okathitu-amb1

okathitu-amb1

Originally uploaded by aaronforest.

Hilya test rides the ambulance prototype in Okathitu, mid November

november

November 29, 2006

Somehow it’s been 6 weeks that I’ve lived in Namibia. I think that I’m approaching new records for being in one place. Living in Windhoek is still nice. There are certain things that are taking awhile to get used to, like our landlady’s/our cleaning person walking into our house without waiting for a greeting, and like customers at BEN Namibia walking up to me because I’m white, and asking questions that the other mechanics are many times more qualified to answer than I am.

After about a month of work setting up the shop (with minimal funds), and building a bicycle ambulance with simple tools, I finished the first prototype, which we’re calling P1. Elizabeth and I took a week to travel in the North, showing the ambulance to many different organizations and collecting feedback about usability, design features, and stakeholders. On drive up the country felt huge and empty. The land changed subtly as we drove, and when we crossed the red line the changed happened quickly. Animals abound in the road, cattle, donkeys, and goats grazing and roaming freely. I’m not sure how ownership worked, and the animals were valuable enough that ownership was important. These Namibia’s can tell goats apart way better than I can, clearly.

We drove to Ondangwa, where we met with Terina Stibbard, a fantastically together woman who runs Yelula. The are supporting the startup of our ambulance project. Most of the money will go to tools, some to personnel and overhead, and some to materials. This grant enables me to prototype several iterations of the ambulance and deliver them to communities for field testing, without the pressure of needing to sell them or find specific donors.

We then went to TKMOAMS, an organization that coordinates and supports Home Based Care around Oshakati. They have around 600 volunteers for whom TKMOAMS provides training, resources, and sometimes a very small stipend. They organized a demonstration of the ambulance, which was attended by many of the TKMOAMS staff and several HBC volunteers. I noticed many things about the ambulance design and about the social aspects of the ambulance use, here and at subsequent demonstrations, which I’ll detail below.

I picked up Michael Linke from the train station in Ongangwa, which has to be the most hidden train station that I’ve ever been to. Finding it still wasn’t nearly as bad as finding Union station in DC the first time, as I was running there with my backpack at 3 in the morning or whenever the train left, before I realized that there are two 1^st streets, one in NW and the other in NE. (A cab driver set me straight for $5, and I actually made the train, although 6 minutes before it left I was still wandering around New Jersey Avenue, lost.)

Michael had arranged for us to meet Hilya, a BEN-trained mechanic from the village Okathitu. We waited at a gas station for her, and let people passing by try out the ambulance. 2 men took off down the road. Their friend who remained told us not to worry, but after a few minutes I asked him to take me in his truck to follow the ambulance. He laughed and said that they were his colleagues, which didn’t put me at ease until he showed me his police badge. Ahhh. I was supposed to know that he was law enforcement. The ambulance did come back. Hilya arrive and guided us to Okathitu, by the way of her family’s traditional home, where there was a party going on for someone, because they had the same name as someone else. I didn’t quite understand. We were offered food (with forks, too), Oshakundu (fermented grain homebrew), cooldrinks that were quite warm, and a tour of the home. There were 8 building perhaps within a fence. Half were sleeping rooms, a couple were for storage, and several were for food preparation and storage. Grain is stored in huge baskets, held off the ground by sticks, and covered with a thatched roof. It seems to keep quite well, even in the rainy season. Bugs are just a part of food preparation.

Hilya’s dad is Father Lazaus, the leader of the Anglican Church in Okathitu. He has a concrete house quite close to the church, which is close to the center of the town. The villages in the region Oshana are quite spread out, also have very low density, even at the center. I never saw more than 10 buildings together, even for a town of 2 or 3 thousand people. This makes the work of HBCers difficult without good transportation, both to get to the homes, and to help sick people get to clinics and hospitals when necessary. Walking to church, for example, can take 2 hours, even if it’s the church in your own village.

