I have a love of fabrics and carpets, so when I travel to countries where carpets are part of the culture I do my best to find something small enough to carry home. Tunisia is such a country. Oh to be flying home first class with an unlimited baggage allowance!

I’m staying in Tunis, not far from the picturesque, upmarket town of Sidi Bou Said. It comprises winding, narrow cobbled lanes of white buildings, blue railings and window shutters. Souveniers fill the shops at street level and although there are many people trying to sell their goods, the atmosphere is laid back and not at all pushy.

The locals are fluent in Arabic and French but struggle a bit when it comes to English. Either way, their English is miles better than my French.

I discovered a nice, quiet carpet shop off the main street and settled in to enjoy the ritual of carpets being pulled from colourful piles and laid out on the floor for viewing. So much to appreciate and oh, the battle of making a selection.

I selected a small Berber carpet and when it came time to pay, I used a credit card. However the transaction didn’t go smoothly so a colleague was brought in to look at the machine and the bank was called to discuss the problems being experienced. No joy. As an alternative, I offered to walk down and get cash from a nearby ATM. This seemed like the only option, so the shopkeeper and I walked down together.

When I handed over the cash, the shopkeeper asked for my phone number as he was concerned that the credit card transaction might have actually gone though and debited my card. Although he seemed nice enough, it all felt strange enough to feel like some kind of scam. Still, I couldn’t see any harm in exchanging numbers and did so.

About 30mins later, back at my hotel I received a call from the shopkeeper saying the credit card transaction had indeed gone through and now he needed to return my cash to me. I became deeply suspicious – especially as we struggled with our mismatch of languages. He promised to send a taxi driver to my hotel the same afternoon with my cash.

True to his word, he did, leaving me and other veterans of market rip offs equally stunned.

Sidi Bou Said street

I downed tools a couple of weeks ago to take time out with my family on a houseboat on Lake Kariba.  My siblings and our families are split across 3 countries, so opportunities to reconnect are a celebration. This reunion was particularly celebratory as we were gathering for my brother’s imminent wedding in Nyanga.

The journey up to Kariba was unremarkable with the exception of the fabulous signs displayed on the roadside by worm sellers trying to attract the custom of fishermen and women headed for the lake. Reading the signs, there are clearly different varieties of worms to be had – connoisseurs can choose from ‘red worms of note’ and ‘puffadder worms’.

Pufadar worms ahead

We enjoyed 6 days together, spending each of our 5 nights at a different mooring along the seemingly endless margin of this giant body of water. Every morning a few of us would wake before dawn to meditate and reflect on our beautiful environment. Shortly after sun up the rest of the family would rise for a quick cup of something hot before separating for a few hours to windsurf, paddle a canoe or head out in a tender boat to fish and game watch.  After a late breakfast we’d unmoor and slowly head back out into the deep water to enjoy another day in the sun, en route to our next berth. Because all around is national park, you’re not allowed to walk on the land unless you are accompanied by a park ranger. With so much fun to be had on and in the water, none of us were complaining.

Swallows on the mooring rope

Actually there was only one of our party competent to windsurf with hippo and crocs plentiful in the water all around us. The rest of us waited for a ‘nursery site’ later in the day – any deep water far offshore, somewhere on our daily journey between evening moorings.

In between swimming and eating we read books, played games and revelled in the warmth generally absent during the winter months in other parts of Zimbabwe.

We saw remarkably little traffic on the lake – a scattering of kapenta fishing rigs, a pair of yachts and a handful of other houseboats – all a clear sign of the decline in tourism to Zimbabwe. Also in less abundance was game. We saw plenty of hippo and crocs and some lovely sightings of elephant and impala – even one remarkable sighting of a rhino and its baby – but there were no buffalo to be seen at all. I expect this is largely as a result of the lake being incredibly full and grazing being in short supply.

Elephants - Kariba

I always have mixed feelings about the pleasure I derive from being on the lake. It is a magnificent expanse of water, but underneath lies a sunken world – once home to communities of people and a diverse variety of plants and animals – now displaced or lost forever.

