Training Daze - Part 1

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Just what exactly are YOU doing for Ethiopians??

Well I guess I ought to interrupt the random (blog) thoughts of Chairman Al with an update on work. I will do a 'typical day' blog later this week (if I get some pictures/video) as it is quite a contrast to a typical day back in the UK; not because I do less work, just the timings and general environmental differences.

Ok, I've not had to shoo any sheep out of the office yet, but we have definately had a couple of oxen wandering around the compund for two days, waiting for slaughter and distribution amongst contributing staff!

So my job title here is IT Training Expert though during recruitment and the first month in country VSO's wires were crossed and I was listed everywhere as a Management Advisor. To be fair, I could probably do that to. In fact the capacity in Ethiopia, and particularly Beneshangul-Gumuz (one of four emerging regions) is so low that even Sara would be an IT Expert in her own right, let alone Planning Advisor as well!

Given then situation in her bureau with regards to IT support, she has had to become the IT Expert too! She is now the source of anti-virus updates (which I supply) as well as minor laptop fixes (which I help with), though that's all another story...

Let me skip the preamble about the first 6 months in country and cut directly to the training.

The Capacity Building Bureau have asked me to prepare and present (at a minimum) four training courses over the nine month period from July 08 to March 09. Two courses on Windows 2003 Server, Wireless Technologies and Exchange Server 2003 and two courses on Cisco Networking. In other words, prepare two courses and run them twice.

This is clearly advanced training (or trainings as Ethiopians call them!) for IT Experts, rather than basic Windows, browser and Office application training - the intended audience being the regional bureau IT Experts, based in Assosa (being the regional capital).

Location, Location, Location

First up, I needed a training room.

At the moment, all training should be located and co-ordinated by the Management Institue (MI) - about 10k out of town and currently being used as a detention centre for those arrested in the troubles over the summer.

Of course I am not allowed by VSO (quite rightly) from working at the management institute while it is a prison. In all honesty I wouldn't really want to conduct training at the MI anyway; it's too far out of town and requires a hail Mary bus ride from the centre of Assosa.

It's a shame really for the people of Assosa that the MI is so far away. It has a library and a free Internet Cafe (blistering 56k, just like everywhere else) but no one goes there! It's impossible to get to.

It was an old police training centre so not really a surprise how far out of town it is, but damn inconvenient.

After weeks of quiet suggestion and gentle persuasion my boss agreed to earmark the room next door to our office as a temporary training centre and after weeks of quiet suggestion and gentle persuasion, his boss - the Bureau Head - agreed.

Unfortunately it meant relocating the BPR Team.

BPR = Business Process Re-engineering and is currently all the rage in Ethiopia.

Hit squads of staff are recruited and trained before setting off to spread the Good News to the rest of the bureau with different methods of improving the way people work. The BPR Team earn slightly more money and claim elite status in terms of office location. The shai-buna (tea) people (ok, they're all women but let's not gender sterotype through the term "tea ladies") even bring them tea to their room (us mere mortals usually have to walk to the shai bet or tea room).

The BPR guys also have a habit of locking their office door all day - so the good work can carry on undisturbed (except by tea people of course). I suggested this was so they could get a couple of hours undisturbed kip in after a heavy lunch; but I don't think they appreciated my suggestion. That said, I'm sure I've heard music from behind locked doors, in an unsuccessful attempt to mask gentle snoring...

Needless to say the BPR guys didn't fancy shipping out to let the Ferengi build an IT training room.

In fact they liked it so little that they sent a delegation to the Bureau Head and he hastily backed down.

We even offered them our plush carpeted IT room (very rare in Assosa bureaus - Sara would kill for a carpet in her Bureau. We even have a red one in the hallway during the dry season). And our office also has a big 4-person sofa to allow them to ruminate and philosphise (digest and repose) in comfort on.

After much to-ing and fro-ing 3 of the 4 BPR guys relented and so began a game of muscial offices while people were moved to accomodate them in their new office of choice - which in turn meant booting other people out and so on.

One of the guys decided enough was enough and staged a one man sit-in to prevent us using the old office (he later attending my training in the very same room).

Eventually he was placated with yet another office change and at last the room was cleared to allow us to convert it into a training room! One month after we had been intitially allocated the space.

Note: I have to say that maybe I wouldn't have made such a good management advisor over here after all!

After years of spending numerous weekends re-arranging desks, computers and recabling offices in the UK so the pregnant women are (or are not) under an aircon unit, the PR Manager has a better view out of the window; or this week's office org chart (10 minutes to decide on at the pub) can be realised through the rearrangement of desks (10 days working out-of-hours for IT and Facilities), I would have advised the Bureau Head to listen to their grievences, nod, say 'noted' and then remind them who the boss is and stop wasting everyone's time...

Beg, steal & borrow

Now to fill the empty room.

I had explained to my boss and colleagues that I didn't expect to train more that 10 people at a time. I reckoned that we could fit 5 desks into the room, with a pair of students at each desk.

There were one or two murmurs as it is not uncommon for 3 or 4 people to share a desk for professional training courses and even for a class of 40 to share 1 PC! At the schools, many of the classes contain 90 school children!!

Because the classes in Ethiopia are overstocked with people and understocked with equipment much of the teaching here is purely theoretical. In fact there are IT graduates who probably have less flying hours on a computer than most 8 year old kids in the UK!

The mechanical engineering students in the technical college here in Assosa have never used what little equipment they have as the electricity supply to their college is not man enough to power it up. Likewise the biology students at the local school have never looked down a microscope. There are none.

My opinion was that to do a good job, we really needed to keep the numbers manageable. Two computers per desk (server & client), two students per desk, ten students in all. Let's give people space and man-hours on the equipment so the lessons really sink in. Besides, the room - given it had previously held only 4 BPR staff - was not really capable of holding more than 11 people in comfort, particularly on a hot day.

