Back in Bonsaaso

Well, here I am back in Ghana! I've landed safr and sounds and enjoyed my sweet suite in Nairobi for the very short time I got to enjoy it. So, let's see, I've been traveling with Yanis and Nella two collegues who are working on the Tropical Labs Initiative which I am going to be helping to develop a SMS based labs component for. But you can read about that later on Childcount.org later, I guess I need to chat about the other stuff that's been going on. So, I stayed in Kumasi for a couple of nights which was fun, went out to a great Indian place called Moti Mahal, and strangely enough, every single person I've ever met who has traveled in Kumasi have all independently mentioned this place as great and said that they wanted to go there. It's really good. Patty, Beth and I went there during the first round of Ghana visit and then again with Yanis and Nela. Also went to the Max Something hotel for Lebanese which was awesome too. Now I'm back in the field and attending a conference call on internet which is way to spotty to hear everything, and working on drawing out the specs for the software. We are staying in De Pat Palace tonight which has a hell of a reputation among my coworkers and sets a new low bar for customer service. But with the addition of Yanis, it's really funny (those who know him will know what I mean, he has a super dry sense of humor), I'll be posting a pic of his gorgeous bedspread which made me make My Little Ponies and Barbie's Malibu Dream Hotel jokes the whole way to the office. Funny, the place has crap for service and the cook may or may not be working tonight, but the rooms are pretty big and nice (but who knows how clean). So, everything is going well, I took a look at a house today which was super nice, but damn did they want too much cash for it, so I'm thinking of a slightly clever approach :) Anyway, pics to follow!

Mix up in Accra

Well I've landed in Accra, and had a great flight from Nairobi where I sat next to the former head of UNDP for all of Africa, we had a very nice chat. Well, when I landed in Accra, and tried to check in fire my flight to Kumasi, they told me I was supposed to fly in the morning, and the next treetop flights are full, I'm keeping my fingers crossed that someone doesn't show, but I might need to shift to the bus our try and go tomorrow (though I don't have money left for a hotel) on the plus side the hiring process is nearly complete, I start on monday as long as they don't need me to come back to NYC for paper work.

See the full gallery on Posterous

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We have decided to try a new format as the old one wasn't exactly great with poor internet connections. So, welcome to the new blog! I'm back in Kisumu , Kenya for one more day, off to Nairobi this evening, tomorrow Accra and then Kumasi. Whew, I'm going to be "knackared" I'm not sure how you spell that, but my new buddy Big Claire (not to be confused with the baby) has been introducing me to all kinds of fun English Slang. I might get Twatted tonight, aaaaaand, I think I forget the rest. Anyhow, Welcome to the new blog! Oh, and we've set it up to autopost onto the old blogger site. toddlertraveldiaries.posterous.com is the new one!

Link to the other blog I just wrote on!

Hello friends and some people whom I have never met. I wrote a post for the official ChildCount+ Blog and it's now up. It's a more detailed explanation of what I have been up to here, so go and check it out!

http://www.childcount.org/2010/08/17/using-childcount-to-strengthen-maternal-and-childhood-health/

Ok, so I'm back

So that was my first attempt at Creme Bruleé, it turned out okay, but I think I needed to account for the extra moisture from the passion fruit. Oh well, next time. It was still yummy but the consistency wasn't right.

OK where did we leave off? Oh yeah, we were going to be evac'ed to Nairobi, that went well, more like a vacation, yeah, in case of questions, see Katie's post. Big shout out to my Dad who donated $200 to help the orphans in Masago! That is going to help the feeding programs so much and help keep kids healthy!

Lets see, I keep thinking of things in my day and thinking "Awesome! I'm totally going to write that in the blog!" and then when I actually get home, I have completely forgotten it. So pretend i told you all about awesome things! yay!

Yeah, I'm still tired.

So, the past week or two has been really good for the project. The software is finished and has been moved onto the main server, which means we are up and running there. Komolo and I have trained the first three health centers, and starting Monday we will be taking trips around to see how the ID card distribution is going and if the health staff has any questions about the program as it stands.

