I took leave from defense engineering to travel the world and bring a startling concept where I go. It is a crazy and premature idea that has potential to change the way the world thinks about technology consumers and producers, and even where the riches of the world lie. I ventured out to find the special places and people that share my passions and unending hope in people, finding applications for technology and learning about the social and community needs that go hand in hand with development. Several labs around the world now comprise a limited experiment including dry dusty rural India, a shipping port in Ghana, an Apartheid­era township in South Africa, coffee­-growing high mountains of Costa Rica, Arctic sheep and reindeer valleys in Norway, and even inner city Boston. It is an exciting modern day version of trekking off into the jungle with crates and crates full of sensitive equipment in Dr. Livingstone style, and it’s very cool. (The multitudinous biting insects and heat are probably still the same.)

In the course of several itinerant years, my focus shifted from the engineering details of energy conversion and mechanisms to the social and individual implications of making complex, high precision devices in primitive places. My master thesis was a partial, mostly technical, description of my experiences building solar and wind energy conversion devices in primitive and remote places in the world. Early on, I mistakenly believed that I was embarking on an engineering project with some broader consideration for energy policies. I was genuinely surprised to discover my greatest impact is to address the crippling lack of world­wide application of technology for peaceful and humanitarian goals.

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(reprinted and slightly edited from my masters thesis, in answer to a recent journo inquiry)

Everett dog is ready to go and impatiently awaits the humans. We assemble one FabFi antenna at the base of Mt. Wachussetts and Jonathan Ward straps it to his back. Jon and Kerry Lynn set off for the summit. Keith Berkoben and I drive to the first test site 6km from the summit but a ridge occludes the view of the mountain. We drive on to the Sterling Airport, a small airfield with a great, clear view of the Mt. Wachussetts. We assemble the second FabFi antenna and point by eye. By phone we give a bearing to the summit team and they point their antenna by compass. It was almost too easy, just like that both routers were talking to each other. We continue to make measurements after the sun set until the summit team’s battery runs out.

Technical details will be available at the FabFi blog sometime this week.

Full res photos available at (beta) Thalia site: http://fab.thalia.mit.edu/?type=album&id=d1c9624a-c7fe-11de-8bd4-3597f7dac090 (someone please let me know how this works for you!)

More info and pics to come (see http://fabfi.fablab.af/blog/)

Shembot – #3 is you. Yep, the triple nickel is now high speeeeed.

For the super cool real time map (brought to you by superSmari), see http://fabfi.fabfolk.com/stats.php.

Step, step, awkward let-go-and-grab-the-next-rail, step, step, let-go-and-grab, step, step… cripes this is a tall tower. The ladder is steep and I have to climb slightly askew, turned to a side so my knees and shins don’t crash in to the rungs.

Finally at the top of the tower I find Keith, Talwar, and H sitting at the very top surrounded by a forest of bigger FabFis. The big ones make it difficult to walk around on the ledge so most have been banished to the very top of the tower. Talwar looks like a kitten suddenly caught in mid-play in a tangle of a large amount of blue ethernet cable.

“This … FF24 … “, I somewhat say between breaths of air – now that I’m not rowing I’m pathetically out of shape. “… has old .bin. Needs new FF2.0 <gasp>…. must… <gasp> <gasp> before iftar… <gasp>”.

Keith nods. “Yeah, I understand. Sundown soon… say no more.” and takes the router from me and starts to look around for a short net cable. I pathetically manage to hand him a cable I brought for this purpose, then sit down cross legged and start repairing the longer cable I brought up. It’s a little funny that the best IT / net / computer tech support equipment in Jbad is at the top of the tower.

I just manage to line up the multicolored cable in the correct order when Keith starts yelling – “Amy! Amy! AmyAmyAmy! H JUST CAUGHT A KITE!”

What? Did he say “caught a kite?” I try to figure out what that might rhyme with, what he must have meant. But by then my head has turned all the way around and indeed H is standing 5 stories up on the top of a concrete water tower flying a simple diamond-shaped red kite. From my perspective he is a silhouette, standing in front of an red-orange sun and the thin paper of the kite is backlit. It’s a boy in salwar kameez lunging and tugging and gesturing at his kite with the entirety of Jalalabad at his feet and the tall mountains anchoring the pastel layered sky. The moment is out of a movie and it is spellbinding.

And I’m here in the scene. I feel the cooling breeze in the rapidly darkening sky and hear the toots of the rickshaws and barks and yells and general traffic and people far below. H hands me the kite string carefully. It’s like fishing line, thin and slippery. There’s a lot of it but the end of it is frayed so it definitely broke or was cut in a kite fight. The kite literally flew by… and H reached out and caught it… and started to fly it. I start to giggle while I’m flying it, this simple nearly translucent red kite, it’s really a lot of fun.

