Computer Maintenance in Cameroon

On Friday I finally finished getting the lab in order. Eighteen PCs fixed, loaded, and ready to go for my Informatique de Base class (Basic Computing), which is theoretically supposed to start this week.
Now trying to fix up PCs in our cyber cafe (now out of commission as a cyber cafe but I've turned it into a second mini-lab for teaching). Thanks to Bill, I was able to get four used PCs through an organization run by a former Peace Corps volunteer here in Cameroon who's now a high school computer teacher. He has his students fix up donated computers and then every couple of years brings a shipment here to donate to Cameroonian schools and other institutions. (Thanks to Michael and all his students at West Ottawa High!)

So recently, I've been fixing computers like a fiend. OK, not sure how exactly a fiend would fix a computer, but I bet they would do it my way...

Computer maintenance here is a slow and laborious process. The machines we have are all old, mostly built from parts that have been scrounged together from wherever we could find them. Usually when one machine dies we can swap its parts into another machine, and so by cannibalizing bad machines we can put together a working system or two. Of course, because of the mix of different processors, motherboards, types of RAM, etc, this doesn't always work.

Figuring out what's wrong, hunting down replacement parts, then installing and testing them (and hoping they're not bad as well) is always a big pain in the neck.

And our machines require a lot of maintenance, in part because of their age, but more so because of the harsh environment here. Cameroon kills computer. It has 1) lots of heat 2) lots of humidity (in the rainy season) and 3) lots of dust (in the dry season), all of which are bad for computers. Air conditioning is not usually an option outside of some offices in the bigger cities, and certainly not at most schools.

The worst hazard for PCs here is the power though. Electricity is constantly going out, and when it comes back up the resulting power surge can often fry machines that were left plugged in. Ideally, all PCs should be hooked up to a voltage regulator and/or a UPS power backup (I managed to snag a few for my mini-lab thankfully), but again, given the lack of resources these are often unavailable. In that case, when the power goes out during class I have all my students unplug the machines immediately. This doesn't guarantee that they won't be damaged by normal fluctuations in voltage (since it's unstable even when the power is on) but at least it reduces the risk of damaging the machine when it comes back on.

And of course, very often the power goes out when I'm in the middle of fixing a PC or installing software, or teaching class, so it's just plain annoying as well.

Thinking back to my days in corporate America, I realize now that I was working in paradise from a maintenance standpoint: power was stable and every machine had a backup; the office was climate controlled; computers were pretty new; and if something did break, hey just send someone to OfficeMax to buy a replacement on the company's dime. Here if a part blows I have to go all the way to the capital city of Yaoundé (four to eight hours away) to replace it, assuming the school has the money to replace it, which they often don't.

Yes, in terms of computer maintenance, America is truly the land of milk and honey, with streets paved with gold-filled integrated circuits.

On the bright side, all of this has been keeping me busy. And if you like a challenge it is satisfying to finally get a battered old Pentium 166 running again so your students can at least use it to practice their mouse and keyboard skills.

Such is the nature of service as a Peace Corps Volunteer: you do the best you can with what you've got. As they used to say in Great Depression era America: "Use it up, wear it out, make it do, or do without."