I have also been feeling really good about all of the accolades that have been coming my way. I feel really good about the project and have really appreciated all the nice things that people have said about it and me. Of course I haven't done it alone, without Yanis I wouldn't have even had the chance to work on this or the funding that made it all possible, without ChildCount and Matt we would have had to start from scratch which would have made things about 18 billion times harder, Moses, Dickson and Kevin were the ones who actually did the programming, and Komolo and Francis among others have been key during my visits to the field. Andy and Ben made me fight for only those parts of the system that really needed to be there and helped to make the system as streamlined as possible. The CHWs and MVP project in general are the reason we can implement and I wouldn't have wanted to have to try and do all the amazing strengthening of the systems that they have done over the last few years before I started on this project. So yeah, I know most of you have no idea who these people are, but they rock! I have never enjoyed such hard work as I have enjoyed these past few months, if any of you guys are reading, thank you so much!

On that note, we have been talking to people who think that this system would be perfect for a district or nation wide strengthening of PMTCT services, so this is really exciting, as well as talking to the Kenyan Department of health people and UNICEF Kenya, we have also had meetings with UNICEF Uganda about this program. It's exciting to see the work you have done getting people to think about what they could accomplish in their own backyards with the same systems. It's all open source, and the more people using it, the more mothers getting good antenatal care and the more kids born without HIV, so that is awesome. I'm working on a post for the childcount blog and a Powerpoint that really goes through the system and shows how it works, I'll post a link to the CC blog and to the Powerpoint when I'm done with them (which had best be tomorrow!) So, Monday it's looking like I'm going to try and get my phone (or better yet, borrow one on the correct network) to be a fake CHW phone on the test network and make an appointment for my test patient. Make sure that it is all working to plan and meet with the lab here which does dried blood spot testing for early infant diagnosis of HIV and I hope the lab in Yala. I'mgoing to sit down with the coordinator and say "sorry to be a pain in the ass, but I'm going to need to commandeer one of your cars for my last week, I have too much to do and too little time to do it in and I have to be going between meetings in Kisumu and meetings in Yala the next few days. If that doesn't work, than monday in Kisumu, Tuesday in Yala, then Wed, thurs and Fri, we are training 2 Health Centers a day (which sounded good at the time of the planning meeting but now has more than a passing resemblance to logistics hell). We have 10,000 ID cards being printed (I hope soon) and booklets which need to go out to the health centers and I need to talk to the OpenMRS guys to see if the data entry folk can put in the forms in Sauri. Anyway, yeah, it's gonna be busy! Also, my contract should finally come next week, we have a Claire's 1st birthday/going away party on Wed and Claire's actual first birthday on Thurs.! Yeah, were gonna need a little more caffine over here... Okay, we are off tomorrow to hike in the rainforest, somehow between everything else, I took a night off and build them a simple website. So, yay for free rainforest! Enjoy the pics, I may not label them... We'll see. I wish I had Goonies to give the orphans, though I totally hooked them up with Winnie the Pooh and The original Star Wars Trilogy as well as The Princess and the Frog... They are good kiddos,I hope this small thing can help distract them from the difficulties they have already begun to face and feel like a normal kid for a bit.

So, I'll try to write more, but as you can see I'm a bit scattered and have a lot on my plate!

Ok ok ok, I'll finally post a blog!

Hello blog people. This is Casey. I have not disappeared because of a time traveler accidentally screwing up the space time continuum ala Marty McFly, yes, that was a Back to the Future reference. A few weeks ago, our Japanese housemates and I were talking about movies from the 80s, Kaniko and I agreed that the Goonies was awesome and then we moved onto the Never Ending Story and Karate Kid (Which only Yoshi had seen) We had to use google quite a bit to find movie posters as things are called something different depending on what country/language you see them in. I saw "Dreamcatcher" a few years back in Burkina Faso, and that movie sucked even then and in French. In case you missed it, it had Morgan Freeman in it and monsters that came out of your butt. I'm not even sure why I'm writing about movies, I think I might be tired. Anyway, it's time to faire le bruleé sur mon creme bruleé so I'll be back and actually talk about something current. I apologize to those who just read this post. That's my bad....

In case you were wondering about the module

So, the software I am working on designing is an addon to Childcount+ I've embedded the overview here in case you wanted to know how text messages are used for health in Africa. I'm making a new bit to add to this slideshow... I'm trying to get caught up on work, (Claire isn't helping with this, but she's a really cute distraction) I'll write a real post later...

ChildCount+ Overview from Matt Berg on Vimeo.