Sunday, June 11, 2006
Meeting People
We're meeting so many people! It has been really fun over the last few days to talk to Rwandans and make friends, especially when we use our limited (but growing) Kinyarwandan vocabulary.
On Friday the 9th, we ended the evening by having dinner at the Ibis Hotel with Gerald (a NUR professor). We were joined by a student name Cleophus, who is very interested in using ICTs to bridge the poverty gap in Rwanda. We talked for some time, tried some banana beer (it was pretty good but tasted more like wine), and went to the local disco.
For Saturday, most people from our group left to go see the gorillas. The three student team members stayed behind. First we met with Herbert, who introduced us to his friend Moses. Moses is apparantly the CEO of a US-backed company called Rocket 2020. His job is to set up telecenters in the major cities of Rwanda and return a profit to his investors. He is a very big talker, and he claims to have a special blessing from the Rwandan president, Paul Kagame. However, he has never contacted the ICT Workforce in the Ministry of Education or been in contact with any of the major players we have met. We will have to see how legit he is.
We decided to do some work and figure out how we would set up the network at Maraba. We talked to a man named Mike who is doing consulting work at NUR, and he had some very good ideas. He is working with Sun Ray ultra-thin client technology for the university, which is very exciting to me. If only we could have this at WSU! With Mike, we decided that the best approach for Maraba would be to have the laptops serve as thin clients and have an off-site server to save data. Perhaps we can use some server space at NUR.
In the evening, Gerald took us to an authentic Rwandan restaurant. It was very much like the Ethiopian food we had in Kigali. You eat it with your hands. We had rabbit, potatoes, and banana beer. Beer is a very common drink in Rwanda; it is safe to drink in case the water is bad. Herbert and Cleophus came with us.
Today we went to the university church in the stadium. It is very much like a gospel church in the US, except that there are people playing soccer on the field at the same time! After that we met with Gilbert to gain access to one of the computer labs. In doing that, we met someone new named Jean Luc. We all went to lunch together at a real Rwandan restaurant. The hotel restaurant is quite expensive, so it was nice to pay less and eat with the locals. At lunch we met Vincent, a Rwandan university graduate who works with a British health-related NGO. We made arrangements to see his office sometime. He is using radio theater to promote the prevention of malaria, TB, and other issues that are important in Rwanda.
We started a little project today to create a new online Kinyarwanda-Swahili-English-French dictionary, which we call kamusi. I started it as a wiki with a group of the Rwandan students. Anyone can get on and edit this site as long as they know the password: gilbert. The students seemed very interested, and hopefully this can become a good resource for people trying to learn a new language in Rwanda.
On Friday the 9th, we ended the evening by having dinner at the Ibis Hotel with Gerald (a NUR professor). We were joined by a student name Cleophus, who is very interested in using ICTs to bridge the poverty gap in Rwanda. We talked for some time, tried some banana beer (it was pretty good but tasted more like wine), and went to the local disco.
For Saturday, most people from our group left to go see the gorillas. The three student team members stayed behind. First we met with Herbert, who introduced us to his friend Moses. Moses is apparantly the CEO of a US-backed company called Rocket 2020. His job is to set up telecenters in the major cities of Rwanda and return a profit to his investors. He is a very big talker, and he claims to have a special blessing from the Rwandan president, Paul Kagame. However, he has never contacted the ICT Workforce in the Ministry of Education or been in contact with any of the major players we have met. We will have to see how legit he is.
We decided to do some work and figure out how we would set up the network at Maraba. We talked to a man named Mike who is doing consulting work at NUR, and he had some very good ideas. He is working with Sun Ray ultra-thin client technology for the university, which is very exciting to me. If only we could have this at WSU! With Mike, we decided that the best approach for Maraba would be to have the laptops serve as thin clients and have an off-site server to save data. Perhaps we can use some server space at NUR.
In the evening, Gerald took us to an authentic Rwandan restaurant. It was very much like the Ethiopian food we had in Kigali. You eat it with your hands. We had rabbit, potatoes, and banana beer. Beer is a very common drink in Rwanda; it is safe to drink in case the water is bad. Herbert and Cleophus came with us.
Today we went to the university church in the stadium. It is very much like a gospel church in the US, except that there are people playing soccer on the field at the same time! After that we met with Gilbert to gain access to one of the computer labs. In doing that, we met someone new named Jean Luc. We all went to lunch together at a real Rwandan restaurant. The hotel restaurant is quite expensive, so it was nice to pay less and eat with the locals. At lunch we met Vincent, a Rwandan university graduate who works with a British health-related NGO. We made arrangements to see his office sometime. He is using radio theater to promote the prevention of malaria, TB, and other issues that are important in Rwanda.
We started a little project today to create a new online Kinyarwanda-Swahili-English-French dictionary, which we call kamusi. I started it as a wiki with a group of the Rwandan students. Anyone can get on and edit this site as long as they know the password: gilbert. The students seemed very interested, and hopefully this can become a good resource for people trying to learn a new language in Rwanda.