Funeral programme

Dr Monica Glenshaw, a friend for many years, died on Monday September 20th, weeks shy of her 69th birthday. When I heard the news, a day after her death, I felt the wind knocked out of me. I knew Monica was battling cancer but didn’t vaguely have a measure of how aggressive her adversary was. These past few days I’ve realised that there are a lot of things I didn’t know about Monica. She was a private and self-deprecating woman who kept the different areas of her life distinct from each other. Medical, family and social lives seldom intersected. But given that Monica was happy to answer direct questions directly, there are perhaps other reasons why I found myself so uninformed of her Amazing Achievements.

When she was in town, I think Monica was happy to put the responsibility and challenges of her rural hospital life out of her mind for a few days of R&R. She didn’t deflect questions about herself, she just seemed to slip her own in first. She was curious and interested in what we were doing in our personal and work lives, and would soon have me prattling away about my concerns and passions. I frequently made the mistake of not reversing the roles. Happily colleagues at Kubatana got her to answer one of their Inside/Out questionnaires in 2009, so we can go back and read a little about Monica, in her own words.

I met with some of Monica’s closest friends on Tuesday night. We were miserable but couldn’t help but spend quite a lot of the time laughing about Monica’s quirky side. She was a woman who travelled extremely light – partly because she needed very little and partly because she trusted others to deal with logistics when she wasn’t at work. On one occasion Monica arrived at an airport in Canada, visiting from Zimbabwe – all she had brought with her for the visit, was a clean pair of knickers and a gift for her friend!

On Wednesday afternoon I went to a memorial mass for Monica at the Lady of the Wayside Church in Mt Pleasant, Harare. We were an eclectic mix of family, artists, doctors, nuns, gay men, lesbians, human rights activists and many others. Monica’s brother Mike Glenshaw and her friend John Miller shared details of her life – some of it amusing, much of it illuminating.

I learned that Monica’s distinctive way of speaking was courtesy of a cleft palate, and that she had been hard of hearing since childhood. She wanted to be a vet but didn’t have good enough grades to pursue that dream. Instead she studied agriculture, and worked for a time as a dairy manager – or dairy maid as she liked to joke. After some years she realised that fulfillment lay elsewhere, and enrolled to study medicine at Wits University in Johannesburg. Appalled by the politics of the apartheid regime in South Africa, Monica moved to Zambia in the ’70s to practice medicine there. In 1985, a few years after Zimbabwe’s independence, she accepted a position as Medical Superintendent at Murambinda Mission Hospital, where she settled in for the long haul. Some years later she was appointed District Medical Officer for Buhera, and thereafter took on a workload meant for two.

That evening we gathered with more of Monica’s friends to have a few drinks and share how our lives had been enriched by hers. She loved a party and more than a few drinks, unwinding and socialising with her friends. Those of us who saw more of the off-duty Monica could be forgiven for overlooking the Fabulousness of her doctoring work. For some of her family it was a wonderful opportunity to learn about another side of Monica.

The following morning a group of us drove the 3+ hours down to Murambinda Hospital for her funeral and burial. It was to be a memorable experience for all of us.

Graveside

The turnout was amazing. The emotion and respect expressed by colleagues and friends from the medical side of her life was inspiring. Looking around at the school children who arrived to join the service after school ended, I wondered how many of them Monica had delivered, immunised, medicated or patched up during her 25 years at the hospital.

Present at the funeral were many hundreds of people, including hospital board members, nursing staff, mission staff, NGO partners, district police, friends, family, clergy, nuns, local business owners, community residents, the local chief, the District Administrator and Eric Matinenga, MP for Buhera. Speakers drawn from this assembly spoke of their huge respect for the enormous contribution Monica had made to the hospitals and clinics in her district, and the innovative public health initiatives she pioneered or supported. A spokesman for the Ministry of Health shared that practitioners from a variety of fields visited Murambinda to learn from the systems and methods in practise here. Speakers described Monica as a committed team player, mentor, visionary and leader in the field of rural medicine; as rigorous, forthright, brave,determined and tireless.

Dancers graveside

Monica lived in a simple, neat home on the hospital grounds and kept her personal possessions to a minimum. She had a famously limited wardrobe – as a friend recalled, the only thing to change over the years he knew her, was the colour of her fleecy.

