I guess hopelessness is one of the paradigmatic (new word maybe..) emotions of the trip out here to India. Looking at the bigger picture there's so much corruption and sub-cultural issues that need overcoming before change can happen at a wider scale that it soon becomes overwhelming. That's exactly why we focus on 'One child at a time' - to keep plugging away at individuals and finding solace in knowing that their lives have been positively affected by standing up and fighting for them.

For me, the feeling of hopelessness comes about during some pretty painful 'eureka' moments. One such example that when a lady has been raped, and has kept the child. Their 'euphemism' for the situation is that her husband left her when she found out she was pregnant. Such a statement is still a cause for much stigma, but less so than the truth. That so many women have to face the trauma of rape, and attempt to come to terms with it without the support of even their closest friends. I find that pretty hard to take, especially when we only recently realised that particular story was a euphemism, and have met countless kids who have repeated the same story to us ad verbatim.

These people need support and people to stand up for them so that they can get the support they deserve.  Whilst I sat back at home and watched TV or wasted time at the snooker club, there were people here facing such horrible situations, and many of them have not survived.  It's a pretty big pill to swallow, realising that I could have done something to help these people, and through my own forced ignorance and inflated self-worth, decided that money was better spent elsewhere.

I'm pretty sure that in future I'll still waste money that could have been used for a better cause, but at least now I'll think twice.  I just hope that by doing the work out here that I get other people at home to also think about where their time and effort gets spent.

One of the things I really like about our effort out here, is that I know exactly where the money getting donated gets spent, and I have full confidence in our accounting and ethical stance regarding the spending.  If you'd like to get involved, there's so much coming up that I'd like to do.  For the geek crowd, let me know if any of you have any ideas.  There are so many parallel problems to be drawn between open source volunteering and charitable volunteering, such as taking advantage of the long tail .etc.

Get back to me with comments.  Thanks.

I thought I'd put this one out to the blog to see if anyone can offer me advice.

I'm trying to work out the best way to share files between 2 Macs, 1 Ubuntu box, and 3 XP machines.

Initially, I thought a central NAS drive would make sense, however, because of the need for backup (and the lack of a decent internet connection) - backing up remotely is going to be too costly.

My next thought was that the clients should sync the NAS locally, as to avoid disaster should the NAS be unavailable/broken. I'm using Ubuntu ONE - and something like this would be useful, providing I could run it on my local network w/out internet connection.

I've also looked at iFolder (by Novell) but haven't got time to waste trying to get it to work and play nice..

So if anyone can offer me some advice, I'm ready to take it.

I have a Buffalo LinkStation acting as my NAS at the moment, but it's simply serving a USB-attached 320GB Drive.

I was pretty impressed when I heard about Movember - a competition which begins with a shave on the 31st October, followed by a month-long growing marathon, and topped off with a local event in your area.

Being a bit 'off the path' in India, I was already growing a Mo, and it turns out I did it just at the right time to help kick-start a friend's team's 'Movember' build-up.

Take a look here!

Of course there is a serious issue behind all this baloney.  It's about raising the awareness in Men that they need to care about their health too - hopefully by reading this it'll make you think twice about your own health.. so GROW THAT MO! and setup your team.  Ubuntu teams would be nice, as I already know a few facial hair growers.. just beware of BEARD DANDRUFF!!

Despite the title, this isn't a meme that's going round some planets, but a short reflection on the last three weeks.

I've been back in India since the 13th August, and despite massive anxiety in the run up to coming out, I've settled in better than I thought I ever would. I've been welcomed back into my home in Thrissur, and have had three awesome volunteers come out so far - all of whom have contributed fantastically to the cause.

What am I doing out in India?

The main aim of my trip to India is to look at how the skills I have can help increase the speed of administration for the Doctors working for the charity I'm helping to support. In a word I'm trying to use my IT skills to create easy-to-use systems which should hopefully enable the charity to operate with a lower admin overhead. If I was still in the UK business world, I'd call it "Integrating legacy systems across multiple co-operative organisations." Out here the legacy application is paper-based forms, and I don't just have to integrate them, but for many of the people I'm working with, it just isn't possible to upgrade to IT systems.

One of the things at the forefront of my mind is that IT is not an answer - it's just a solution to a small slice of the pie I'm attempting to eat. Luckily I'm working alongside two skilled paedeatrictions who have a real heart for the children we're caring for. Since getting back I've been to visit the following children:

Edi - A 12 year old boy with Cerebral Paulsy who lives in a house atop a 16 foot cliff. To travel anywhere his Mum has to carry him down, but now he is too big for her to carry. Sentenced to a life at home, Edi cannot get the exercise he needs to keep his muscles from wasting. Thus the vicious circle continues.
My role was to work out a way to enable Edi to get down the cliff. Despite our first option being to get the child moved to a new location; land prices made that prohibitive. Instead we decided to design a ramp, to go parallel to the cliff which Edi could walk down. Once I'd designed the ramp, the implications of installing it and practical considerations (maintenance, vandalism .etc) it was no longer feasible. I'm now trying to raise money to help Edi move house.
Jenny and Sarah - Two sisters whose house gets flooded year by year during the monsoon. A few years back, the local church raised their house to avoid it being flooded. This is working well, but both girls and parents were suffering with asthma related illness. They also have a few goats provided by a micro-finance initiative; these were also causing the children breathing difficulties when they were too close. We visited the girls and provided them with Sabutamol inhaler, spacer, and some anti-histamines to relief the itching.
A Mercy Home - The Mercy Homes are the main charity that the one I'm volunteering for is linked with out in India. It's a fantastic organisation where rather than put children into orphanages, the children are put into a family-based home with a pastor and his wife. We visited a couple of homes and played cricket with a few of the children. Having people pop in to visit them is an experience that very few of the children get. It was also an opportunity for us to check out whether there were any obvious illnesses and make sure that those children on long term medication had been taking it correctly whilst we were away.

I've also been pretty ill. I managed to avoid it last time I came out to India, but this time I got the Dehli-belly pretty bad. I was laid low for 6 days, and managed to lose over 7kg. The food here is awesome though, so I was really missing out. Luckily the illness passed with some immodium and anti-biotics, and despite submitting a little 'sample' to a local laboratory, we never got to the bottom (excuse the pun) of what actually caused it. I'm good now though!

So that's been the trip so far. I'm also working on digitising all the records of children in the Mercy Homes, and having a system whereby paper-based forms submitted to the charity can be backed-up for reference in a local database. It's pretty rewarding work, as all the software that I've used is still open source stuff. I'm trying to get more involved in django, and I feel like I'm learning more about it very fast. It always felt to me when I was working in Open Source that I was somehow at the wrong side of the equation. Now working for the charity, I can get them the direct benefit of me being here to support it 24/7.

So that's it so far. I'm planning on going to spend a couple of days at a Tribal Mission Hospital in Tamil Nadu - it's a pretty inspirational story, but I'll share that with you in the next post I do. Thanks for all of you who have been supporting me with your words and thoughts - and also thanks to the many techies on IRC who've been helping me with the IT stuff. I couldn't do it without you.

It's as easy as two commands

cd /usr/lib/chromium-browser/plugins/

then

sudo ln -s ../../flashplugin-installer/libflashplayer.so

Then restart chromium and you're away.

These instructions are just the same as the original.. originally from here!