Sometimes you win some and sometimes you lose some….

The last two days have been “one of those days”. When our equipment finally arrived at the CAMEJO clinic in Leogane it was time to get an Internet connection into the campus there and to build out the network. The clinic is currently working out of prefabs with work going on to rebuild the original structure. Below are tow pictures illustrating the final plan and the current condition of the structure that is being rebuild.



 

Obviously the work that is currently going on in the prefab structures would benefit significantly from having Internet access & a functioning computer network. As they say themselves:

So we set about contacting a number of the ISP’s operating in Haiti to find out what service they offered, what the costs would be and lastly if their service covered the area where the CAMEJO clinic was. As was my experience in the last year or so this wasn’t easy. First of all for whatever reason 9 out 10 times that I try to make a call to a Haitian number from Ireland I get an automated messages that the number is not available. Instead I sent of a number of emails to a few Haitian ISP’s and we received a few quotes back. The first quote received was $1000 for a 1Mb connection and a $500 install fee. Pretty pricey but that was to be expected as it’s a sellers market. I bit more negotiating led to a reasonable $250 quote.

The next point was one of speed, our main guy on-site (Jodel) was flying back to the USA on Sunday so we needed to have the installation done before then. The whole day of Friday went by in a flurry of emails, tweets, phone-calls and DM’s while also having someone on-site at CAMEJO with cash to pay for the install. By that evening (9 pm GMT) we finally had an arrangement that the installer would call out on Saturday to do install the equipment and connect the clinic to the Internet. Seeing that we had been working towards this for the last 6 months you can hopefully imagine my excitement.

So I spent most of Saturday waiting for the news that the installation had been completed and that the clinic was connected. It was nearly midnight here in Ireland before I got my first message; apparently the engineer had cancelled the appointment because the network in the whole area was down.

*take head and bang on desk repeatedly*…..

Anyway, we have a new attempt scheduled for coming Wednesday. I will post any news here.