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| Guatemalan Hospital to Run Linux |
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 Posted by Saint on Friday May 05, 2000 @ 06:38 PM
from the lasers-in-the-jungle dept.
Last Updated: 6/14/00: This whole article appeared on LinuxNews.com here after it was edited and pictures added by Michelle Head of LinuxNews.com You can read the final installment Day 14: On the Wings of Victory and the entire travelog in the forum section by clicking Read Me...and scrolling down. Digg this article
Cheerio friends, it is travel time. I'm off to Antigua, Guatemala where I will be installing a RedHat Linux based hospital network in Antigua's all-volunteer Hermano Pedro hospital, traveling with a missionary medicine group Faith in Practice. Former Whataburger computers running OS/2 gave up their souls to run the network which was built in my house and shipped down last week. I'm
planning on running Freemed and will give a trip report upon my return (unless I 'go native') in two weeks. I may be off the net for awhile, however, cutting edge, high-tech www.LinuxMedNews.com can be remotely administered so if there is a way, I'll get to it. Meanwhile, Captain Fantastic will be stepping in for me if
I crash and burn over the Gulf of Mexico. If any funny stuff appears on LMN, it is him not me.
All the best, may medicine be freed of its bondage through open source!
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Day 1: Live from Hermano Pedro Hospital!
by Saint on Sunday May 07, 2000 @ 04:03 PM
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We are live from Hermano Pedro hospital in Antigua Guatemala. The hospital was built in 1680 and I'm writing this outside of the surgical suite which has stone arches to my right and a door opening onto a garden courtyard on my left. The first order of business will be to run Class 5 cabling throughout the building which by the looks of it will be tough going because everything seems to be made of stone. However, there is modern lighting and phone cabling so they did it somehow. I've inspected the trunks full of the computers and they appear to be unscathed by the trip down. But they still smell of Whataburger...
But first vacation time for this week since my full time missionary work doesn't start until next week. While thinking about the network topology, I've been undertaking such strenuous activities as sipping a local fruit drink: Rosas de Jamaica. The local street vendors unfortunately know my wife by name now. -- Saint
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Day 2: Network Topology and Coffee Farm
by Saint on Monday May 08, 2000 @ 08:51 PM
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I met with Joe Wiatt today, a board member of Faith in Practice which is the Houston-based group we are doing missionary medicine with. He is here this month making sense out of chaos. As I mentioned before, the network wire is going to be a tough run through the hospital which is an aggregate of buildings built over 320 years. We decided to punt the job of running the network cabling to a local engineer who has more time, tools and expertise with Hermano Pedro to do it. It looks like we are going to setup the server and a client in the administrative offices, 1 client in central supply, and two in the surgery suite. We brought a cheapo Link-Sys router along which I tested in Houston, but unless we want to run two cables to the administrative area we are going to try to buy another router here locally so that we can have a single four wire cable running to the administrative area.
Not all is sweat and grunt work today. We toured a beautiful little coffee plantation run by Dr. Alfred G. Thompson who has a colorful past as a school principle, University professor and now empressario of the Los Nietos coffee farm in a little hamlet outside of Antigua. A former garbage dump, Thompson bought it in the last years of the Guatemalan Civil War in 1991. He has built a beautiful refuge full of flowers and coffee plants. I'm not much of a coffee drinker, but the smooth flavor of his pure beans was something even I could appreciate. The place was full of hospitality and good taste. Highly recommended. Tomorrow, I may play a little hooky from Spanish language school to semi-direct or confuse the engineer about the network wire runs. Until then, hasta luego.
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Day 4: Engineering Guatemalan-Style and Antigua
by Saint on Thursday May 11, 2000 @ 01:31 PM
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I am here in an Internet Cafe with my Spanish Instructor Herbert Leopold who is here beside me learning how to use hotmail. This week my wife and I are taking Spanish classes with Tecun Uman, one of the many language schools here in Antigua. Antigua is visited by people from all over the world who come here for its colonial charm and its Spanish language schools. We spend four hours each morning with an individual Spanish instructor. The afternoon is free, but I have been stopping by Hermano Pedro hospital to arrange network cabling.
The network topology is as follows: The server and one client will be in the diagnostic clinic, with three more clients in the anesthesia, surgery and supply area respectively. We are using a star topology because we have only one 8 port Link-Sys router, so some of the wires will be duplicated.
We quickly decided that by myself the job would be too large to run the network cable, so Faith in Practice hired a local electrical engineer familiar with Hermano Pedro Hospital and three assistants. We planned the run around conduits that already existed in the hospital. The last meters are going to be the most difficult. With the planning done, they went to work and I will be checking on their progress for the rest of the week.