Monica loved animals and became very attached to her dogs. A few years ago she was given a Jack Russell pup and the two quickly became inseparable. If Monica was coming to stay, so was Nutu – it was not negotiable. Monica must have had great peace of mind knowing that Nutu was going on to live with one of her closest friends.

There’s no doubt than many of us have been marked by Monica’s life and death. She had strong close bonds with colleagues, friends and family and all will sorely miss her company in the days ahead.

For more images from the funeral, follow this link.

Also, a lovely aggregation of Monica pics here.

Pam and Bren, day 3

For what seems like ages, my sister Pam and I have talked about cycling from Harare to my parents’ cottage near Juliasdale in the Eastern Highlands.  Early this year we picked a date, but it came and went and we were no closer to being ready to make the trip.  Since the distance from Harare to the cottage is roughly 250km, we realized that we would need to do a bit of training before setting out on the journey.

We cycle together regularly, meeting early in the morning on a Saturday or Sunday to do a hilly loop that takes about 2hrs.  But riding together once a week hardly seemed adequate for the endeavour – hence more procrastination.  The sad truth is that I’ve been the one holding up the show.

For the last couple of years Pammy has been struggling with a bad back.  The doctor says it’s not going to get better, and in fact it’s amazing how active she is given the shape it’s in.  She does uncountable prostrations as part of her daily Buddhist practice, swims, goes to yoga and Pilates, plays the piano and has recently taken up the violin – never mind looking after a house full of kids.

Anyway, Pam recently decided that with the increasing pain load associated with her back, she’d opt for surgery in early September.  Suddenly our options for cycling together to Juliasdale telescoped down to one or two weekends in July.  Yikes.  Travel and flu had combined to limit my exercise in July and I was suddenly faced with doing this ride less fit than I’d been in awhile.  There was nothing for it but to trust in Muscle Memory!  Hopefully my legs and chest would remember that I’d been quite fit this year.

We were easily convinced that cycling the leg from Harare to Rusape, along the Mutare Road, was for the birds. Instead, to make up a similar distance to our original route, our ride would go as follows:  Day 1: Rusape to the cottage (+- 72km), Day 2: Cottage to Troutbeck and back (+- 80km), Day 3: Cottage to the bottom of Christmas Pass – about 11km out from Mutare (+- 80km).

Garigayi, the bike mechanic

We set out by car from Harare on Thursday July 29th with bicycles and mini support team at the ready – Mum, Dad and Pammy’s husband, Dave.  With the clock ticking down, we made the obligatory stop in Marondera to check in with my aunt Lorraine. Mum and Dad were recently back from a trip to the UK, so there was lots of catching up to be done – in Marondera and during the car trip.

When we finally pulled in at Rusape, it was well after 11am, making it a fairly late start when the two of us got underway at 11.30am.

With bottles of Game juice and pockets full of jelly babies and energy bars, we headed side by side up the long road towards Nyanga.  Day one was blessed with a wintery blue sky and a cool, gentle breeze.  Happily there was very little traffic on the road and we made good progress for a couple of hours.  Our support team met us roughly half way with tea, sandwiches and fruit and Dave joined us to cycle the last couple of hours to the cottage.  We put him to use sooner rather than later when we discovered somewhere along the way that my back tyre was flat.

By the time we reached the turn off to the Pine Tree Inn, the temperature had dropped considerably and we were very happy to be Almost There.  Then a small disaster struck.  Going up a steep bit of dirt road about 1km from the cottage, my chain broke.  We hadn’t planned for that eventuality at all.  I was miserable as we trudged up the long hill to the cottage.  It seemed that nobody had the tools or the know how to fix my chain.  There were still a couple of options, so all was not lost.  Pam is taller than me, and Dave is taller

than Pam, so although we could swap bikes it wasn’t going to be all that comfortable the next day.  The road to Juliasdale had been a fairly hilly 70km+ Up.  The road to Troutbeck would be lots more Up.  Actually, it seems that all the roads in the eastern highlands are a mixture of ups and downs, so relief is usually at the top of the next rise.

According to my partner Bev, cyclists in Le Tour de France are advised to have an ice bath after a long day in the saddle.  My parents have a small pool at their cottage and it was Icy.  Soon after we arrived, Pam and I jumped in and very quickly straight out.