OK, so let's get 6 desks (one for the trainer), 12 chairs and 12 PCs. Two PCs immediately for me to write the course and prepare the practical sessions and then 10 for the training itself. One of my two PCs could then be used as the classroom server (to download disk images & software from) and the other PC used as a spare in case one of the other 11 fails.

The spare PC raised a few eyebrows as the whole concept of spare equipment, spare parts and redundant hardware is quite an alien one out here. Considering it takes weeks, if not months, to get replacement PC parts from Addis, it is a concept I hope people start to embrace.

In fact I advised the guys to tag 5 spare power supplies onto a CIDA (Canadian Development agency that provides funding for projects) order and lo and behold five duff PCs with blown power supplies (a common occurance) were resurrected at a fraction of the cost of a new PC.

Tables and chairs we found from our IT room, the tea house, absent staff offices and meeting rooms, though subsequently we have been involved in various stand up shouting matches and impromptu visitations from the furniture police. Everything - and I mean everything - has a code written on it, which is logged by the furniture auditors.

There is no concept of organisational ownership. Everything - furniture, computers, printers - is allocated to an individual and must be signed for. Any changes require a stamped & countersigned letter from the correct official.

Fortunately my guys seemed pretty good at smoothing any ruffled feathers and given the furniture and equipment was on short term loan for the duration of the course, people seemed fairly accomodating.

The PCs were released from the storehouse, about half a kilometre away and arrived with wide screen TFT monitors. Each PC was a pretty much state of the art, dual core pentium with DVD writers and various portable memory interface sockets. Easily capable of running the applications I needed for training purposes. Ultimately they were destined for smaller zonal level offices out in the remoter areas of the region, but were not earmarked for allocation just yet. We could use them - signed letters, purple stamps and goodwill permitting.

My name is Al and I'm and eBay addict

Yep. I'm a big fan.

In fact I reckon you can easily build and run a perfectly acceptable IT infrastructure for a small to medium size business using eBay kit. There are heaps of perfectly good pieces of IT hardware available for a fraction of the new cost. In fact many manufacturers will let you add second user or refurbished kit to their maintenance agreements and if not, many bits of eBay kit come with 30 or 60 day warranties.

Most IT kit either dies en route or within the first few days of operation, so you can be pretty happy that if it lasts 30+ days it will do a job. Besides, you can probably buy 2 or 3 units for the price of a new one and if one fails, well so what? I have two spares (that golden concept of spare parts once again).

Why do I mention this? Well, I had been recruited originally to provide networking and specifically Cisco network training to the IT guys here. But when I arrived I found one (highly over-specified) office network switch and was told that was probably the only Cisco equipment in the region.

Hmm. So assuming learning Cisco is a better use of time then something like basic networking, how am I supposed to do training without any routers or switches?

Use router simulators?

Nope. You cannot possibly expect to learn practical Cisco skills unless you can get your hands dirty on real Cisco hardware! I mean, where are you going to plug the console cable into if you have never seen a Cisco device???

My mission - which I enthusiastically accepted (I am an addict after all) - was to find 4 old Cisco switches and 4 old routers on eBay, buy them myself and get them shipped over here. After much uhmming and ahhing I found an American eBay seller who would do the switches and routers at $45 a unit, plus a few of the cables I needed ($30) and ship the lot over ($280 shipping) for about US $650.

The Capacity Building Bureau kindly agreed to help me with the legal paperwork and pay the import taxes ($150) if I paid for the kit and shipping ($650) myself. Cool.

To cut a very long story short - the kit was held up in Addis, it took me 3 days of non-stop office hopping across the length of Addis with assorted letters and purple stamps, money and a big Ferengi smile, to get the equipment released - we now have the equipment ready and tested and waiting for training. One of the switches is currently in use as the training room switch anyway, but we will reallocate it when the Cisco training is due.

And would eBay work in Ethiopia? Unfortunately not.

There is a very small turnover in second hand IT hardware, but private computer ownership is very low. Plus with every piece of office equipment signed out and registered to an individual, there is no central store of crocked PCs or old hardware, either to be used as spare parts or to be put on eBay.

Equipment, even if aging, damaged and non-functional, sits rusting on a shelf in an individual's office.

Besides, two of the fundemental components of the eBay model are missing over here - there is no credit/debit card system and the postal service is very basic. There are no postmen. All post is delivered to a PO box at the nearest post office. PO boxes are limited in number and expensive enough (70 birr or $7/year) to preclude usage by the general population.

And when you factor in the import tax of 30-100%!a(MISSING)s well as the 3 day paper chase to release any imported hardware, the proposition really starts looking less and less attractive.

OK. So.

We have a room? Check!

We have tables & chairs? Check!

We have PCs and Cisco equipment? Check!

All we need now is some people to come and a course to run...

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Photos

The finished article
Where are the people?

Trainers-eye view
and mine for 15 days

Imported Cisco 2924
Anally retentive cabling as usual...

Hello wifey!
How did you sneak into this entry? :)

Strike a pose
Er, but maybe not that one Bekema...

The Train Gang
Building the IT Training Room - Mark II

Plus Ferenge
Hamid, Debebe, Emebet, Me, Ato Tilahun (the boss)

New training desks from China
With no assembly instructions. Uh-Oh

Have screwdriver
Will travel

Al doing DIY?
Oh come on. It's not *that* funny!

Quick take a picture
...before it falls to pieces

Bekema & Debebe seem to be enjoying it
Um, that draw's upside down fellas...

Yes, people in the UK spend weekends doing this for a hobby!
At least we're getting paid!

15 minutes worked - time for a teabreak.
Union rules in 'em.