Well looks like I’m not going to be going to Nagaland now for a few more weeks. The board has set the date for the opening of CIHSR to after I was due to leave, and so now I am looking at moving my flights around a bit. On the plus side this makes me more hopeful that I will get to see the opening.
Oh dear… 30 homes were set on fire by an angry mob in Dimapur this week.
I heard yesterday about a district in Nagaland where 19 out of 19 women tested for Sexually Transmitted Infections tested positive. This is seriously disturbing in itself but introduce HIV into this environment and you end up with serious problems. Having an STI actually increases your risk of contracting HIV as it lowers your natural defences.
From this and other reports I have heard and read, Nagaland on the verge of a HIV epidemic to rival Africa.
This is an emergency. Every day we fail to act more people will get infected. There is no cure for HIV, only treatment, prevention is what we really need.
Prevention of STI’s and STD’s requires people to move out of their comfort zones. To accept that people have both pre and extra-marital sex and not judge them for it. To accept that people do drugs, and not judge them for it. To help people understand their risks. To provide the means to enable people to minimise their risks, be it condoms or needle exchange, or protection from forced sex. To work to empower women to be able to make their own choices regarding their reproductive and sexual health. To challenge issues of gender inequality and sex. To encourage people to get tested for STI’s.
None of this is easy, it is all highly cultural specific. There are no shortcuts. It is vital work and hard work. Most of the work is in the field and in country.
What can I/we do?
I do not really know at the moment.
Challenge assumptions.
Support the MDG’s
Support efforts to bring gender equality.
Keep the safe sex and safe needle message alive. I am scared about the new trends in Australia towards unsafe sex.
Be aware.
I think I managed to do some good work whilst here. I set myself the goal of providing at least $100,000 of value during my time volunteering. Except I forgot to work out how I was going to calculate that. Ops..
Anyway here is a somewhat incomplete list of the work tasks I completed:
Specify the computer systems required for a 200 bed hospital.
Setup a loadbalanced, redundant set of servers to deliver a custom application (Turbocare) using a MySQL backend.
Designed a network
Documented howto setup 90% of the hospitals systems
Misc work on Turbocare including testing and some coding.
Train and mentor two computer systems administrators. One in Delhi and one in Dimapur. (They should be meeting up in a few months, along with the guy I trained in Raxaul. I wonder if they’ll talk about how crazy I was. )
Setup online courseware for two programs (No content in them yet)
Setup an online LDAP Address Book (Not quite finished)
Setup backend for three websites (None of them have much content as of today, but I am promised it will come).
Created some mailing lists (Strangely these are actually used)
Gave a short session in a HMS workshop. (It was title Basic Health Care for Hospital Computers)
Provided evaluation of three Hospital Management Systems. (Mostly informal)
Meet with far too many vendors (I may be a bit of a people person, but I am not really that much into sales people. Particular the ones who call at 10pm on a Friday night.)
Developed a healthy coffee addiction
Researched mobile phone jammers (It’s too hard to get people to switch off phones in meetings)
Evaluated video conferencing solutions(not much though, cause I didn’t like the idea at the time)
Setup far too many wireless networks (But on the plus side, it is a good way to make friends)
Worked on credit card donations options ( Somehow it all ended up going nowhere)
Evaluated a variety of Content Management Systems (Oh so boring)
Evaluated Wireless long distance VPN system (Evaluation is such a nice word isn’t it)
Created specification for PBX system, evaluated some PBX’s and meet with a vendor.
Became official present shopper for colleagues in Dimapur. (Would be fun in a place like Delhi, just hard work in Dimapur)
Helping Damsel’s in distress with IT issues.
I am sure I am missing some tasks I preformed but I think that will do for now. No wonder I’ve been feeling tired. I am pretty amazed I managed to actually develop some friendships in my time here. Although sadly that last work task of helping damsel’s in distress is actually one of the ways I made friends here.
I think I need a new life but for now I’ll settle for leaving India and going on a holiday.
I am now sitting in Dimapur waiting to leave for Kolkata and then Delhi. I am feeling very sad about leaving but really looking forward to Delhi, my holiday and returning home.
I was booked to go to Delhi through Guwahti in Assam but Assam has had a recent explosion of violence over the past few weeks. The Indian military is now cracking down heavily on a group called the ULFA. The ULFA is responding with yet more violence against civilians, primary people from Bihar.
So with situation dodgy there, I am flying direct to Kolkota and then to Delhi. It is much more expensive but much safer.
Yesterday was Republic Day in India, as well as Australia Day back home. The project team celebrated the founding of the Indian Republic by trying to work hard.
In the morning Tushar(the IT Manager) and myself managed to setup the servers and other equipment in the rack. At about noon we had everything running and working in the rack and then the power went out. We did not worry though because we had a nice big UPS. We went and had some lunch and then moved up to the site office.
Everything was going fine for about 30 minutes and then the servers stopped responding to our laptops. I went down to investigate and found that our big UPS had gone flat.
We waited for the power to come up and it didn’t come back up. I was offered the use of the generator and decided that yes I wanted to use it. So they went to try and start it. The first obstacle was fuel, they managed to take some from one of the contractors. Then once they had the fuel they tried to start the generator only to discover that the battery was flat. So we tried to jump start the generator by linking it to a bob cat(front end loader, JVC or whatever you want to call it) and tried the generator again. With the power we tried starting to run the generator but it didn’t work. We had a “magnetic prick failure” after that point I gave up and went back to sit in the office and wait to go home.
The power was not restored whilst we were at the site, and we ended up leaving at 4pm which is about 3 hours earlier then normal.
Moral to the story, only work half days on public holidays.
Well yesterday was pretty bad productivity wise, in fact I ended up going home at 2.30pm in disgust over the lack of power at the site, but I did at least have a keyboard
Today was a lot better I slept in and called the site and found out there was no power. So I felt pretty good about that decision. I waited until there was power at the site before going in and I managed to have power for a lot of the day and the Internet and a keyboard.
Today I managed to guide my replacement through some basic setting up two of the four servers.
Some Saturday Night’s aren’t very exciting. I am spending this one working on documentation for the project. I only have 20 working days left in Nagaland, and that’s with a 6 day week. Found out my servers are meat to be coming on Wednesday. The big UPS also comes then, meaning I should be able to run multiple computers at once, which is important for testing. The other equipment should arrive some time before I leave.
If you are a geek with absolutely nothing worth doing you can check out the google code project for the software Wes has written here. I’ve been doing some documentation on the Wiki, very tedious work I must say.
At least my MacBook is very nice to use, and I have a good iTunes collection to keep me entertained.
In related news it’s only 50 days until I get home.
I got my rack yesterday. Whilst it is impressive in size, it is taller then me, wider then me, and deeper then me, the colour is really not doing it for me. It’s metallic gray is just so unsexy. It’s quite depressing the It did come in a big woden crate which was impressive at least. Anyway I’ll post some more photos tomorrow.
News just in the Nagaland ceasefire between NSCN(I-M) and government of India has been extended by 1 year
The Australian (an Australian newspaper) is surprisingly covering the ceasefire process in Nagaland. The NSCN(I-M) is threatening to not extend the ceasefire past 31st July. They are claiming the Indian army is arming the rival faction. I reckon it’s probably just saber rattling but you never know for sure. The world certainly is rather messed up at the moment with all the conflicts.
Rest assured I am not going to be travelling to Nagaland over the next few weeks.