Linux in Africa (via Victoria)

Brian Burger blurdesign at gmail.com
Tue Oct 3 07:55:26 UTC 2006


Back in late Jan/06 our local LUG - Victoria Linux User's Group - had an
InstallFest up at the University of Victoria. We had an African guy who came
in with the older desktop PC; he was the only one to actually go to the
trouble of bringing a desktop to the Fest.

He was working with one of the missionary groups, and doing
training in Victoria to set up email-over-shortwave stations in very remote
sections of Africa. They had been using Windows, but were switching to
Linux-based tools, hence his appearance at our Fest.

I gave him my email address, and forgot about the whole thing - until last
week, when I got the following email from the guy (Nzola), sent via one of
his Linux-powered shortwave/email setups deep in rural Mozambique.

This isn't an Ubuntu story as such, just a cool "unexpected Linux" story.

Brian.

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: KAPASENI at zfds.chirpnet.net < KAPASENI at zfds.chirpnet.net>
Date: 26 Sep 2006 11:01:00 -0000
Subject: Greetings from Kapaseni
To: Nzola Swasisa <nzola1 at yahoo.ca>, Carol Kerr < c-kerr at shaw.ca>,
davidc at cfh.ca, blackcrow at shaw.ca, mukahanana at shaw.ca, colinadams at hotmail.com,
fredc at quale.com, wayne at queale.com, lorene.anger at waradoo.fr,
blurdesign at gmail.com, brent at pinetreeline.org, ketinkoba at yahoo.ca,
divkwanda at hotmail.com, annaikmackay at hotmail.com, sgragina at shaw.ca,
gamesetgo at shaw.ca, kapasseni at yahoo.ca, diversity at shaw.ca, cfoley at shaw.ca,
office at lambrick.com, warren.dixon at ca.schneider-electric.com ,
gaspal at yahoo.com

Hello Friends!

PLEASE, DO NOT RESPOND TO THIS ADDRESS. I AM LEAVING THIS VILLAGE TODAY.
RESPOND TO ME TO nzola1 at yahoo.ca

I am very excited today to write to you this email because it originates
from a remote village called Kapaseni, situated in the Northern Mozambique.
We panned to install 2 Radio Email stations in Mozambique and they are all
done, so I thought it was good to send you this email to say that we have
successfully accomplished our system installations in Mozambique. Rob left
Mozambique last Sunday for Zambia after the first install in Sena and I
remained and traveled to Kapaseni to do the last install. It was a 3 hours
trip on a bike from Sena to Kapaseni because there are no vehicles on that
road. When I arrived in Kapasseni I had a soar back. I rested for an hour
than I started installation. It took me 8 hours though I had many helpers. I
installed a 12 m pole with 6 guy wires, antenna, solar panel, the radio,
battery and the computer. Today is my second night here in Kapaseni. I am
being fed with Nshima (corn flour), beans and chicken. I plan to go back to
Sena this afternoon "another 3 hours trip when I finish training the
operators here. In Sena I will do more training for one or two days before I
proceed for back to Ndola, in Zambia to train Radio Email Server
Administrators before and work on the Server computer before I return to
Victoria, Canada on October 31, 2006.
This email is comes to you via the radio wave, about 900 km away from the
server and finds the internet.
Thank you very much for your financial, ideas and advise support and we will
keep in touch. I have a lot of video pictures to show you.

PLEASE, DO NOT RESPOND TO THIS ADDRESS. I AM LEAVING THIS VILLAGE TODAY.
RESPOND TO ME TO nzola1 at yahoo.ca

Bye for now,
Nzola.
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