Saturday, May 28 - Sunday, May 29th 2004 -- Accra, Aburi

A picture of Omar | A picture of RJ and collegues | Samir, RJ and Omar

Saturday, Omar and I went to the Kofi Anan Center for ICT studies (actually called the Kofi Anan Center for Excellence) to attend the Accra Linux user's group. Samir and Ronnine went to BusyInternet to meet with the people from African Learners, a private electronic library.

This morning I got up early, and went to meet with my sister Afi at the grand opening of her new grocery store store in Oyibi, about 20 minutes from where we live. We cleaned up the area, put the goods on display, and waited for some other guests of the grand opening to arrive. After a prayer, I bought a few things for our house in East Legon, and headed back to meet Omar and then it was off to the Linux user group. My brother Habib was out of town, and Albert had a program. I hope I can see them soon!

One thing I noticed at Afi's place is that she is using a calculator and paper to keep her books. This seems very time consuming and error prone, and will make it difficult to understand buying trends and other useful statistics about her clientel. I imagined a point of sale program for a cheap PDA which doesn't have a cash drawer or anything, but at least allows Afi to track inventory, see her margins, and allows her to quickly tally the total for her customers.

The facilities at the Kofi Anan Center for Excellence (an accademic and professional ICT trainging school, and the result of a partnership between India and Ghana) are excellent. The internet connection is reletively fast, the computer equipment is modern, and the site even features an 8-node (32 processor) cluster computer.

As one might expect, the cluster computer is literally a solution looking for a problem. It was procured (from India I might add) for the Kofi Anan center in order to give accademics in ECOWAS access to a "supercomputer." At the very least it is a good staging server for jobs running on a larger computer. Unfortunately, not many people know that it exists, or how they might use it. ????, one of the head IT people at the center, asked me to help him get ahold of some cluster computer software. I thought that the sequence alignment software that they run over at the UCSC Bioinformatics Lab "KiloCluster" would be a good candidate, and agreed to hook him up with somebody over there. I might also be able to get some software from the national labs for them.

The existence of the cluster computer at the Kofi Anan Center needs to be advertized and marked to West Afican accademics. Surely there are biologists, geologists, physiscists, mathematitians, etc. who could benefit from a fast computer.

Samir and Ronnie talked to someone at AfricanLearners.com, a private, fee supported electronic library for textbooks and other accademic resources. AfricanLearners partners with various accademic publishers to provide online versions of their textbooks. They also provide facilities to access the materials, and intend to partner with Ashesi University and University of Ghana, Legon to provide online access to materials as well. What is not clear to me is where the content is stored: is it cached in AfricanLearners' local web server? If so, the content would be much faster.

Sunday, we slept in after a long week, and headed up to Aburi, a quiet little town known for its botanical gardens, and its brilliant carvers. Our first stop was at Yasmina's godmother's house, Nana Apiedu (spelled phonetically). Nana was not in (though she is in Ghana), but I did get to see Auti Leifwa, the woman in charge of Nana's property in Aburi, as well as some of the other's living there. The children have all grown up!!! Alas, the grandmother of the house, Cici diead a year ago at the age of 102. Next sunday I will attend her memorial. Even the last time we saw Cici, she was lucide and happy (especially when her grandson Kojo was around), so I know that she had a wonderful fufilling life!

We walked through the Y-junction where carvers plie their trade (though alas it was sunday, and many were at church), through town, and up to the Botanical Gardens. After lunch and a nice stroll, we walked down the road in what turned out to be a very hot day in search of the property that Yasmina and I bought last time we were in Ghana. I believe we found it, but will need the surveyer to take me there and show me the exact boundaries. Most importantly, there were not houses on the property, and a farmer had planted some cassava there, which was as we had planned. All the trees appeared to be intact, something we were worried about since the former owner's son was a carver, and cut one of the giant trees on the property just before the sale of the property (to my great frustration).

We rode back down to Accra on a Trotro (a little bus), and talked to two Germans kids in Ghana on their national service. Apparently, all German boys must either do military or social service after they graduate from high school (girls are "excempt"... this sounds like a raw deal to me). These two were among four selected to come to Ghana and teach children in the slums near Tema (I forget the name of the slum). Their work sounded very interesting and rewarding, and made me wish that the US had a national service.

When we got home, Omar and I headed to Afi's place for a delicious dinner of Red-Red (black-eyed peas in a tangy tomatoe sauce with plantain fried in red palm oil), and to enjoy some spanish tele-novellas dubbed into Ghanaian English. Very entertaining for many reasons. Took Afi's niece and nephew Helene and Wisdom with us, and had a great time singing etc on the walk to and from our place (across the street from Afi's sister's place) and Afi's. Tomorrow, we will take some equipment over to Ashesi and BusyInternet, and start gathering data over there, since we have already lost a week's worth of data to the staff strike at Legon.