Michael coordinated the delivery of BEN Namibia’s first BEC (Bicycling Empowerment Center). BECs are the new focus of BEN’s bicycle distribution, in that they create jobs, provide training and vocational skills, and enable home based carers to have their bicycles serviced near where they work, and by people who understand the local conditions. It was interesting to see the container come in, on a truck bigger than that which many people there had ever seen before, as well. The container arrived after church on Sunday, and Father Lazarus invited the congregation to come see the container being delivered. There was some ceremony, mostly for the US Embassy to Namibia, which donated the shipping container and transportation to BEN Namibia. About 6 of the local Home Based Carers were in attendance, and Hilya translated for me in a demonstration of the ambulance. The first people who tried it took off across the oshana, heading towards the village center, and returned after 5 minutes. Others tried it, and were generally quite pleased. I was amazed that the HBCers (all women) were not discouraged by the shallow sand at all. A common reaction in deep sand, however, was a dismissal of the ambulance as impossible to use in deep sand. I designed it to be pulled by hand in places where you wouldn’t be able to cycle anyhow, but I need to product to speak for itself without training. It’s hard to incorporate manual pulling into the form of the design, especially with a chainstay hitch. Partly for this reason, I will prototype the next with a seatpost hitch.

We also visited the Wapandula Noyaka Center, an overnight care center near the Oshakati hospital, where it is hard to transport patients to the hospital in the night, even though it is only 700 meters away. They were very keen to get a bicycle ambulance, and even pulled it to the hospital to see how the trip was. Terina wants them to receive a prototype, as well, and it will benefit us to have an ambulance in a central location, where other people can come to see it. I showed the staff at the Wapandula Noyaka center the user surveys that I would need if we were to donate a prototype to the center, and got important feedback on my survey design as well.

We brought the ambulance to Okau, with Jermiah from TKMOAMS guiding us there and translating for us. The village has 4000 people, an clinic, and 8 TKMOAMS volunteers. We decided to leave the ambulance in Okau for testing for a month, with training materials, data collection training, and a bicycle. Jeremiah promised to translate the surveys into Oshivambo and train the HBCers. See the survey questions below, as well.

I’m nervous for the success of the ambulance, of course, but not so worried that I will let my hopes for its success cloud good data about it’s problems. This is, of course, easier said than done. Already I know that the bicycle wheels will not work as they are. They will buckle from side loads in the sand, and sink in too far. Car wheels? Motorbikes? Donkey carts? (I think they use car axles). Double bicycle wheels?

Elizabeth was very helpful with the meetings and demonstrations, and I should push myself to learn how to use her skills better, if we travel together again.

Since I’ve been back in the BEN shop, I’ve been sourcing tools again, and taking some time to build funky bikes to promote the fun of cycling. So far I have a small chopper and a chopper tall bike that’s too tall to free mount, and too floppy to ride safely—yet.

I don’t think that ‘ll get another ambulance done before Michael and Clarisse go north for Christmas in December, mostly because we don’t have a bender and I haven’t been able to source one that will work, anywhere in the city. We are hoping to get a Hossfeld bender donated from the US, which will help tremendously, even if it takes a long time to arrive. I may have to design another ambulance with only straight tubes, which takes a long time and compromises the aesthetics of the design, but functions nearly as well. I’ve been designing now using Solidworks, now that we received a computer that is powerful enough from a sponsor from the US. The use of CAD will help me collaborate with other designers in the US and Canada, and save time on this end. It’s an odd thing for me to do an iterative design process, using the fundamental principals of design for development and appropriate technology, while using CAD, but I think the use of CAD will help this project have more of appeal to donors, and facilitate a good collaborative design process, without detracting from feedback I can get from a hands-on, iterative prototyping approach.
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A year doesn’t seem nearly as long as it did at first. We’re looking at potential partnerships that could lead to my participation extending past a year. There’s still time to not think about that yet.