Making IT Where There Is (Almost) None: More On Haiti

Back in April of this year, I was part of a group that went to Haiti to work with a Haitian educational institution to rebuild its IT operations after the January 2010 earthquake that devastated the country. What I discovered is that there isn’t a lot to rebuild, and the creation of an IT environment largely from scratch is what is really needed. In a couple of weeks I’ll be returning to the island nation with three pallets worth of gear and a mountain of challenges to overcome that we typically don’t deal with in the comfy IT spaces of the developed world.

Before we talk technical, a quick overview is in order. I’m working with a multicampus higher education organization in Haiti that has about a dozen sites in the greater Port-au-Prince area. The city of Port-au-Prince can be thought of loosely as half of a bowl, curving up from the sea to the mountains above the city. When the quake struck, the bowl was horribly broken. The contents of the bowl--including people, buildings, vehicles, and a fragile IT and communications infrastructure--were hit hard, with tremendous loss of life and property.

Back to my mission. During my first visit, I learned that the many campuses that make up the Haitian organization that I’m working with had very little IT to begin with. There is no resource sharing among the sites, and across the sites a chaotic patchwork of 1-Mbps-or-less Internet feeds provides small pockets of Internet access to individual offices or very small learning labs. Being an ISP is big business in the poorest country in the western hemisphere, and WiMax seems to be the preferred way of delivering network. Most links feed from an impressive tower site above the city down toward the lowlands, where smaller towers and masts are literally everywhere. To the eye, the sprawl of antennas and towers is visual chaos, and it is hard as an outsider to understand why there are so many low-speed links.

The organization that my group is working with realizes that the status quo is not only an obstacle to getting its educational mission back on track, but also keeps it from the efficiencies of shared resources and modern educational tools and network-enabled distance collaborations.Ultimately, as part of the final solution, I hope to run Bridgewave microwave links down the mountain to a few individual campuses. From there, we’d interconnect the remaining campuses as it made sense with 5 GHz wireless bridges, and then provide WLAN and Ethernet on each campus.

But this sort of achievement takes a lot of groundwork, discovery and planning, even before the other IT-types of problems are considered. Among these problems are an extremely unreliable power grid, no public IP space allotted to our partner organization, no real IT staff on the Haitian end to work with, language barriers, the need to be in and around buildings that may still be unsafe, extreme heat, hurricane season and the logistical challenges of being productive in a foreign country where getting around can be difficult.

During the coming outing, which is likely to be one of several required to reach the goals of the project, the idea is to put some stakes in the ground to build from later. If all goes well, we will install a pair of donated Bluesocket gateways as the head end to the network. I hope to install a Cisco Ethernet switch and several access points on up to four campuses, and to interconnect them all with wireless bridge links. (Of course, all of this is also reliant on carving out some sort of suitable IT equipment space on each campus.) We may also turn up a couple of ESX servers, and will devise a power solution on site to combat the fickleness of the Port-au-Prince electrical system.

On this trip, we have little choice but to use an existing low-speed ISP feed, but eventually we’ll get better dual feeds delivered to the tower site to work into the topology to really enable things like distance learning. We’ll also do training on system use and monitoring, and will help our hosts to start growing their own IT support environment and to understand how to leverage the value of a network that spans multiple campuses.

An initiative like this really makes you appreciate the comfort and stability of your own lifestyle and IT environment. It also makes you think well outside of your comfort zone and tap your inner McGyver to overcome obstacles that simply don’t exist for most of us. There will certainly be more to tell on this project in several weeks, so stick around.