A hot bath and a square meal quickly set us right, and after an early night, we were set to go the next morning.

It's a long way to...

On Friday morning, the blue skies were gone, and in its stead a cloudy grey day with a brisk wind. Not what the doctor ordered for a long hilly ride to Troutbeck and back. The grey weather was completely countered by the wonderful news that a casual labourer working on a project at the cottage knew how to join a broken chain.  With a long nail, a pair of pliers and a hammer, he soon had me and my chain back on my own bike.  Dave had also been busy in the background and had replaced my bald back tyre with a new knobbly one!  You’ve got to love the amazingly practical folk that live around you.

We set off at 9.45am and arrived, thighs burning, at Troutbeck Hotel at 12.45am. We pulled on thermal tops and tracksuit trousers and ducked into the hotel for a cup of tea and a bit of food.  Service was a little slow and whilst we waited, Pammy and I pondered the option of being ferried back to the cottage by car by Dave. Nope! We wanted to do the mileage, And we wanted to cycle Down the long Up we’d cycled earlier.  The ride home was no picnic and by the time we arrived back at the cottage, just after 4.30pm, we were very tired. We had our obligatory freezing plunge and followed the same routine as the night before.

The next morning I was beginning to feel a bit worse for wear.  My little sister’s superior fitness was definitely starting to show.  Never mind her crocked back.  The weather had deteriorated and the mist hung rather low around us.  We hadn’t thought to bring raincoats.  Silly really, because although winters in Zimbabwe are mainly dry, the eastern highlands can be a lot more wet all the year round.  Once again, as luck would have it, someone else saved the day.  My parents had brought their raincoats.  Rather surprising for our forgetful family.  For example, my mum had brought her paints and brushes but left her art paper at home!

Pammy en route to Troutbeck

Pam and I were happy to have Dave join us for the start of Day 3 and we rode off in the cold drizzle together at 9am on Saturday morning.  There were a lot more downs that ups, but be sure that every down had an up at the other end of it!  As you can tell, I wasn’t feeling as perky on Day 3.

Thankfully the drizzle stopped after a couple of hours and the cold day warmed as we dropped height along the road to Mutare.  Acres of pine trees gave way to glorious views of bush and granite kopjes and small scale farms.  Cattle and goats on the side of the roads looked in good condition and commuters plied the road between busy rural business centres.

Dave hopped off his bike and into the support car after about two and a half hours, leaving Pammy and I to finish the journey off together.  About 12km away from our designated end, we started to discuss the possibility of doing the extra Big Up and Down into Mutare.  Christmas Pass is 11km Up and Down into Mutare.  Just then the support car pulled up to check on our progress.  We mentioned our recent thoughts.  Their response was … “It’s enough already!”  They had put their collective feet down after hours of hanging about for us over 3 days of cycling.  And, coincidentally, saved Pammy and me from our Burrell-ness  – enough is never enough if there’s another hill to be climbed.  I suspect they also saved me from a bust gut.  I was done for, even if Pammy still had miles left in her legs.

Freedom Fone’s ability to fulfill it’s promise as a must have tool for bridging the digital divide has yet to be determined. Millions of poor people have access to mobile phones, but with tariffs as high as they are in countries like Zimbabwe, experimentation in this field is still costly. And of course, for our project these are early days. The development team is still in the process of creating the variety of features that will distinguish Freedom Fone from the technically intimidating (to ordinary folk) IVR products like FreePBX, Trixbox and PBX in a Flash.

One of the recalibrations for me has been a growing appreciation of the relevance of text-to-speech synthetic voices for our platform. This isn’t news to our Project Architect, Alberto Escudero Pascual. He’s been convinced of its relevance from the start. In fact, in order to build an interactive online demo for Freedom Fone he integrated a commercial synthetic voice from Cepstral called Allison as a quick option for building and testing a voice menu.

As you can imagine, English speaking Allison, as good as she sounds given she’s synthetic, is not an ideal voice for enunciating other languages.

As a project located in Africa we are keen to develop/acquire free synthetic voices for some of the continent’s many languages and include them with the Freedom Fone software. As an open source project I hope that we can attract the contribution of free synthetic voices for many of the world’s languages over time.

