Last night, I had a conversation with Charity, one of the people who works at the guest house where I am staying. She told me that she has asthma, and that the dust and trash fires in town tend to induce asthma attacks. Then she told me how, during the LRA insurgency, she would get asthma attacks while sleeping out in the bush, hiding from the LRA soldiers at night. People sleeping next to her would force her to stuff a bed sheet into her mouth in order to muffle her coughs, otherwise the LRA troops walking by might find them and abduct or murder them. She told me about how at night, the streets right outside the place where I am staying would be full of children sleeping, attempting to escape the threat of abduction and murder in the surrounding villages.

Also, guess what? The rainy season in the area is not happening as expected, and for the past few years, rain has been erratic. Some people blame this on Global Warming, others see it as part of a longer cycle of drought years every decade or so. In any case, if there is no rain, or if people misjudge when to plant their crops due to unpredictable rain cycles, there will famine.

The pic below is from a Gulu MSF (Doctors without Borders) shelter circa 2006?

I am still not sure if people in Acholiland consider their language Luo, or a dialect of Luo. I have heard some people say that they speak "Acholi" - reminds me a little of someone saying that they speak "American" rather than "English." Anyway, "how are you" in Acholi is actually spelled "Itye Ma Ber" - unlike the spelling fail that I wrote in my notebook (below). That final "R" on the end of Ber is tricky - the word is pronounced kinda like "Bay" with just a little tiny beginning of an "R."

Are these browser-based network speed tests accurate? This one says I am 0.15 mbits down, and 0.09 mbits up to a "server in Kampala." I am way more than 50 miles away from Kampala. By the way, who puts a server in Kampala? I hear that it's not always a good business idea - one startup founder we talked to hosts out of the US.

How come some of the Washington and San Jose hops only list one packet latency value... that means the packet didn't get back to me, right? Update: I learned from Stefan at BOSCO that until the undersea cable recently installed in Kenya is carrying Ugandan packet data, Uganda still gets all of its Internet from a satellite connection. At the MTN/AppLab offices in Kampala, there are 2 really huge satellite dishes that, I bet, carry a lot of this traffic. I am not sure how satellite hops work, but if you take a look at the traceroute below, you can see that somewhere around hop 8, 9, and 10 Ugandan Internet traffic goes up into Outer Space... and then back down to Europe!

traceroute to ischool.berkeley.edu (128.32.78.26), 30 hops max, 60 byte packets
1 10.120.1.50 (10.120.1.50) 201.066 ms 297.988 ms 297.934 ms
2 10.120.1.49 (10.120.1.49) 320.850 ms 339.793 ms 380.738 ms
3 10.120.1.17 (10.120.1.17) 397.683 ms 398.659 ms 398.609 ms
4 hd9.n3.ips.mtn.co.ug (193.108.214.217) 398.559 ms 418.486 ms 560.435 ms
5 h131.n2.ips.mtn.co.ug (212.88.97.49) 800.376 ms 818.384 ms 818.326 ms
6 h138.n2.ips.mtn.co.ug (212.88.97.56) 1317.183 ms 677.273 ms 441.658 ms
7 217.194.128.81 (217.194.128.81) 960.553 ms 977.468 ms 998.447 ms
8 hsrp.sky-vision.net (217.194.129.1) 998.384 ms 998.332 ms 998.282 ms
9 gw1.afl.sky-vision.net (217.194.129.20) 998.231 ms 998.164 ms 999.006 ms
10 GW1-FRA-DE.sky-vision.net (217.194.128.34) 1236.933 ms 1217.879 ms 1238.830 ms
11 212.162.25.77 (212.162.25.77) 998.799 ms 999.741 ms 999.583 ms
12 vlan99.csw4.Frankfurt1.Level3.net (4.68.23.254) 758.704 ms 734.263 ms 677.648 ms
13 ae-92-92.ebr2.Frankfurt1.Level3.net (4.69.140.29) 939.653 ms 917.459 ms 939.525 ms
14 ae-42-42.ebr2.Washington1.Level3.net (4.69.137.54) 1018.389 ms ae-43-43.ebr2.Washington1.Level3.net (4.69.137.58) 1018.341 ms 1120.250 ms
15 ae-62-62.csw1.Washington1.Level3.net (4.69.134.146) 1122.190 ms ae-72-72.csw2.Washington1.Level3.net (4.69.134.150) 1139.173 ms ae-92-92.csw4.Washington1.Level3.net (4.69.134.158) 1156.096 ms
16 ae-64-64.ebr4.Washington1.Level3.net (4.69.134.177) 1138.043 ms ae-84-84.ebr4.Washington1.Level3.net (4.69.134.185) 1138.958 ms ae-64-64.ebr4.Washington1.Level3.net (4.69.134.177) 1138.878 ms
17 ae-3-3.ebr1.NewYork1.Level3.net (4.69.132.94) 1136.805 ms 1179.719 ms 1197.540 ms
18 ae-81-81.csw3.NewYork1.Level3.net (4.69.134.74) 923.630 ms 779.809 ms ae-71-71.csw2.NewYork1.Level3.net (4.69.134.70) 1158.483 ms
19 ae-94-94.ebr4.NewYork1.Level3.net (4.69.134.125) 1159.412 ms 779.663 ms ae-64-64.ebr4.NewYork1.Level3.net (4.69.134.113) 881.536 ms
20 ae-2.ebr4.SanJose1.Level3.net (4.69.135.185) 959.468 ms 1001.434 ms 978.374 ms
21 ae-64-64.csw1.SanJose1.Level3.net (4.69.134.242) 1020.323 ms ae-84-84.csw3.SanJose1.Level3.net (4.69.134.250) 1037.262 ms 1439.248 ms
22 ae-92-92.ebr2.SanJose1.Level3.net (4.69.134.221) 1061.172 ms ae-62-62.ebr2.SanJose1.Level3.net (4.69.134.209) 1438.196 ms ae-72-72.ebr2.SanJose1.Level3.net (4.69.134.213) 1259.048 ms
23 ae-5-5.car1.Oakland1.Level3.net (4.69.134.37) 1439.013 ms 1438.925 ms 1438.874 ms
24 CORP-FOR-ED.car1.Oakland1.Level3.net (4.71.164.66) 858.660 ms 959.570 ms 856.608 ms
25 inet-ucb--oak-isp.cenic.net (137.164.24.142) 977.508 ms 975.458 ms 998.405 ms
26 g4-1.inr-202-reccev.Berkeley.EDU (128.32.0.50) 956.355 ms 1016.334 ms 1016.283 ms
27 t1-1.inr-211-srb.Berkeley.EDU (128.32.255.43) 1061.191 ms 1057.148 ms 1059.090 ms
28 * * *
29 * * *
30 * * *

