Back in Bukavu.

Attention. Boring post ahead.

Yesterday we flew – via Moba and Kalemie – from Lubumbashi to Bukavu; back ‘home’. We left L’shi early in the morning. At around 12.30pm we arrived at Kivuma – the UN military airport – and at around 2pm, after a bumpy carride, we were back in our office at the IRC compound. We are here for only another two weeks; and still so much work is to be done. Just to give a flavor:

Because some things from the 2007 baseline survey were missing in our dataset we need to go back to the hardcopies and get that information into the computer. Today we hire and train a person to do exactly that; for 3,000 hardcopies! This job is going to take him weeks. Anyhow, we are: preparing a contract, checking exactly what we need from the hardcopies (this is a lot of work; there are two types of questionnaires and each with more than 150 questions), building a template to fill out, getting cash in via Western Union, arranging a laptop, office space, etc.

We just came back from L’shi where we – next to trained and piloted the final survey – trained the TUUNGANE boss and the M&E officer how to take GPS-coordinates - and waypoints, record tracks, etc. – by making use of GARMIN GPS devices and satellite phones. This is not too easy as we try to synchronize everything across four provinces, but there are many different projections of the world, within each projection there are different ways to take the geographical coordinates, etc. We also explained how to use specialized software (ArcGIS). We are currently writing templates and dummy-guides for the provinces.

An important thing in Haut Katanga was to clean Haut Katanga's LLU-data: yep, I will write what this is in the near future. Anyhow, the data was a mess and even together with the current and former M&E officers of Haut Katanga we couldn't clean it. Now we are making a template for all the territoire and chefferie bosses to fill out.

Today we will also train our Project Coordinator for the Phone Project; the latter is now officially know as “Voix des Kivus”. Tomorrow and the day after we will be in the field to implement the project in the first village (after that 3 more to go). This means: preparing contracts, yesterday afternoon we bought two additional mobile phones (we already bought 10 at an earlier stage), getting the specialized software to work, setting-up templates for reporting, finishing codebook, translating documents from English to French and from French to Swahili, getting car and driver (this is a non-IRC project so we have to do all the work ourselves), getting security briefings, arranging money-issues, preparing the village presentations, making marketing material (Macartan made a cool logo), etc.

Anyhow these things – and a 100 hundred smaller things – have to be done before Monday because we will be leaving for yet another week to another province; we are leaving to Kindu – the capital of Maniema province. After we come back from that: 4 more days left...

[I will upload some pictures and random notes later on today. Internet is to slow at the moment].