Meanwhile, we have been touring Antigua, which has the historical advantage or disadvantage of having frequent earthquakes. The city was abandoned as the capital in the 1770s and was moved to Guatemala City. The ruins of the city were relatively untouched since that time and with restorations and laws passed to protect its colonial character, the city has a colonial feel to it that is unique. The climate is agreeable and the view of the nearby volcanoes are spectacular which is probably why the capital remained in Antigua for approximately 200 years despite earthquakes and floods.
Guatemala is known for its native crafts, from beautiful hand-woven cloth to carved figures. Street vendors offer a wide variety of goods and unfortunately know my wife by name.
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Day 5: Server is up and Music Museum
by Saint on Friday May 12, 2000 @ 07:03 PM
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The day began with our last day at the Spanish language school Tecun Uman. The students were not so in the mood to go over irregular verbs this Friday so at the break, a little revolution occurred and we all walked to a nearby museum of traditional Guatemalan musical instruments and music. Think marimba. Think marimba made out of gourds.
Afterwards, we bid a fond farewell to our instructors who went along on our excursion and returned to our room behind the beauty shop that we call home. After a tasty meal of spicy Pepian soup and a siesta, I met with Leo the electrician under ladders and wires. They are making good progress and will have at least one or two links ready by Saturday. Sunday will be impossible to work more because several hundred patients will be present for pre-surgical triage.
I then tore open the cardboard box containing the server 'Cielo' and proceeded to set it up the server in the diagnostic area in order to demo it to Joe Wiatt of Faith in Practice. It survived the journey without a scratch and RedHat Linux 6.2 which I had installed and configured in Houston came up without a hitch. Tomorrow I will attempt to add some clients and printers and begin adapting it to the needs of Hermano Pedro Hospital.
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Day 8: Intraoperating and Mariposario.
by Saint on Monday May 15, 2000 @ 09:01 PM
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I write this while my wife is eating banana bread from Dona Luisa's. She is about to drop, having spent a day out in the field. Between four providers, 250 patients were seen in a 6 hour period. I'll be out in the field with her tomorrow at a very remote area doing general practice and I'll be checking in tomorrow evening on LMN for tales of the day. Little computer work will be done tomorrow.
It was a good weekend, we toured a 'Mariposario' which is a butterfly reserve in which a large area of forest is enclosed by netting and chrysalises are incubated and the butterflies released. Beautiful.
I started full-time today on the computers at Hermano Pedro hospital. I've got two client machines 'juan' and 'marco' and the server 'cielo' up and running. Unfortunately two Windows machines already existed in the hospital, so I have to explain a lot that Linux is not Windows, but it will do most of the same things Windows will do with more security. Already there is some pressure to change over to Windows, I've had to dual-boot one Linux machine in order to allow them to use an MS Access database that was on a slow laptop. It is obvious that Linux will have to intraoperate with these Windows machines. After Tuesday out in the fields, I'll be back to get them all stitched together and get Freemed running. I'll report on the reaction to Linux and Freemed when I get it all going.
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Day 10: In the Arena
by Saint on Wednesday May 17, 2000 @ 09:28 PM
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It has been two days of ups and downs. Tuesday we went to a very remote village in the Guatemalan jungle in which I saw my first real cases of malnutrition. Guatemala is a place of much poverty, and the village we visted had extreme poverty, people living in tinroof shacks with no plumbing or electricity. We treated approximately 300 people in 6 hours. Afterwards we took pictures, loaded the four wheel drive vehicles and started back in time for a downpour that swelled the rivers. We unloaded everyone from the trucks into a beat-up Toyota bus.
There where no bridges in this remote area, and we had one tense moment in which the bus stalled halfway out of the river. It started up again, fortunately. The next river presented an interesting quandry: We traversed a river on a narrow road, only to have to stop because a bus was coming from the other way. We didn't want to back up because our back wheels where at the rivers edge. To complicate the matter, there was a pickup truck on the same side of the road which made us unable to move forward. Perhaps I should mention that the pickup truck was carrying bee hives with bees. The bus tried to move forward, couldn't because there was a large stone blocking one wheel and bees where flying into their bus and ours! Fortunately, one of the passengers of the other bus figured out why we where yelling and pointing down at their front wheels, jumped out with bees in pursuit, removed the obstruction and everyone moved out quick!
