Computers 4 Africa

To answer that I would have to go back a couple of years to January 2007, in my role as Network Manager for Holy Trinity Primary School here in Kent I was replacing 10 of our oldest computers and I had to find a way to dispose of the them. As we are proud of our green status I couldn’t just throw them in the bin and was looking at having to pay to recycle them, like all schools we don’t have pot loads of money and anything that costs us means we have less for new equipment.

A chance conversation with our computer supplier saw me walk away with the phone number for Computers 4 Africa, and thoughts of being able to kill two birds with one stone, not only could I dispose of those old computers but at the same time I could actually do some good!

Over the next few weeks we got the computers to their Maidstone base and during March our Green Club were invited to Computers 4 Africa headquarters to wave good bye as the next container was packed ready for shipment. Our children had a wonderful day, even helping to load ‘our’ computers into the container and Jan laid on a lovely party to say thanks.

I find myself on an Egypt Air Boeing 777-200 up at 35,000 feet on my way to Cairo airport, with a 2 hour stopover before jumping on another plane to Dar Es Salaam where Mike and I expect to finally land at about 5:15 in the morning local time, which is 2 hours in front of UK time. The adventure has begun!

Mike and I arrived at Julius Nyerere International Airport in Dar Es Salaam at about 6:30, having spent another 5 hours on yet another Boeing, this time a 737-200, after going through the rigmarole of changing UK Pounds into US Dollars to allow us to buy entry visa’s we got out of the airport to be meet by Aseri Katanga and his brother Danny and driven into the city, where we were deposited at the Peacock Hotel at 8:30. It’s taken 23 hours to get from my home to the hotel, time to get a shower and a couple of hours sleep before being picked up at about 14:00 to go to Zoom Technology College where the real work will start.

There’s not a lot I can say about today, I spent the whole day standing in a small triangular room with concrete walls and no floor covering, at least it had air conditioning, talking network design and implementation with Reeme Kendric and Aduu Kisoma who were two of the IT staff that work for the college. I must say I was pleasantly surprised to find them very knowledgeable and receptive to all I suggested, it was made easier since there was a large whiteboard on the wall allowing me to draw rough diagrams to underline the theory. Everybody at the college was very friendly and even people I had not been introduced to would walk up and ask how I was and want to shake my hand.

Unfortunately today has been a complete washout. Yesterday Danny went to the airport to pick up the servers, switches and perhaps most importantly, the pencils, only to return empty handed due to customs requiring an unexpected payment. The plan had been that Danny would go first to the airport and then sometime after 11:00 pick Mike and I up form the hotel to go to ZTC and finish the discussion phase and start the physical work of putting in the network. It wasn’t until 17:00 that we heard Danny had only just picked the stuff up, this I suppose at least gave me a welcome day off to catch up on more sleep. A meal in the hotel, an early night and I’ll see what tomorrow will bring.

Saturday was a long, busy day. Arriving at ZTC at 09:30, back into that bare triangular room to find a couple of servers, switches, network tools and the pencils from Holy Trinity, at last I could get my hands on a server. A quick review of what switches we had with Addu and a discussion about the best way to utilize the limited resources and Reeme and I started to install the operating system on the most appropriate server. ZTC have been lucky with one of the two donated servers since the specification was easily up to the expected load, with a 2.8 GHz Intel P4 chip, good quality Gigabyte motherboard, 2 Gb of RAM and four hard drives equating to two logical drives of 70 Gb each. Following a number of hours of work installing the software we realised that without the driver disk for the motherboard we could not complete the setup, as without a working network card we could not install DHCP or Active Directory. The only way round this problem was to use the Internet to download the drivers, so I purloined Gaodious’s laptop at the college with a view to doing the necessary searches and getting the various drivers. Unfortunately, Internet access at ZTC was like the days of slow dialup modems and it proved impossible to accomplish this important task. Because of this Gaodious let me take his laptop back to the hotel to use their wireless network access (which was expensive at £1 per hour) and not much better but at least I managed to get a set of basic drives, which should allow use to finish off the first phase of setup and start the physical work of wiring the network.

Sunday was another day spent in that bare room, but I had found the right drivers for the chip set and LAN card on the motherboard so we were able to complete the software installation of the server and moved into a testing phase to ensure that it was ready for setting up the various components that go to creating a functioning network, group policy, user accounts, computer accounts, sharing data drives and so on. By this time it was getting late so it was back to the hotel for something to eat, I was lucky to walk into the hotel bar just in time to watch the F.A. Charity Shield and although the team I wanted to win lost on penalties, it was a welcome break from the mental exertions that is involved in setting up a network.

