the bandwidth limitations prohibited us from doing much testing with the Tandberg Tactical Unit we lugged with us. We were even experiencing difficulties with Skype audio, while Skype video simply did not work. Going into this project, we knew that internet access existed but were not aware of what type of access we would have. While there, we were able to connect with the owner of the only internet cafe in town. He did not have local control of his firewall and network, so our ability to work through him were quite limited.

In the end, we determined that we can not rely upon the existing internet infrastructure in Sierra Leone (like we did in Nigeria last year), and we will need to communicate directly to a satellite.

I can't thank the folks at Tandberg (Kjierstin and their team) enough for everything they did to support this project. They went the extra mile and I had hoped we could show off the great technology that Tandberg brings to the table. Now that we know significantly more about the infrastructure and operating environment, we can now make sound technology decisions for any future projects in Sierra Leone.

While we were not able to conduct our live video conferencing sessions as we had hoped, we did walk away with the knowledge of how to proceed in the future. After all, the intent of my visit was to conduct an assessment of needs and capabilities. From that perspective, the trip was a great success.

Ray

No comments:

Post a Comment