Yesterday I had the pleasure of speaking with Etienne Barnard at Meraka Institute in Pretoria, South Africa. To my delight he indicated that work already done in Kenya on text-to-speech for Kiswahili by a team led by Dr Mucemi Gakuru at the University of Nairobi some years ago, might be updated and made available in time for our July release of Freedom Fone version 2.

In recognition of the competitive mobile phone tariffs prevailing in east Africa and the willingness of organisations there to experiment with information on demand voice services, we will create our first localisation of the Freedom Fone GUI for Kiswahili in February 2010. The possibility of including a free synthetic voice for this audience is exciting.

So why this interest in synthetic voice? Doesn’t this just mean a horrible robotic sounding Kiswahili voice? Obviously original audio files with perfect inflection are the first choice, but not all information requires the effort associated with recording audio files. Freedom Fone helps with the automatic conversion of audio files for voice menus, and it will be improved over time to make it as easy as possible to create audio files using a basic microphone attached to a computer. Still, it would be a lot quicker to automatically convey information received/produced in text format, like product prices, weather reports, breaking news using text-to-speech.

And … not all synthetic voice sounds dreadful. Build and test your own voice menu in English using Allison and our online demo. Make it the default audio menu and call in to listen for free using Skype. To do this you will need to add Skypiax4 as a Skype contact. Let us know what you think of the experience!

Kubatana, a Zimbabwean non-profit organisation committed to democratising access to information, was awarded a Knight News Challenge grant in May 2008 for its Freedom Fone software development project. The Freedom Fone project aspires to help civic organisations extend their information in an audio format to mobile phone users.

In Zimbabwe the mass media is monopolised by an entrenched and unpopular government. There are no licensed radio or television stations outside the direct control of the government. There are no community radio stations. There are no independent daily newspapers. Voice over Internet (VoIP) has not been legalised and wireless networking is tightly regulated. Working in this environment Kubatana realised the importance of leveraging the growing access to mobile telephony by people across income and interest groups. Frustrated by the limitations of SMS, Kubatana investigated the potential for manipulating call-in voice menus to convey frequently updated rather than static information. The primary objective was to add to the information outreach capacity of organisations in the non-profit sector by providing them with easy to install and use software to deliver their information, in languages of their choice, to phone users in the general public. Since interactive voice menu (IVR) systems incorporate voice mail or ‘leave-a-message’ functionality Kubatana also recognised the potential for developing rich two-way communications with communities and for facilitating citizen journalism.

With the Knight News Challenge award, we have been able to commission the redevelopment of our platform to incorporate lessons learnt to-date and the latest advancements in open source telephony development.

Since software development is an involved process, Kubatana was keen to work with an interim solution to facilitate experimentation with IVR in Zimbabwe whilst full-scale development progressed. We investigated commercial IVR providers in South Africa and were delighted to find a responsive company in Pretoria: Molo Innovation. Charl Barnard, a director in the company, was very interested in the innovative ideas we had for extending the use of IVR into the non-profit and development sectors. Importantly, he was prepared to assist us at heavily subsidised rates with quickly re-gigging an existing Asterisk-based product for our interim use.

The value of Molo’s support cannot be measured in dollar terms – it goes well beyond that. Our expedited productivity gave birth to an innovation called ‘Inzwa’ which means ‘to listen’ in the vernacular. For the first time in many years in Zimbabwe, the general public were able to call-in, at their convenience, and access non-state controlled audio information via their phones.

Our Inzwa experience enabled us to quickly and constructively feed into the planning and development of the Freedom Fone platform as well as test the waters in Zimbabwe and start to assess local interest in phoning in for information. It gave us hands on experience and the ability to speak with greater conviction about the potential of Freedom Fone as a useful product; an appreciation of the skills and resources needed to run an information on demand audio service and allowed us to share a real-life deployment with others interested in doing something similar.

And Zimbabwe is just the start! A deployment partner, Farm Radio International, has been keen for some time to experiment with IVR as a support for and extension of their community radio programming for small-scale poultry farmers. They installed our interim version for training and pilot purposes in Tanzania and Ghana in November 2009.

Commercial support to non-profit initiatives can have far-reaching and rewarding results and we would encourage others to follow in Molo’s socially responsible footsteps.