The Real Show

Ola Amigo…

Finally it was the time for the real show, the real test for our idea, implementation, and last eight months of coding hard work that we pulled off as senior year students in Drexel. We went on the real field to test our software. We finally had the real users, the healthcare workers and patients. The day started with in house random testing. We realized that the format of the message changed every time we forwarded a message from smartphone to non-smartphone. We sent some messages for testing the system and off course now what else can go wrong?  Mcell (the phone carrier in Mozambique) decided not to work. Alright… back to the server, we checked, everything was good on our end. What the heck was wrong then? Why were we not getting the confirmation message from the system. And finally after three hours of struggle and chaos, all of a sudden Mcell sent us four messages together. Yay!! Thanks Mcell for remembering that some messages were in queue that took three hours to show up. Okay so now we are off to the location for testing. Here comes the actual stage, Mucamba Feha. The first message sent. After 2 minutes, Ahh.. maan 2 minutes .. No reply from the system yet.. Damm. This was the final testing we were doing right at the location before the healthcare workers had to do it, right after the introduction of the project. This time the data was not going to the database. What could it be.. a technical bug? Possibly. Counselor spelled as counsolor...a typo. I must say Tamanna is good at catching these errors .Tarika almost got a heart attack with her fingers crossed obviously. And finally one more message… and the phone beeps… New Message…“Obrigado! As informacoes foram salvas em nosso banco de dados.” with the information also saved in the database.  In English “Thank you! Your information has been saved in our database”.  

And by the way, it is not over yet. In Mucamba Feha, people mostly use movitel and not Mcell, another phone carrier in Mozambique. But Movitel does not allow sending messages internationally. Also, the healthcare workers did not have any balance at all in their phones, the financial status of the people there was not good. We kept on thinking and thinking, brainstorming for a solution to this problem and finally we found one. We decided to make a Mcell phone number in Mozambique a central number that the healthcare workers can send messages to for free. This solved problems, sending messages internationally and no balance in the phones. Then we taught the healthcare workers how to type the message, the format. The important part of it was explaining them the format in “Portuguese”. Really….Wait, Miguel how does we say this in Portuguese… “Put coma (,) before you send it”. We know, our Portuguese is a disaster. Thanks Miguel for being our reliable teacher and a translator in the whole process. They all send it to Mcell number and we forwarded the message internationally from there. What a relief… and the first real field Beta Test of Connect the Dots project was after all a success.

This first day on real field experience taught us many things. First, please learn Portuguese if you want to speak. Second, the important one………..make the fucking format easier so that people can actually type it with non-smart phones. So the next target, improve the message format. Remove the double quotes (“ “). In addition, this trip was pretty fun with Miguel, Elfie (Missionary Nurse) and the way through the bumpy road. Can’t forget Elfie holding a huge cockroach in her hand and trying to scare Dhairya…he is a pretty good actor. How come you are a CEO of a company and not an actor D?

We will be back with more updates soon, lot of work to do with very less time left in Mozambique. 

Ate logo…

(See you later! )