At Illongulu,.working

In case you've found extra luggage

I suppose they get less business than "lost luggage"

On the plane from Dar, happy to be going home

Exploring Cassanova Spot

At the cassanova spot in cape coast

We were waiting for mommy to be done at the internet cafe

Claire <3s Alvero

We are sharing a treat

Claire meets a kitten in cape coast

Best exit row.seat EVER!!!!

I'm on a boat!

So, I'm on a boat, it's awesome!!! I've slept 30 minutes in the last 36 hours.. but it's all okay. This hotel is not expensive, has a Tennenyaki resturaunt and I was nice to the lady at the front desk and she bumped me up from a regular room to the boat suite for no extra cost! I'll post some pics, but I'm writing this from my own private boat deck looking out on lake victoria. I was out here working while the sun set, and I wish I was here for more than one night... maybe on the way back :) I'm in Mwanza, the second largest city in Tanzania, and tomrrow it's an 8 hour drive to Tabora. So it's time for my meeting (several hour conference call with NYC) and then I'm going to finally get my shower and a non-airport/airplane meal!

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In case the last upload didn't have the pic

I have arrived in Dar es Salaam!

She's been wearing my glasses lately

Outside Baths and Rice Crispy treats... again...

Okay, so As per my previous post, I will be attempting to rewrite my funny poignent post from before, though this time I am sure it will be a bit shorter.... so, I have obviosly not adhered to my goal of posting something every day in April. This is due to a couple of things, but mostly the massive influx of work brough on by organizing and hosting the ChildCount+ Developers' meetup here in Kumasi, 6 software developers from all over Africa were here to talk about the current status and the future of the project I manage and to train the new guys (myself included) on how to work with CC+ better. It was super helpful, but also meant many many 12 hour (or more) days... :p It was totally worth it though, those guys were great and it was really good to spend some time getting to know them better. They were here from April 9th to the 16th and I am left with a stack of reciepts about a foot tall to send in to NYC for reimbursement. One night we all gathered at my our house for dinner and we played a little Kinect on the xbox (Thanks Dad!) and so that is some of the pictures attached. as you can see, a good time was had by all. 

 

So, everyone took off on Saturday, but Sunday brought a huge rain storm and fequesnt lights out, so not really much of a blog updating day. :) On saturday we were visited by my old friend Kofi who is a woodcarver and made these awesome stools for Claire. She loves to sit on them and we have also discovered that they make a perfect booster seat for her. so you can see them in a few of the pics of claire munching on the spoon. See this link  for more info about the cultural significance of stools to the Ashanti (we live in the ashanti region) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ashanti_people#The_Golden_Stool 

So, as I mentioned we had a whole lot of rain yesterday, this meant that it was time for something Claire and I do called outside bath. Basically she and I go out to play in the rain while she's in her undies and I'm in shorts. It feels nice to have the cooling rain and Claire really likes it too. So we went out and played on the swings, looked for ripe mangos in the tree (she calls them mang-ees) and generally hung out in the rain for a while. It was a lot of fun. 

 

We then driewd off and went inside to make some very yummy rice crispy treats, but we had one issue, no marshmallows... they just don't exist in Kumasi. So we had to come up with an alternitive, which turned out to be even yummier than the original ones. The Recipe follows. 

 

1 C Honey (or Brown rice syrup or Agave or corn syrup)

1 C Brown Sugar (or any other kind of sugar you have)

1 C Cashew Butter (or any kind of nut butter, but we had cashew butter around)

(optional 3 T Butter and 1 t salt, 1T vanilla)

7 C Rice Crispy Cereal

 

So, you boil the honey and sugar together (and butter if you added it) over med low heat until the sugar dissolves (my honey was a bit thin so I boiled it for about 3 or 4 minutes) then you add the vanilla and salt and cashew butter anb turn off the heat (remove the pan from heat if you use electric burners) and then mix in the cereal. We also added chopped cashews and dark chocolate. It's really really good, but also really sweet. So, yep there you have it. Claire was wandering around licking the spoon for about 2 minutes. It was super cute. and they stayed together really well (which is not surprising since basically carmel replaced the mashmallows). Okay, well that's all for now. I have a TON of work to do. I'm off to Tanzania this week for about 10 days to work on ChildCount+ out there, then it's back to Ghana! Please feel free to comment on the blog link itself as well as facebook as we do read the comments (of which there are none, so I suppose we read the theroretical comments?)... 

 

Casey

 

 

 

 

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Just wrote a whole long post

Then as the media was uploading, I forgot about it and rebooted my computer and lost the whole thing :( I'll rewrite it later... I HATE it when that happens....

 

 

Claire may think that black people are made of chocolate

So, Claire has started biting Sandra, this is not a welcome development. Today we may have made a discovery of why... She has also been a fiend for chocolate, coca-cola and Elmo, which may not suprising to all the parents out there. She has been asking for "lala" which is her word for chocolate, and has tended to be asking for "lala" just before biting Sandra. Today when Akose came in the kitchen Claire pointed at her and said "Lala"... therefore, Claire may think that all black people are chocolate flavored. Therefore the new name of the house is "Chocolate City" I'll keep you all informed... in the meantime please see this link for more info on chocolate people. 

Developers meeting

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Some pictures from the meeting I've been hosting all week

Claire likes the paint program on my phone

Pics from yesterday

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I've been running around like crazy! Looks like i'm going to tanzania in 2 weeks!

Yes, I got into Claire's little boat...

Yes it was freaking ridiculous... She liked it though

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Went to the field today

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Learning about community health workers... Informative!

