Worlds Touch

Working with Manish

Manish, originally uploaded by travelertrish.

I spent several hours today, Sunday (!), working with Manish on putting a switchboard on an Access database, getting forms with subforms to work together even when you design them using the design view instead of the wizard. It's like the wizard is "cheating."

I'm about recovered from the three-day training I did for a very interested and enthusiastic group of folks on Online Communications Technology. We covered Gmail, Google Docs, Google Calendars, Google Groups, and a full day of web site work, including resizing and cropping photos, using Flickr and using the free version of Wordpress to create a web site. Our RCRD IT Training group is not taking off like a rocket, but people ARE adding stuff and asking a few questions.

WordPress Workshop

Yesterday I gave the last part of a three-day workshop on "Information and Communications Online." We spent the day getting a blog-type web site up--working with the simple crop and resize functions of Microsoft Picture Manager to reduce the size of the photos, Flickr to store, share and find photos, and WordPress's hosted version to create the blog.

We had twelve participants, six from outside the organization I'm working with, and six staffers and management from CBR/RCRD itself, including the executive director and program director.

We were operating in Nepali conditions, which means that we had a wireless network with less than optimal bandwidth, people brought their own laptops and we used office laptops, with everything from XP to Windows 7 on them. We had long, long waits for pages to load. I told them it was like a crowd of tourists trying to get through the low and narrow Newari doors throughout their city. When everybody tries to get through at once, nobody gets through.

We got through Picture Manager and Flickr in the morning (which, around here, starts more or less at 10:30.) We also started getting them signed up for their blogs/web sites. WordPress has a signup system whereby you fill out the form and then go check your email for a verification link and then sign in to the new site with the login and password you provided on signup.

I will need to make this part much more explicit-- people used emails to sign up that they either couldn't remember the passwords to, or couldn't remember whether they used the yahoo or the gmail email address. And, of course, this meant, waiting for a minimum of three, sometimes four pageloads for everybody.

Also, something happened at this training that happened the last time I offered a group of people an introduction to the absolutely free and simple version of WordPress: They wanted more. The first time, there was at least one participant who wanted to have online donations--which the free version prohibits because they run little pieces of code from the site, and WordPress with its shared database can't afford to risk the viruses possibly perpetrated from that.

This time, one of the participants wanted to put video, wanted a custom header that would use his logo, wanted...in fact...a much more in-depth training than this one. This is great, because Manish (my counterpart on the staff here with whom I've been working for the past three weeks) has quite a bit of experience now with the organization's WordPress site and can offer training in advanced hosted WordPress in the future.

But it's important to note this "scope creep." We either need to make very explicit that what we are offering is a personal blog that will introduce people to the concepts and pave the way for a "real" web site...or we need to offer the WordPress training in the depth the folks seem to require from the get-go. Or maybe both.

Ramesh

Ramesh, originally uploaded by rameshshrestha56.

This is Ramesh, one of my friends and colleagues here in Bhaktapur, Nepal. He coordinates the community-based rehabilitation program here.

How I Got into This

My friend and colleague Jean Pudlo asked me how I got started in my international work, and it dawned on me that others might want the same information. Here's what I told her:

It's pretty simple. I emailed the wife of one of my very old friends here in Nepal and told her I had just finished a set of IT support courses and was there anything I might be able to do for her. She said, Come to Nepal and we'll see. It took me three years to get the money together for the airplane ticket.

That contract lasted a couple of years. I custom-designed a database for Lajana's NGO and made some suggestions about other tech improvements they could make. But they weren't really open to thinking strategically about technology. They persisted with the idea that I provide some kind of standalone product that they wouldn't do anything about except somehow "have" it.

I met my current clients while visiting the various members of my Peace & Travel organization, Servas. I came over to Bhaktapur just to meet them, the same way I had the orthopedic equipment salesman earlier that week. Surya, the executive director of RCRD, is a really forward-looking guy, very quick to see possibilities and immediately he peppered me with questions about his database dreams.

The following year, I worked directly on a database design for him, and this year, five years later, he proudly showed me the nationwide database of disabled persons that has been the result.

In 2006, my husband Jean-Francois had a sabbatical and so we spent 10 months going around the world-- a dream of his since our far-flung traveling days 30 years ago. Wherever we went, I tried to contact NGOs to offer my Worlds Touch services.

I stress that I don't work for nothing, that I am not a volunteer. I request each organization I work for to provide me with room and board. In Cambodia, that meant actually paying me for my hotel room. In New Caledonia, the executive director (like many NGOs in developing countries with foreign visitors and volunteers and interns and fellows, etc.) had an extra apartment in town and offered it to us to stay in while I worked on research for their web site.

