Africa from the rooftops

If you have a look at the page “Where I’ve been” you will see that I have traveled in most of Sub Saharan Africa. I travel in Africa for work, which is installing advertisement monitoring systems for one of my customers.

Because the systems monitor radio and television broadcasts there is always an antenna involved in the installation. Hence the title of this post “Africa from the rooftops” because the Antenna always sits on top of the roof and I get to climb up to make sure in is installed properly.

In the next few weeks I will post my experiences in the various countries I visited. Hopefully it will not make you throw your hands up in despair, like I very often wanted to do. Technical work and specifically internet related work is really frustrating in Africa. The reward however is going to places where your friends will never go and of course seeing them (the places, not your friends) from the rooftops, very often the highest building in the city.

In most cases people are really keen to help you out and support you, but the resources are just limited. Try to ping 196.201.4.42 a machine in malawi to see what I mean. Doing remote maintenance is like wading through tar.

My first trip for one of these installations was relatively tame to Lesotho but the next one involved getting into the Ivory Coast without a visa. To find out how to end up in that mess watch this space.

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