Sharing is caring...

And this made me laugh...

http://xkcd.com/879/

Oh, and I'm keeping my signature on here, it has Ghana phone numbers and a US voicemail I can check from here (go Google Voice! Thanks for the suggestion Anne!)
----------------------------------------------------------------
Casey Iiams-Hauser

eHealth Solutions Coordinator 

The Earth Institute at Columbia University
Millennium Village Project
cbi2103@columbia.edu
Skype ID: Caseynth
US Voicemail: +1-360-818-4000

Ghana Mobile: +233-24-783-8356
ChildCount+ (http://www.childcount.org)

Dear Web People

 hello dear blog readers, friends, family and assorted hangers-on (I don't know why you are reading this if you are indeed a hanger-on, but I will take it as a compliment. Ummmmm, let's see, updates?

 

We had an awesome weekend, Claire got her first scrapped knee at the pool though :( there was a pic up for a bit. She had a ton of fun swimming though and doesn't seem to mind the scrape much. Katie has her new helper who is so awesome with claire we have her a 33% raise after the 2nd day (huzzah for living wages! There is now one person closer to the MDG for those that are counting (you are very welcome Jeff))... Ummm, We have DSL, it's awesome! And my computer is now in the NYC office and fixed, just waiting to be shipped back to me. I've super stoked about it. It was a great computer before all the breaking happened, and so now I have a 6 week old computer back from the shop all ready to go and awesome. 

 

Hmmm, what else. I have been a huge nerd and have very much enjoyed playing Dragon Age after Claire goes to bed. Yes, it's super nerdy, but it's also way fun. I have lots of video games for playing and not enough time to do the playing in. Katie has been super into New Super Mario Bros on the Nintendo DS, She's got to the final castle and unlocked a lot of the game, but I think we are a bit stuck on the last castle. Anyhow, yep, super mario = awesome, and now we have a helper so there is hope on beating the last castle. Ummmm, let's see, what else... I'm super busy at work, we are having a meetup things where all the programmers are coming from all around Africa, I'm really looking forward to that, it should be a lot of fun!

 

Okay, I need to get back to work, but for all of you who are care package oriented (and if you are not, we can make you an orientation powerpoint and manual) you can feel free to send via FedEX or DHL to the following address:

 

Casey Iiams-Hauser and assorted Family

Care of:

Participatory Development Associates

KNUST Junction

On top of Juliponia pharmacy

Kumasi, Ghana

 

Yes, that's right, no addresses in Ghana, my address has an "on top of" on it. Scratch that one off the bucket list... 

 

Okay, going now!

 

Bye!!!

 

P.S. I'll try and post more pics later

 

Untitled

Okay this was for ysterday... I thought I'd uploaded it... doesn't count as missing or today's though :) I'm sure this is one of those things where I will think it's way cuter than you guys will, but I like it. Just shows how much Claire is learning to talk! 

Talking!.wmv Watch on Posterous

Going to try something new...

Hello everyone!

So I know that I haven't written in a while, but it's for for lack of things I want to tell you, it's more that I'm running around like a crazy person and haven't commited to actually writing down my thoughts. So, I'm going to try a little experiment, I want to try and write at least a sentence and take at least one photo a day for the month of April. This will be a challange, but I'm up to the task. 

Sooo, let's see.. things to share... Yanis (my colleauge and friend) came to work on his Tropical Labs Inititive and taught me a new TLA (Three letter acronym)... some of you (including myself) are known to use "TIA" meaning "This Is Africa"... proper useage is for when the 16 page menu for the resuraunt gets cut back to chicken with either plain or jollof rice because that's all they actually have: "Well, TIA, I'll take the jolof rice" or a crazy naked person is wandering around the taxi you are in while the hopelessly lost taxi driver tries to figure out where the place is which he assured you he knew how to get to... That sort of thing... There's another one which has now replaced TIA for me, the Yanis-Introduced "AWA" or "Africa Wins Again" the proper way to think about it is that: In the battle between you and Africa.... Africa wins Again....

 

Let's see, lots more stuff, but it's hard to remember now. I just got my first paycheck finally! So now I am offically on payroll, which is good because I now have a mountain of debt... I just wish my back pay were coming with the paycheck, oh well patience. They also assured me that my travel advance was going to be coming within the next couple of days. This really take a lot of pressure off me! It's very very nice to not need to worry about it. 

So, Claire is talking more and more and I've made a short video of us looking at animal stickers and she's learning the names which I'll share soon. 

 

I'm sure it's one of those things that's way cuter to me... but still, she liked watching it like 7 times in a row. So that's coming up. She is talking so much now, and one of the things she started saying was "tattoo" and then she's point to all the tattoos on me. It's pretty damn cute! Ummm, let's see other than that, Nela the GSK volunteer is coming over for dinner tonight, she is leaving this weekend which will be sad. She was at the Bonsaaso cluster for like 3 months. Also, I gave a talk about Developing mobile application at the Ghana India Kofi Anan Center for Excellence in IT's iWeek. It was cool and I got to meet a lot of young programmers and the head of ICT for the Ghana Health Service. I also got to hang out with David who runs the motech project in the North. We made plans to go up there together and see what we can learn from each other's projects.  

 

Okay, back to work for me, I leave you with pictures of Claire making it rain when we were budgeting! (and an oddly named energy drink for the fairly conservitive Ghana)

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Those of you who I haven't chatted with in the last couple of weeks, email me or find me on gchat/skype!!!

 

Love,

Casey