In Darjeeling, the Rotarians suggested the Jesuit-run charity that I am involved with.

I'm somewhat dismayed to see these agencies spring up that purport to do all the work of connecting volunteers with organizations. All you really need to do is walk in the door and make them an offer, the same way we do it in the States! I understand American parents' fears and trepidations and desires to have insurance and medical evacuation coverage and all that. I've thought Worlds Touch should get some of that business-- it's quite lucrative. People pay plenty of money to go wash their clothes in a bucket and eat rice and lentils and sleep on thin mattresses these days. It could be a good income stream.

And then I think...Naaah...That is not what we do. And it's not what I believe in, either.  I believe in reaching across the barriers that divide us, even to the problem of finding clients who want what I have to offer. I've been quite fortunate that the places I work with are pretty ethical and honest and diligent and mission-centered.

Teach Me

"Teach me," Manish said to me yesterday during our consulting session. We'd been working on some arcane little aspect of the Access database he's created. I never pretend to know something I don't know (unlike many of my IT colleagues, who have to run back to their home offices at night when nobody's looking and consult their books and forums) but I am sitting right beside him, so there's no disguising the fact that I'm experimenting.

At some point, I got the whole thing figured out-- it was how to create a Find Duplicates search. I KNEW it was there, but I just couldn't FIND the durn thing. When I finally found it, I said, "LA! There it is."

"Teach me," he replied. It was just one of those moments that is totally cultural and yet reaches across every cultural gulf. We might say, "Okay take me through the steps," or "Show me how you did that." Somehow "Teach me" is subtly different.

Work in Nepal vs Work in India

[Bhaktapur, Nepal] The Worlds Touch work in Nepal is significantly different from that in Darjeeling, India. In Darjeeling, I was a volunteer with Hayden Hall for four months in 2006 while on a Rotary Club scholarship to learn Nepali. I had been approved to go to Nepal itself, but then the Maoists were waging war against the government here, so the Rotary Foundation balked at sending me there. Then I learned that the Darjeelingites (?!) are a Nepali-speaking people, so I shot off several emails and finally met with success.

The last time I was in Darjeeling, in 2008, the political situation there was unstable. We managed to participate in one health camp, paid for by a generous doctor friend of mine, and then the town shut down tighter than Davy Jones' Locker. Jean-Francois freaked out at being unable to get outa Daj. My contacts at Hayden Hall said the personnel situation there made it impossible to consider any sort of volunteer work there.

So this time, it was in effect, a totally new world in Darjeeling. My Rotarian friends were all busy-busy-busy shooting a movie and other personal stuff. The guy who was supposed to be organizing a video production workshop didn't get his act together at all. Hayden Hall, on the other hand, has a new director who was thrilled when I showed up because he's been wanting to do this book and there came me to write and supervise three college students to get it done. Father Kennedy didn't tap into my tech consulting capacity until the end of my trip there, but then we did manage to look into the self-hosted version of WordPress. He taught computer science before he became director of a huge social service org, so he could figure out how to set up a local host so he could really play with WordPress.

He was also interested in Tactical Tech's NGO-in-a-Box stuff. I arranged for him to receive one of their free CD packets, but when it came, it was all Linux OS focused (he's running Windows) and still required downloading from the internet. I had thought one reason they provided the CD "in a box" was to facilitate software acquisition by folks with incredibly slow internet connections. We're working on this one.

Is Hayden Hall a client yet? I'd say a qualified yes. Father Kennedy may very well start taking advantage of my talents on subsequent visits. Here in Bhaktapur, though, I've been working with Surya and Ramesh at Community-Based Rehab and its Resource Center for nearly six years. My first encounter, we played with an access database and Surya's dream of having a database that could be disseminated throughout the disability community of orgs so that data gathering about the disabled in Nepal could start taking place.

That database-- after one false start with a local programmer-- is starting to become a reality, "thanks to your encouragement," Surya and Ramesh told me my first day here. On my last visit, in 2008, I built two websites for the two organizations housed here together. The first, CBR-Bhaktapur, provides direct service to disabled people and trains teachers, social workers and others to include the disabled in fully integrated classrooms and social situations. The second, RCRD (Resource Center for Rehabilitation and Development-- sheesh, I would change that name in a heartbeat if I had any control over the branding of this outfit) is a library and training center, aspiring to become the nation's data collection center on disability issues.

We've put together an ambitious program for my monthlong visit. I'll share that information in another post. I'm challenged with questions I have to research, I'm gratified to find people who like what I can do and want my contribution (as I found in Daj with Father Kennedy as well!), and I'm with good friends in a fascinating culture. Win-win-win-win.

Whole Gang

Whole Gang, originally uploaded by travelertrish.

The team from Hayden Hall.