10 January 2006

When we arrived on Saturday, our internal clocks were pretty messed up; we sometimes fell asleep in the middle of the day on Saturday and Sunday, which messed us up even more, causing us to wake up fully refreshed in the morning…at 3 AM! Monday’s activities definitely put an end to this. After meeting the various contacts at the university and having dinner with Raja’s family and friends, we were dead tired. Today we woke up, without alarm clocks, around 7:30 AM.

Today’s activities began with a walk to the internet café to check email and see what was going on in the rest of the world. Following this we took a trip into Town Centre to purchase a new Ethernet card for the server to allow it to run both OCW and iLabs without bogging down the UNZA internet stream. This trip included our first Zambian taxi ride. The driver drove much slower than Raja and had some pretty decent music. The trip cost K50, 000 ($15) compared to about $30 in Boston. We discovered that technology is very expensive here. The Ethernet card which might cost an average of $20 in the United States cost K225, 000 ($65). Taxis are cheap, technology is expensive! After making the purchase, we headed to UNZA to meet other contacts.

After arriving at UNZA we met up once again with Peter Kalebwe and Prof. Shigeru Miyagawa who arrived in Lusaka early this morning. We had lunch at the same place as yesterday, and it was wonderful. We confirmed that the mystery food from yesterday was indeed caterpillars. Marta was ecstatic (see picture)!

Back at UNZA we met with Vice-Chancellor Robert Serpoll and Dr. Mbale Jameson, Head of the Department of Computer Studies. Both meetings went quite well. The Vice-Chancellor’s position is similar to that of president in American universities. Vice-Chancellor Serpoll has been in office for 3 years and increasing the use of technology on campus has been one of his key concerns. OCW and iLabs will aid him in addressing this concern, so he was very enthusiastic about our installing the two servers.

Dr. Mbale Jameson was appointed as head of the Computer Studies department about 3 weeks ago. He too was quite excited about the installation of an OCW mirror site at UNZA. OCW will greatly aid his department in teaching its various courses. OCW will also be used to allow students access to information for courses that are either not offered or have no instructor, such as Computer Graphics. Dr. Jameson was also kind enough to appoint Evans Lampi as the administrator of the server that we are installing. Evans is an instructor for courses in Electronics, Computation Physics, C++, and Java. He is eager to utilize OCW to access programming assignments from MIT subjects for use in the courses he teaches at UNZA.

Early today (midnight) when we were preparing the server for setup, we discovered that the external hard drive containing the OCW information was not being recognized properly by our server; the drive was made for Mac OS and Windows 2000/XP, but the server runs Windows Server 2003. Since we had more meetings today, we could not initially deal with this problem; however, Raja came through for us once again. After finishing the meetings, we rushed to the office of Aaron, a friend of Raja’s who repairs computers. He confirmed that the drive worked by connecting it to his own computer and when he connected it to our server, the drivers that came with the hard drive worked. We don’t know what he did, but definitely thank him for his help.

With the server ready to go online tomorrow, we returned to the KEPA guest house to meet a new roommate, Lea. Lea is from Milan, Italy and will be in Zambia for a year working with a U.N. campaign (can’t recall which one, maybe food/hunger elimination). Lea is a very nice young lady and we stayed up to nearly midnight discussing various issues ranging from education in the U.S. compared to Italy/England to past loves and relationships. It was wonderful to have someone to chat with.

Our chat was supposed to last until about 9 PM at which time Raja would return to take us to dinner. For some reason he never showed up, so our dinner included Fanta orange soft drink and Lea’s very tasty Maltesers, chocolate malt balls. Mmm, yummy!