Before I headed for Kenya this Christmas I was asked by the Camara Kenya hub staff to bring with me a good multi-meter and a set of professional screwdrivers suitable for laptop repair. Without going into the exact details I had an utterly frantic time just before traveling owing to a combination of bad planning, career chaos, financial challenges and voluntary commitments. Thankfully despite all this I was able to pick up the multi-meter and toolkit thanks to the generous donation of a friend.
The main reason the Camara Kenya staff asked for these tools is not because they could not afford them but rather because it is extremely difficult to buy good quality tools in the developing world. There is lots of cheap, poor quality tools available but they rarely last long. I realised that it is an important issue going forward. We should support the hubs in acquiring good quality tools.
It has been extremely hot out here since I arrived. Hotter than I have ever experienced before in Kenya. About 5 days ago just before I traveled to Lamu(an island off the north east coast of Kenya) I opened my laptop and almost immediately noticed that it was extremely warm in one corner of the screen.
Suddenly the screen went blank and the distinctive smell of burning rubber filled the air. I quickly turned the machine off and grimly thought of the consequences. My computer was now unusable and would have to be carried around as a completely useless extra bit of baggage for the rest of the trip. Thankfully I regularly backup everything so I had no worries about data loss.
If this had happened to me in Ireland I honestly would strongly think that this was the end of the road for this laptop. Burning rubber smells is not a good sign!
The night before I left for Lamu I told one of the Camara volunteers about my woes. He asked me a couple of questions about what lights were going on etc and what sounds the machine was making. When he heard my answers he reassured me that the laptop was repairable once he got it back to the hub.
His confidence reassured me although a part of me was saying that he was just giving me false hope.
The following day the same volunteer asked for the laptop and the last thing I saw and heard before grabbing the bus to Lamu was a bunch of volunteers huddled over the machine busily talking to one another in Kiswahili. I left the hub genuinely wondering was I making a mistake leaving a 1000 euro laptop in the hands of the volunteers....
A few days later when I arrived back in Mombasa the volunteer held out my laptop to me saying it had been repaired. A wire connecting the webcam had short circuited and so they had to remove it and so my computer had no webcam but otherwise it was working fine.
I turned it on and to my amazement the computer worked fine. They told me that as soon as the model of the computer I had became more available in Kenya they would repair the webcam with a 'spare' part. At the moment the model I had was not freely available.
It dawned on me that second hand equipment in Africa is essential for spares. Brand new equipment is actually a bad idea because if it breaks its hard to get essential spares. And believe me, it does not matter how new the equipment is it will break out here.
Camara has not run a 'laptop' repair course in Kenya. The volunteers have acquired these skills from a deep familiarity with using computers in their own environment and learning how to handle problems accordingly.
Its exactly what we want to see happening in the hub. Even at this stage in its short evolution highly skilled technicians are emerging with skills that can earn them a living and also support our expanding schools program. We need to not just get computers into schools and train teachers in ICT, we also need to develop a highly competent maintenance team to support the growing number of schools.
Another wonderful aspect to this short story is they used the tools I had brought from Ireland to repair my machine!
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