I’m pretty tired and don’t know how long I can remain somewhat lucid.

Ok, router reprogram done, cable repaired, bundle bundle, run down ladder. Run back up ladder – forgot power brick. Run down ladder. Hand off the bundle to SR and H who tries to zip off back to SR’s house, but not before throwing up some cookies. That wasn’t slang, I really mean they were worried about us not eating and drinking and got some cookies and threw them up on to the top of the tower from the ledge. I had returned to help Talwar with his tangle of blue cable and plop, plop,…pause…plop. THOSE ARE FOR YOU MY FRIENDS! GOOD NIGHT!

What can you do but giggle more and marvel? The sun has pretty much completely slipped behind the mountain now and the sky is just fierce layers of purples blues and reds. Cookies (with heart shaped cut outs filled with jam) arc through the darkening sky and land around me. This is weird, right?

It’s the kind of story that just makes you sigh because what else can you do? Long long ago the land was government owned military use land, then during the time of the war – during the mujahadeen times, the folks that seized power gave the land to people who promptly built houses. The recipients were already wealthy people and continue to be even wealthier now. These recipients don’t have the cleanest hands but no one will talk about that stuff outright. But now you get why I was learning the subtle differences among gifts, bribes, and tips.

After the legitimate government was restored, there is a stalemate because the military / government can’t or won’t bulldoze these large, expensive houses and the residents have no reason or desire to move. They didn’t pay for the land and don’t have deeds for land rights, so they also can’t sell their biggest asset. But as far as they are concerned, they were given the land and have every right to be there.

We see a cross section of people in the lab and I ask them about the flooding and damage. No one seems too broken up about “those people with the ruined houses” because they refer to them as “They are rich people. They have big SUVs. <shrug>”. There are complaints about them exploiting the situation – “Even if they have 1 or 10 million dollars they will stand there on the street and say to the UN or USAID, ‘I am a poor person and I have no house. You must help me.’”

But what about the people I see who’ve hung up sheets and mats and who’ve thrown their soaked bedding on to the street?, I ask. And I show them pictures. More shrugging. Those are only the kids. I’m aware that the pictures tell the story and I’m just not seeing. The windows alone in those houses cost over $100 and some of the debris is super ornate mirrored tile. There are beds and mattresses, not simple carpet and floor cushions. They are rich people, they can fend for themselves. One groped for the right words, then said a fat chicken will not lay eggs, that is they are so wealthy they need for everything to be given to them, they will not rebuild on their own.

The municipality sent out 500 workers again today to help remove the mud and debris. “Since the elections there is no government”, one of the residents told me when I asked him what he would do, “there is no organization, no plan. No one can make a decision.” People have sent their families to live in other houses or with relatives while they wait for foreign donations and help. Waiting is a past time here. “You people must help us, you must give to me.”

What’s cooler is what’s happening around me. The water tower is super crowded with people and even more FabFi. It’s a party! Our goals for today are to replace and upgrade every existing FabFi connection and add two more ~3.5km each. Right now it’s a mess of people in salwar kameez’s schooching past each other on the narrow ledge carrying router boxes, reflectors, rope, cables, meters, and so on in every direction. Every now and then there’s a shout followed up something getting thrown UP to the top of the tower, or slightly comical attempts to convey what needs to be fetched from below.

We’ve just finished with marching orders, people are breaking up in to groups and readying to travel all over the city. Nearly all the Afghans are on the phone with their friends who want to come up the tower and help so they can learn to make and install a connection for themselves too. Today they will learn the install part, tomorrow a workshop at the new FabLab in the sharwali to make reflectors and program routers.

After tomorrow there will be so many Afghan-made, made-in-Afghanistan FabFi’s deployed throughout the city (and surburbs) that FabFi in Jalalabad has certainly turned the corner and is here to stay – fragile still but established.

The residents – some men but mostly young adults – pulled me to the places that had been their homes. The Afghans are fanatics about walls and there wasn’t a structure with four intact walls. A lot of the walls were simply gone – presumably washed away “down there somewhere” – whereas we were standing on the mucky remnants of others. Several buildings had big gaps and cracks because the ground on which they were built had shifted down the street too. All the rocks you see in the pictures were once part of walls.

Afghan homes (here in the rural/suburbs) are often built with enclosed rooms along the outside edge of the property so that there is an enclosed courtyard on the inside behind those tall walls. A compound may have only one enclosed structure with one or more rooms and then a series of porticos for cooking and lounging. When you are invited “into” an Afghan home in the suburbs, depending on the weather, you will probably be received in the courtyard or under the shade of a large tree or corrugated roof portico. There is usually a gate or door in the wall that opens in to the courtyard, and sometimes a door directly in to a room from the street.

