@ Rwanda

WEEK 9 - The Project

Although ninth week went fast, I was able to make some progress with my projects. Firstly, with regards to Moodle, there were two trainings left for admin users. Last Wednesday I met with Aloys Kagimbura (left) who is the Principal of the Liquidnet Family High School at ASYV, and with Christian Muhawenimana (right) who is the Instructional Coach for teachers and students. Both were amazingly excited about some of the features of the tool that we reviewed during the meeting: user creation, assigning admin privileges, adding courses and categories, assigning teacher and student roles to courses, viewing logs for teachers, and adding activities and resources to the courses. We also talked about specific recommendations that have to be implemented for the sustainability of the goal. As three teachers from the school were trained in the past weeks, each of them will have to digitize one of their courses for next term which is starting next week. We foresee good things with Moodle!

Secondly, I designed a Dashboard in Excel (please see image below) with real data collected from the recruitment app in Commcare. This information will be shared with individual departments. One cool feature about Commcare is that forms and surveys can be linked to manually-created Dashboards, and from Excel all one need to do is refresh the data; if there is new data it will be added automatically to the Excel sheet... until next week (last week!).

Week 8 - The Project

During the eight week, I progressed with Deo Karibigi (IT head) setting up our new account for the virtual server in which we could use a cPanel to manage our resources in the new server. The following is a screenshot of the cPanel and some features:

The installation of Moodle was straight forward because it is done through a wizard called Softaculous. In comparison with the installation of our site in the in-house server of the village that took us around two weeks, this new site was set up in around 10 minutes. Enabling php extensions for the site and finding the location of the Moodle directories takes more time though. I believe the village will be more comfortable using the account and all its features by more and more exposure to it. We programmed the server to be doing backups three times per week. Our idea at the end of the first year with Inmotion (the vps provider) is to transfer sites between hosts. As long as the database is compatible across hosting providers, regardless of LAMP or WAMP, it will work. 

The following is a screenshot of latest version of the site. The domain we chose to own is: https://moodle-lnfhs.org, and we installed a SSL certificate to make it more secure. My co-worker from CMU has been working on uploading some content, installing some plug-ins and adding some HTML/CSS code to get a better look-and-feel of the site:

This week I was invited by the fellow graduates to attend a cooking workshop. The goal was to cook “Shakshuka” which is a traditional Israeli dish of eggs poached in a sauce of tomatoes, peppers, and onions. We also used some spices that they brought from Israel. I believe it was paprika and another middle-east type thing. The following is an image of the meal:

And a photo of myself cooking with the mamas (acting mothers who are responsible of guiding students):

WEEK 7 - The Project

In the previous weeks we made the decision to host Moodle system in the in-house server of the village. We tested its performance in parallel with a Moodle site hosted on the cloud, and it was running good. However, last week the server crashed due to a failure of one of the RAID disks. The operating system could not boot again. Therefore, my co-worker and I had to come up with another option to host the system. I made some research in the past about share hosting and VPS (virtual private server) options and some providers offer licenses to put the system into operation in their servers. We rapidly scheduled a meeting with the management team to discuss pros and cons of the three options we had on the table:

WEEK 6 - Akagera National Park

I was invited by one of ASYV's fellow graduates to go to Akagera National Park in the northern part of Rwanda. I went with a group of six people including my CMU co-worker. We were picked up at 5am by a local driver who came in an old Land Rover Jeep. The roof of the jeep can be flipped to have a 360-degree view of the park while we stay in the car; it is also for safety precaution.

The current area of the park is 1,122 sq. km and it took us around 5 to 6 hours to go throughout it. This is the closest experience I've ever had to a real Safari. One can spend all the trip starring at the hills, lakes (10 lakes based on the guide information) and animals. It is a habitat of: zebras, elephants, lions, warthogs, rhinos, birds, giraffes, etc. We were lucky to watch some of them since it is hard due to the extension of the park.

WEEK 5 - The Project

WEEK 5 - Lake Bunyonyi

WEEK 4 - Art Center

WEEK 4 - Rwandan Impressions

Trip to Lake Mugesera in eastern province:

Last weekend at the green club house (one of the meeting facilities) a mentorship workshop with young professionals took place. It aims at advising senior students on their choices for a professional career they’d want to pursue and the universities they’d want to apply to. In the upcoming photos, you can see the mentees and some of the mentors:

The leftmost guy is a lawyer working at KPMG (one of the big four) for the tax department, and the one at his right, Timothy, is a CMU alum who launched a start-up in Kigali focused on developing mobile applications. He is currently working to implement a prepaid electricity distribution system (in Rwanda electricity is a prepaid service) to be used nationally via mobile app. Nice meeting these two! 

The girl on the right who is speaking is a student at Harvard Medical School. She is originally from Rwanda and is pursuing a degree in Global Health. Her story is very motivational for the students since she earned a scholarship to go to the US. In Rwanda, there is a National Exam on the last year of high school; those who get outstanding grades are able to get full-scholarships from the government to study abroad... It is impressive to meet these mentors and their personal stories. 

WEEK 3 - The Project

WEEK 2 - CMU Rwanda

WEEK 2 - The Project

During the second week, I made a proposal to the IT Coordinator of the village for the launch of the Moodle platform based on the requirements gathered in the first week. I came up with four different approaches after considering a benefit-cost analysis and the goals of the project which are: to get the platform running, but at same time to accomplish sustainability over time allowing more users to log in. On Wednesday, after a talk with IT Coordinator, we decided to carry on the set up of the platform in one of the main school servers. Consequently, in the last two days, I have created a Sandbox environment in a virtual machine (Oracle VM VirtualBox) to start a thorough documentation of the installation process and to verify the performance of the platform on a Windows 2012 server. Having done this, I expect to put into operation the platform for end users soon. Regarding the Salesforce system, there have been some delays in finishing the demo version, it might be ready within three weeks. 

WEEK 2 - Kigali

WEEK 1 - The project

The first week has been more about knowing all administrative staff, gathering all requirements and having a clearer idea of the technology infrastructure of the village. My project is focused on supporting the deployment of Salesforce system. The system is currently under sandbox environment where the main developer works in New York at Liquidnet (the main partner and donor of the village) and he will have a demo version ready to be tested on the week of the 12th of June; the ones who are leading this project at the village is the MEAL team composed by the Chief Operating Officer and one of the fellow graduates who normally stays throughout a year. In the meantime, I am supporting the Moodle development with my co-worker from CMU and I am also supporting the Chief Operating Officer troubleshooting one of the main platforms the team uses for the recruitment of orphans in the country; the platform is called CommCare, a user-friendly app, it is flexible, intuitive and it can be used off-line.