MobileActive Convergence: PreConference, Meeting Bukeni Waruzi

Today, the first person I bumped into when I walked into the lobby of the hotel was none other than Bukeni Waruzi of the Democratic Republic of the Congo. You can see one of the things he is involved in here - A Duty to Protect: Justice for Child Soldiers in the DRC. Watch the movie. You'll see Bukeni in it. Great work. In fact, he was a bit surprised that I knew who he was, and that I could recognize him.¹

We eventually bumped into each other as I was returning from my coffee run², and we exchanged room numbers. He was off to find batteries for his camera and tape recorder.

When he returned, he knocked on the door - I offered him some coffee after the first few minutes, because we were busy chatting and I'm a geeky host. We had a problem discussing his want for recording video - and I came to realize how odd the use of the word 'video' is in English. What you see on your monitor is actually video - snapshots. Yet we use the same word to describe 'moving pictures'. This lead to some discussion about my involvement with Cultural ICT - specifically Cardicis. Very cool.

The next thing you know, we're up on the Wikipedia and showing each other things about our own regions of the world. We looked briefly at Trinidad and Tobago, Guyana, Suriname, and French Guiana. He was pretty satisfied with the Wikipedia entry on Democratic Republic of the Congo. I noted it wasn't available in Swahili, and hinted that he should probably do that... but I found he had something more to teach me.

He's from Sud-Kivu - and he has to cross the national border to go to Burundi for internet access. There's no internet access where he lives, and it costs him about $2 U.S. to get the paperwork to cross the border, plus transportation... and $1 U.S. in that part of the world is a lot. He also told me that the capital, Kinshasa, is on the Western side of the Democratic Republic of the Congo - and he lives on the far eastern border. It would cost him $1,000 to travel from one end of the country to the other³ - he's never been to Kinshasa (and I don't blame him at that cost!!). There's a wake up call.

In fact, to get here, he crossed the border into Burundi and flew out of there.

Where he lives, there are no land lines. Everyone uses cell phones. And one of the projects he works with includes routing messages to the authorities when there are problems in villages - very similar to ARC, but without using SMS for the most part. This is a people-network, and is a very core way to do a network - a core which is lost on most geeks.

At 8:30 p.m., the entire convergence should be down at the outside pool to meet each other... But I think Bukeni has set the tone for me already. I'm hungry to hear more about the issues that other people are contending with.

I mean... imagine having to cross a border so you can access the Internet. That's a definite Digital Divide.

¹ Of course, I read a lot more than I write and my scope of reading is a bit larger than most people, and while people have been paying attention to where the media points them to, I like to look where nobody looks. The blind spots, I find, are most interesting.
² Hotels that leave coffee makers in the room leave inadequate amounts of coffee, cream substitute and sugar. Thus, when faced with this, I go find a store with coffee and other things. In this case, I actually bought some sugar from Guyana in the store here in Canada. The best sugar in the world, brown, unrefined...
³ Interior flights.