I described all this for you so you can study the pictures and see if you can figure out what was what … and where it was once. The yellow cabinet on that white and blue wall is a clue – it should be on the “inside” of a room.

I think I’ve been here too long – my initial response was to avert my eyes from that cabinet in the wall. You’re not meant to be looking in to someone’s house (or courtyard) and seeing the details of their private lives and the innards of their homes without their invitation.

This is two days after the storm and the residents have already removed their belongings, more or less. The ruined textiles and such are in heaps on the side of the paved road.

There are hazards everywhere, from downed electrical cables to huge cracks in the walls that stay standing. The drainage culverts are full of mud and rocks so even a small rain before they are cleared will damage things further.

The affected areas were pretty wide spread. Alley after alley was the same story; a short drive away we saw high brick walls of large compounds… missing.

These were not refugee-camp-style poor people’s housing and people have lived in these neighborhoods for 7-12 years, so they tell me. But “they” say that these people are all illegally squatting on military land and so the government is not rushing to help – they want the people to move anyway. Ah, TIA.

You can download an extended set of photos of flood damaged houses in east Jalalabad. (54 images, 16.3MB)

The next morning Logan asked if it had rained the previous night. The concrete houses are sound insulated enough that on the first floor I would have slept through the storm too had my window not blown open. The front yard didn’t look too different but once the front gates were opened we could see that Jalalabad had been flooded.

All over Jalalabad culverts overflowed, low areas became rushing rivers, mud walls melted, and houses were damaged or destroyed. The biggest casualty was Saracha Bridge, about 1 km east of FOB Fenty towards Torkham. Tim and I went out to see the bridge a day later and found two and three story tall bridge footings washed down river and most of the bridge completely gone. The river looks innocent and small, only the near opaque turbidity gives away upstream mischief. Brick archways and stone footings are stranded on dry rock in what now looks like a dry river bed.

The initial ANSO report implied some damage that would be fixed within a day, which in Afghanistan usually might mean a week or so. I couldn’t remember a significant bridge to the east of the customs house because the road bed is wide and the approach to the bridge is long and gentle. We were unprepared for what we saw and initially I didn’t even realize that the enormous expanse had a bridge suitable for heavy truck traffic spanning it only a day before.

There were trucks everywhere, pulled on to the side of the road on both sides of the bridge. Some tried to use smaller roads to the north or south as bypasses but upstream and downstream bridges were questionable themselves. The bypasses were not necessarily a great choice because the heavy trucks made big muddy ruts in the small dirt roads. So most cars and trucks opted to try their luck simply driving through the river after the water level went down.

Several bulldozers had arrived and were making ramps down and up the banks to make it easier for the vehicles to get down to the stream bed. While we watched, about 2 in 3 cars or trucks made it through ok, sometimes with a little help from the masses of Afghans who had collected to watch and see if anything exciting might happen. A handful of jingle trucks seemed to be pretty stuck.

During the storm Keith logged in to the FabFi’s and we were thrilled to see the routers were up. Sometime the next morning, he tried again and FabFi1 was down. So he went up to the roof and found that the plastic bag taped around the router had been ravaged and filled with water and the router was completely drowned in the water. He poked a hole in the bag and drained the water; we assumed that we’d lost the router. A while later after hours drying in the hot sun, he plugged in the router just to see what would happen… and FabFi1 was back up!

In the meantime a truck did show up and the rest of the fablab was moved. There was a misunderstanding about the furniture timing so we were swimming in a sea of boxes and equipment lining the halls and floor with no tmp swap space. With much persistence by Keith and Carl, they were able to make clean spots in the machine room and move furniture and equipment into those spaces.

I’m sure it will be funny someday… later… in the future… after we’re done… but every time you make a clean space an Afghan lies down and sacks out. We have spent the days walking over sleeping bodies. As the machine room becomes more and more crowded with machines, bodies crowd in closer to each other. No amount of polite “uh, could you please move, I’m going to install this there” budges them more than a few inches, only enough for you to set down whatever object you’ve got.

Ramadan presents some other logistical difficulties aside from catatonic Muslims by afternoon time. We don’t want to drive the others crazy by eating and drinking in front of them so we try to hide in rooms out of sight. The first problem is the above mentioned sleepers – we can’t actually find rooms in which to hide. The second is that this isn’t getting enough cold water into people and I think we’re cooking Smari’s brain cells. By noon or so he turns the color that lobsters get when they’re boiled and begins to slur (more than usual). We’re lucky that it’s cooler than “usual” – only about 45 C or something like that.