Yesterday I had the privilege of hanging out with Stefan, the Tech Advisor of BOSCO Uganda, an Austrian organization that attempts to use battery powered devices to bring communications technology to IDP camps and villages around the Gulu area. Stefan uses several technologies that I School folks might be familiar with. For example, one location, in the Pabo IDP camp, uses a low-power Inveneo thin client to conserve battery power (provided by a 30 watt/hour solar cell and battery array). At the Pagak camp, some of the trainers in a community center had just received a shipment of XO-1 laptops. The trainers were demonstrating them, and told me that they were going to use them for the camp's ICT cirriculum. Finally, Stefan demonstrated that he uses, among other things, Berkeley's TIER long range WiFi technology to connect isolated camps with a 200+ kb/s network connection in Gulu. Therefore, camp to Internet is slow, but camp to camp network is up in the megabit speed range. BOSCO doesn't log what IDPs are checking out on the network, but Stefan told me that it's a lot of email, Facebook, and news.

The huts are called "Tuckels" (pronounced tookles). It's interesting how the buildings that face the road are brick and mortar, and the huts are behind them.

Northwestern Uganda. West of the Nile. Yes, that is where West Nile Virus is from. Despite the security warning box in the 2009 East Africa Lonely Planet, it's supposed to be pretty safe up there. The long distance busses, however, are not safe. So, guess what? I am taking a "Postal Bus" - yes, the Ugandan Post Office sells seats on its mail carrying busses, so I am taking one of those up to Gulu.

Today in Uganda, newspapers announced that the current president, Museveni (abbreviated in the press as "M7"), aims to stay in power until 2021. It's an interesting move: a political leader that declares his presidential intentions an entire decade ahead of schedule... it seems to indicate that the leader has lost the confidence to carry the electorate over the next few elections. Our host in Kampala claims that M7's growing unpopularity in Kampala is tempered by popular support in rural areas. It seems that Museveni's political strategy is to woo the rural vote by providing farmers with, among other things,  agricultural inputs. A recently launched agricultural program (whose name elicited eye rolls from one of our recent interviewees) is the poorly named "Prosperity for All," which attempts to provide a select group of agricultural industries with agriculture extension aid. I didn't find it easy to find good media coverage - here is a brief Guardian UK post mentioning it, and here is a Ugandan editorial about the program.

It is clear that one challenge Becky, Charlene and I will have to undertake is the unpacking of the roles of each ingredient in the Ugandan agriculture extension alphabet soup. Some groups, like NAADS and NARO, are government run, but appear to be funded in part by international aid. Thus, when outside funding dries up due to recession, these agencies face the possibility of losing influence and momentum. Other players, like USAID, may possibly provide stable program funding, but may also prioritize American economic interests above the interests of small scale farmers. We have many questions to explore, as we begin to dig through the role of various nodes in the Ugandan agricultural network.
 
So what does this mean for our project? Primarily, it informs our group about the need to take into account unpredictable political forces that assert pressure outside the market. For example, if external inputs are being provided to a selection of farmers simply for political reasons, the scalability of an ICT innovation might be effected.