In the past few months,

In the past few months, many people have asked me about my trip to Africa.
And while it takes a lot to tire me of hearing my own voice, at times it seems a little futile to explain the same things over and over again.

Also I have gotten the whole, and may I say, excellent, experience at a bit of a distance now, and so feel comfortable trying to express some of the experiences in words.
I think there are a lot of things to say that may reflect negatively on the whole experience, and I would like to say from the start, that it has been a great trip, I would do it again in a second and it has indeed strengthened my belief in projects like

For those of you who aren't familiar with the GeekCorps program, and what a gadget-loving technology evangelist like me was doing for 3 months in the relative backwaters of Accra, Ghana, have a look at these sites before you read on:

• The Organisation that arranged the whole trip: GeekCorps,
• The on-line diaries of geeks in Ghana: GeekHalla
• The company I worked with for 3 months: AfricaExpress

Oh, and pictures, as well as other accounts of this 3 month hiatus may be found here:

• My very own, badly scanned (thanks to the photo-store), pictures: http://www.geeks.krag.org/
• The great, and well-designed journal of my good friend and fellow Ghana-geek Jean: Welltempered
• The immense travel-log (and seemingly limitless photo-gallery of yet another friend and fellow Ghana-geek, Babak: GlobalJungle

Basically this is the story:

One fine evening in late may or early June 2000, the exact date escapes me, I was sitting at the office of my then employer, Icon Medialab in Copenhagen.
To say I was tired of my job was probably an exaggeration, but for a while I'd been thinking about other things. I had a great job at Icon, in charge of mobile Internet developments. A great salary and above all great colleagues. Nevertheless there were more and more days where I found myself wondering wether this was enough for me. Wether I was falling into the trap of work. Success means fullfillment in a sense, and it gives me strength to work harder, just for the feeling of knowing you are good at what you're doing. In a way it is a desire to at least try and see if there is more in life.
I was good at what I did, and still am, mind you, and that gave me some satisfaction. I had great colleagues, fun, interesting, intelligent and challenging, in fact Imiss them now that I work alone, and that made my days exciting. But I missed feeling a pride in what I was doing. I wanted, and still want to be doing something special. To be trying something a little different than what everyone else is trying. Maybe I just need to see myself stand out in the crowd. Maybe it's just narcissism, but there you are.

The fact is, that that fine summer evening, I was at work late, and my brother mailed me a link to an article on Slashdot. It was a tale of a small start-up working in the highly unusual field of bridging the digital divide. It told the story of how GeekCorps, a North Adams, Mass.-based NGO, was going to send IT specialists as volunteers to Africa.
Now, ever since I travelled South Amarica for 6 months back in 1997, I have been fascinated by 3rd world problems. I have often thought of volunteering, even starting my own projects to help. The volunteering never happened, because I felt that as an IT specialist, it was futile to volunteer for a well-building or water-sanitation project, and the part about my own projects never happened because, well, I don't have what it takes to be a pioneer. But I had often said, and even written on this very site, that I wanted to volunteer, if I could find something that made sense to me professionally.
And there it was. GeekCorps, it seemed, was exactly the kind of organisation I would have dreamed up, if I'd had the guts and the creativity to do it.
So there I was, in my office in Copenhagen, on a spur of the moment decision, filling out an on-line application, to leave comfy Copenhagen behind and spend 3 months, doing god-knows-what in a country I knew nothing about. Oh, and looking over my shoulder to make sure my boss didn't see me.

After that I more or less forgot about it for a while. Spent 4 weeks on vacation travelling through Mexico with my girlfriend, and kept doing the same old work. Until one day in october, when a sudden e-mail from GeekCorps meant I had to make up my mind, should I go or should I stay.
A tough decision at the time, what with my girlfriend having just been away in Germany for 3 months, me being about 85% of the way towards starting a company with 3 friends of mine, and all the other more practical things that such a decision brings on.
Having dreamed of something for years and having promised yourself "if only there was a way..." is such a catalyst for this type of decision though. I knew I had to do it, or I'd be forever asking myself how it might have been.

From that day on was a race of immunizations, getting rid of my apartment, packing, moving, quitting my job (not too popular that one) and generally busying myself with all sorts of arcane preparations.
And one Sunday in mid-January my flight left from Copenhagen, via Iceland to JFK and NYC, where I was to meet up with 3 fellow volunteers, and get on the train to Albany. The adventure had begun.

At that time, I still had no clue of what I was going to be doing, with whom and under what circumstances. I knew the name of the company (AfricaExpress) I was to work with, as well as a few key-words regarding technology. But it was enough.....

In brief the whole idea was to get 2 weeks of training in North Adams, Mass. followed by 3 months in Accra working with a partner in a local business in an attempt to transfer as much knowledge as possible in the 3 months available. Oh, and have fun in the proccess.

This is not the place for me to describe the 3 months, what happened and why, for that you should probably have a look at GeekHalla, our on-line diary while we were there.

Instead I wanted to write this to attempt to answer some of the questions I have gotten since returning to Copenhagen almost 3 months ago.

Many people ask me the same question: Did you achieve your goals? (asked in a fairly sceptical voice)
The answer of course, like with so many things, is an emphatic yes and no

Did I do everything I hope to do? Did I pass on as much knowledge as I believed possible, in the given 3 months time period?
NO! not even close.
Did I get things done? Help my partner company? Make a difference?
I believe I did.
Was it personally enriching? am I a better person now? Has it increased my long-term involvement in Digital Divide issues?
Beyond a reasonable doubt, I'd say.

The problems in such a venture are huge. The key to GeekCorps is Knowledge Transfer. The idea that you can take a geek from his/her comfortable home, somewhere in the Western world. A specialist in a field with fairly large labour shortages. An expensive commodity. You dump this geek into the private sector somewhere in the developing world. In a company that needs and wants that skill-set. And you sit him down for three months with an individual, and ask them to solve a problem, or build a system together. The knowledge that will pas between 2 people working together like that, with a common goal, for 3 months, is knowledge that is almost impossible for the Company to get in any other way.

In an ideal world the results are manifold.

1. Your original geek, who may be stressed out to destruction in a business that seeems to have little respect for the individual in the eternal fight for growth, gets a needed break. In Ghana,a s in may developing countries, the pace is different, the need to be faster, stronger and better is a lot less, and even having an impossible project to finish in 3 months stress is not an issue.
2. That same original western-minded geek, hopefully goes through the 3 months in Africa as an eye-opening experience. He/she will learn about other cultures, get a feeling for the other side of Africa, the one that isn't famines, civil war, AIDS and terrorism, and maybe even be infected with a longer lasting desire to help.
3. The local partner company, ideally, gets a small competance boost. A boost that, as I mentioned, is almost impossible to get in a country where many Computer Science Graduates have never actually had access computers at university.
4. The individual employee