Today was a very long day in which the network decided to loose its marbles. Nothing that previously worked would come online. It took four hours to figure out that one of the plastic connectors had worked loose with pulling and jostling and was creating intermittent failures. I replaced the connector and everything worked. In addition, we are hampered here by a slow modem connection to the Internet and everyone wants to get their e-mail and do other work on the machines I have setup which makes me have to wait to configured the machines until they find a stopping place. In addition, I frequently have to translate Spanish and deal with constant interruptions of the show me how to do this variety. It is a tough environment and I must admit that I almost lost it when I tried to print sticky labels for vitamins in an HP Deskjet printer which jammed by the labels coming off the wax paper, creating a stuck on mess deep in the printer. 20 minutes of picking with tools failed to clear it and I simply gave up.
Time is running short and while I've made progress, I think that many things will be left undone when I leave Sunday. This is a low point. I go out into the villages again to do medicine tomorrow, so I think I'll be more upbeat Friday.
What remains is getting Samba to work with the Windows machines, networking one more machine, getting Freemed working and ensuring that I can get a remote access session going.
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Final Day 14: On the Wings of Victory
by Saint on Sunday May 21, 2000 @ 09:26 PM
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The Journey is at an end.
I write this from my comfortable home in Houston, Texas with my Chihuahua Cindy in my lap and a table full of old mail. Seven hours ago, I was making my way through the usual hundreds strong crowd of patients waiting for surgery triage at Hermano Pedro hospital.
So many sights, so many thoughts have gone by. Wednesday, Day 10 was a low point, nothing was working. Faith in Practice members kept coming up to me saying: 'Are you okay?' so the pressure must have been showing. The next day I went out on a village trip to San Martin Jilotepeque doing general medicine among the indigenous people's. Very fulfilling, so I hit Thursday's computing tasks full steam. I moved Cielo the server over to Surgery to take advantage of the phone line they use for the Internet.
That move proved to be the turning point. I got it connected to the ISP in minutes. Others noticed my browsing the Internet. The former ambivalence of my 'It isn't Windows?' computers dissolved into approval as they saw the familiar Netscape browser working. The team members who no longer had to kick the surgery secretary off her Windows machine everytime they wanted e-mail were for the first time enthusiastic about my hocus-pocus activities.
Things really fell into place. Lucas went up smoothly in the diagnostic clinic. Remote printing was also enabled from Lucas in a short time, as well as getting StarOffice available and configured for the secretaries there.
I only had one day of work left on Saturday, Day 13. Time was running short.
The Franciscan priest in charge of Hermano Pedro, Father Jose, had noticed my activity and wondered what this gentleman who seemed to be wearing a hole through the tile floor between surgery and diagnostics was doing. He is a charming Italian man, a mixture of sadness, gentleness and strength born of 29 years of service during the Civil Wars in Guatemala and El Salvador. Truly a holy man. We went to his office in the archaic building and I mapped out the network I had built and the three computing missions that should be (and were being) accomplished: 1) Expedite patient surgery scheduling and begin building for eventual electronic patient records. 2) Provide office computing support, including inventory. 3) Internet access. He had ideas for the computers which where near identical to my own and he seemed enthusiastic about the posibilities. I told him about Freemed with its browser-based approach. He liked the idea. I came away happy to work for him and his ancient hospital.
Saturday found me in the hospital at sunrise for the sole purpose of getting Freemed working. I had actually failed in getting it up on Cielo in Houston and I was anxious to find what the problem was. I shouldn't have worried. In 30 minutes I found that httpd was pointing at the wrong directory for php3 pages, changed it and bingo, we had Freemed.
Finally! one of the major reasons for me to come to Guatemala was actually working. That afternoon I showed Freemed to the team and Father Jose. They were impressed by the Linux-based mini-Internet running in their hospital. Freemed with its browser-based approach truly showed the full power of what Linux and open-source could do. With StarOffice and web-browsing in place, everything was running on all cylinders.
The new mission team for the week showed up at about the same time, bringing two Wake-On-LAN cards that I had requested for Cielo and the Windows side server. I got them both in and configured in record time, sprinting out the door in order to be with my lovely wife for dinner. I will declare in a loud voice that Linux was superior in the LAN card swap and I'll have a separate article on the technical merits of each OS in the near future.
I came in early Sunday morning to re-test and fix any minor glitches. There where many fond farewells. Father Jose as well as some of the team members staying on expressed consternation about my leaving them alone with this new beast.
As for me, my concerns were far away. I felt light as a feather. This odessey which began 5 months ago pulling dirty restaurant computers out of a warehouse and ending in a medieval hospital of a poverty stricken Central American country was over. In only two weeks the hospital had taken a long step forward in its ability to serve the grindingly poor inhabitants of Guatemala.
My wife and I boarded a refurbished old US school bus to start our journey home. The street vendors were pushing their wares even up to the last moment. To me they were archangels in a spiritual land and in the chugging bus I felt carried away on the wings of victory.
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