Dear Denise, In 1995, you "donated" 66 computers, and 2 years later, only 4 were operating...What happened to the 62 others? where are they now? The same to Alex: what has been the fate of the "huge pile" of junk of Macs given to his terrain worker to lure the local police? Francois Montreal Original Message: ----------------- From: Denise N. Rall denrall@yahoo.com Date: Thu, 30 Aug 2007 07:34:10 +1000 (EST) To: air-l@listserv.aoir.org, cristian.berrio@gmail.com Subject: Re: [Air-L] help on africa and computer donations Dear AIR-ers - I actually organized a computer donation to Ghana in 1997. It was very difficult on many levels. It was almost impossible to secure grid power to the research centre at any given moment in time. When the generators kicked in, all the computers would re-boot. As one of my participants said, "well we come to work and if there is power we do work otherwise it is back to pencil and paper" I will note that despite wind-up batteries there are other issues - heat, humidity, dust and at my site ANTS. I toured an IBM computer lab at the Kumasi Inst of Technology. In 1995, IBM had donated 66 computers, and in 1997 only four of them were still working. Before people scoff at IBM, their machines held up better on this research station than any other brand. Particularly the keyboards. Laptops in particular were fairly quickly overwhelmed by heat, humidity, dust and insects. I kept some of the residual moisture at bay by zipping up my laptop case tightly with a hot machine inside. Floppy diskettes of course could be opened and washed to remove the mold. I NOTE that Computer donations to Africa have been going on for decades. Many of the issues presented in this classic text: Lewis, S. G. and J. Samoff (1992). Microcomputers in African development. Boulder, CO, Westview Press. are still active today. For instance, the Lewis & Samoff discussions of cross cultural misunderstandings and miscommunications about what computers should accomplish are still spot on. The role of women and computing is still hugely problematic. The theory has been explored by Jules-Rossette: Jules-Rossette, B. (1990). Terminal signs: Computers and social change in Africa. Berlin, Mouton-de Gruyter. "The more things change the more they stay the same" Those donating laptops to Africa should spend the time to understand the micro-climates and entomology of the sites where they expect to donate. It's easy to discuss the theory, the hard facts are the insects. My supervisor (former) just returned from Thailand without his internal keyboard as he was on aan archelogical dig and the dust destroyed it. Since cockroaches have recently eaten the circuit boards in both our dishwasher and television recently, I guess that also goes for northern New South Wales. (yes we spray but not often - it's the environment, stupid!) Cheers, Denise Denise N. Rall, PhD Southern Cross University, Lismore NSW 2480 AUSTRALIA Tues: Room T2.17, +61 (0)2 6620 3577 Mobile 0438 233 344 http://www.scu.edu.au/schools/rsm/staff/pages/drall/ Virtual member, Cybermetrics Group, University of Wolverhampton, UK http://cybermetrics.wlv.ac.uk/index.html ______________________________________________________________________ ______________ Get the World's number 1 free email service. http://mail.yahoo.com.au _______________________________________________ The Air-L@listserv.aoir.org mailing list is provided by the Association of Internet Researchers http://aoir.org Subscribe, change options or unsubscribe at: http://listserv.aoir.org/listinfo.cgi/air-l-aoir.org Join the Association of Internet Researchers: http://www.aoir.org/ -------------------------------------------------------------------- mail2web.com Enhanced email for the mobile individual based on Microsoft® Exchange - http://link.mail2web.com/Personal/EnhancedEmail