Technological Jargon

David and I took lunch with Claudia at the "Voices for a Malaria-Free" office to discuss exactly what work I would be doing while here in Mali. For the past few days, I'd been working on a "Case for Change" (shoutout to you, Ashley Weber...stole that right from under you!) based on my initial assessment of communications at "Projet Keneya Ciwara II" and the interviews I'd been conducting in the office with the pillar 6 employees. The powerpoint itself was not anything difficult, but it had taken me a whole 2 work-days to make sure I had translated everything correctly to French. Turns out I can't just copy and paste from Google Translate.

The presentation basically ran through how the office works now: Monday meetings every now and then, informing the group of field visits when individuals are already on the way, etc.; to how the office could work more effectively and efficiently: having agendas for Monday meetings that should be held every Monday, discussing field visits in those meetings before they happen, and emailing out the key points of the meeting once it's concluded. Minor adjustments.

At the end, I also added a slide about options on how to increase information sharing with the other JHU CCP offices. I mentioned weekly or monthly newsletters or emails, but also included Facebook and Twitter options that provide platforms from which updates of the on-goings within the office can be published for all to see and visit regularly, even those in the U.S.

Teaching the yahoo.fr email system

From there, David -- a native Cameroonian who had not yet taken a serious interest in my powerpoint (albeit, it was on agendas) -- got out his pocketbook and pen and jotted a few things down...the wheels were turning. He then spoke up, "I am seeing that something you could be doing with our office is give presentations on different aspects of technology." Claudia and I both replied that it would be a great idea, and I started throwing out ideas like how to better maneuver Microsoft Word, Excel, and Powerpoint, how to manage emails, how to use Google, and so on.

David

"Yes, yes, this is all good. But it is the technological jargon that I do not understand. Take, for example, this SMS (text) I get from Madame Touré a few days ago. She used this other lingo, and it took me hours to discover that 'tjs' meant 'toujours."

Now David is a very well educated man, many simply call him "Doctor," and yet here he was asking me, in Mali as a practicum for my master in public health, to give a presentation on texting abbrevs. (abbreviations for all of you non-technologically savvy individuals).

While the aforementioned activities are not exactly what you'd consider public health work, it is considered systems strengthening within a public health program which will hopefully lead to long-term efficiency and worker productivity, and thus better the management of the Keneya Ciwara community health programs.