It was back to Malawi to do the final decommissioning of the server rooms and I.T. side of the various site offices we had in Malawi for a Railway project my company was involved in.
This basically meant the final backup of all the data off the servers, then shutting them down, packaging them up and shipping it all back to our Head Office in South Africa.
So it was a journey round the final 2 site offices and consolidate all the equipment at one office and do the backups - a long slow mind numbing job watching data copy off the servers onto external NAS drives (Network Attached Storage - for those of you interested in I.T) and then returning to South Africa with the data while the rest of the equipment following behind - a task that took many months due to incompetent customs bureaucracy.
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| Chileka Airport Blantyre |
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| First site office |
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| Accommodations being demolished |
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| Foundations of demolished accommodations |
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| Hill outside of the camp |
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| First Site Office |
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| Server before shutdown and packing |
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| 80 km of road to the next camp |
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| Section of the railway line |
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| Malawi bush |
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| Baobab tree |
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| Office at the second camp on my route |
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| Accommodations at the next camp |
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| My Bungalow |
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| View into the camp from accommodations |
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| Bungalow"s |
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| My palatial bungalow |
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| Corridor to my bungalow |
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| My "office" for 18 hours a day for nearly a week |
The highlight of my day was the meal times, this was not due to the fact that the food was so gastronomically excellent, it was a time to get away from my desk and do something different.
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| Canteen |
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| My equipment is packed and i'm ready to go...... |
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| What remained on site for the final close out - three data centers reduced to a couple of NAS drives |
And now for a public services announcement:
Malaria:
If any of you, dear readers, ever get the quaint idea to travel in Africa, and by this I don't mean South Africa, speak to your Doctor or travel clinic about Malaria.
During the project 2 of our staff got malaria and died, but that was not during my time there.
While I was there one of the staff got infected and I was treated at 2am in the morning to a first hand view of the effects of malaria, the fever and hallucinations the chap endured right through the night before I could get him medical attention.
Now you may ask why didn't I get him medical attention immediately - well we were nearly 100 kilometers out in the bush and the medical staff on duty were not available by phone, and the roads are far too dangerous for driving at night, so we sat it out until the following morning, with him alternately babbling, sweating and shivering .
He spent a couple of days in the clinic on a drip, and thankfully survived the ordeal.
Rule Number 1: Take your malaria tablets, use a bug repellant ALL DAY, sleep under a mosquito net at night.
Rule Number 2: Take your malaria tablets, use a bug repellant ALL DAY, sleep under a mosquito net at night.
Rule Number 3: Take your malaria tablets, use a bug repellant ALL DAY, sleep under a mosquito net at night.
Rule Number 4: If Rules 1 - 3 don't apply then ..... Take your malaria tablets, use a bug repellant ALL DAY, sleep under a mosquito net at night.