We arrived at ZTC at 08:30 and where introduced to Joanna Martin and Julian Gordon-Hastings, the film crew that would accompany us on our tour of places that had benefited from donated computers from Computers 4 Africa. I just had time to conduct a confidence test on a workstation to be sure I could join it to the domain, before we all jumped into Zooms bus to be whisked off to the first destination, which turned out to be Tanzania’s main library in Dar Es Salaam. On the way there Joanna said that she would like me to do a piece to camera, probably at the next venue, which was a school, in fact I didn’t like the idea as in the words of my sister “This is Mark, he does computers he doesn’t do people” aptly describes me and the prospect of being interviewed for a TV piece left me cold, so I agreed and put it out of my mind. Once there we were shown into the office of Dr Alli A S Mcharazo FCLIP;PhD, MA, BA (London); DIP.Lib; Cert.Law (Dar), who with all those qualifications after his name was obviously a very well educated man and the Director General of the Tanzania Library Services Board, who answers to the Minister for Education. I have to say I was surprised, as I wouldn’t have thought he would have the time to talk to me. What he said made perfect sense in that in his view the best place for computer resources was a public library as in schools donated computers where only used by the pupils, in libraries the same computers were available to everyone. His point was that whereas a school tended to protect the resources of donated computers to only pupils of the school and at any time outside of the school day they were locked away, in a public library they were available during the whole day to anybody that wanted to use them. The library had been given 40-45 of them and they were now being used (with a similar amount supplied by the Ministry of Education) by between 500 and 700 people per day, which I have to say, amazed me!

Mike and I are picked up from the hotel at about 04:00 in the morning and deposited at the airport where we meet up once again with Joanna and Julian, who will accompany us to Bukoba and film our visits to the various schools for a corporate video for Computers 4 Africa. Once we have all gone through the rigmarole of the various security checks and checked in we end up sitting in the departure lounge for over an hour before boarding an ATR 72 turboprop aircraft for a two and a half hour flight from Dar to Mwanza. I was very excited by the prospect of flying on a couple of smaller planes since, apart from once as a child, I have only ever flown on large commercial jets and I was told that the flight from Mwanza to Bukoba would be on a single engine twelve seater, which would be interesting.

I am dragged awake at about 6 o’clock by a noise being a city boy I am not particularly familiar with; it was one of the several cockerels that the people keep to ensure they have fresh eggs available. I would come to hate that rooster and a couple of times suggested to Aseri that he should be the first one in the pot, but of course no rooster no eggs so he was off limits. Once again it brings it home to you that if you remove the conveniences of modern life you are no more than just another mammal, I hesitate to say struggling from day to day, rather moving from day to day needing to find food and water to ensure you stay healthy, but I am in some respects fortunate living in the UK where at least I can earn money. Here in Tanzania there are a lot of people that find it almost impossible to find work, but at least it’s warm, it’s winter and still in the high 20’s centigrade so they are not faced with astronomical fuel bills like we are back home, which means that the amount of money needed is not as large and a small amount of cash goes a fairly long way.

Sure enough, 6 o’clock and I’m woken by cock-a-doodle-do, that bird is better and more reliable than any alarm clock I have ever owned. No point in trying to get back to sleep so I might as well get up and start the day early with a shower. I say shower but that’s not really correct, it’s more complicated than that, since Aseri’s shower was not working so it’s more a process of asking for a bowl of hot water that is heated over an open fire and then standing in what resembles a wet room at the back of the house and getting clean in stages, but it’s all part of the rich tapestry of life in Tanzania and definitely better than the prospect of walking down to the river and washing in cold water, it once again makes me realise how much I take things for granted back home, being able to just walk into my bathroom and having hot water on tap, all the water in Aseri’s home is collected rain water and consequently a valuable resource and not to be wasted, it’s definitely a different way of living and a huge eye opener. Every morning you could stand outside the house and see children doing their chores which included going down to the river to collect water and returning with heavy containers of it balanced on their heads before going to school and according to Aseri these children would think nothing of having to walk 10km to and from school every day, that may be because they have a real hunger for education and see it as a way out their situation but it make you realise how privileged the children in the UK are and they don’t even know it.

Mark Jarman is about to embark on an exciting journey that will take him right into the heart of Tanzania, East Africa. He will be travelling with a team from Computers 4 Africa, including Aseri Katanga, the Chairman of the Board.

Mark will be helping to implement and install a computer network in an IT Training Centre and will be visiting a number of schools in and around the area to see how the generous donations from schools in the UK have touched the lives of children in Africa.

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Why not Partner with a School in Africa?

If you have old IT equipment that meets our minimum specification and would like to partner with us for future projects in Africa please contact us. We are always looking for schools in the UK that would like to partner with a school in Africa.

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