Back in Ghana: Home, Sweet Home?

After 4+ months of nonstop travel, I'm finally back in Ghana for more than a week at a time. Home, sweet home, eh? It's a strange feeling being back. It's strange to be anywhere for more than a few days, but strange here especially. I remember when I left back in mid-November. I went out to a local jazz club the night before and met a few new expat friends. "Will be you be my insta-friend?" one girl asked who was still new to Ghana. That's how it had been. In the months leading up to this massive trip, I had met so many people from all around the world, and none of us knowing anyone else all became fast friends. Some of those friendships became full relationships and others remained fleeting acquaintances, but when I left, I left a life behind. Settling in again some 19 weeks later, I realize the life I left no longer exists.

The Black Waters of Makoko

The waters of Makoko ran black, luminous, like oil. Large swaths of the land were littered with trash, and the ground sank beneath you with each step. We were in one of Lagos’s notorious water slums, built on stilts above the Lagos Lagoon and populated by the poor and desperate. Some eighty or ninety thousand people live this way.

When I had told my friends in Ghana that I was planning to visit Nigeria, the reactions I got were almost the same. “Good luck, man; I hope you come back,” one said, only half-jokingly. I had been living in Ghana a few months already; how different could Nigeria really be?

Voice: The Obvious and Yet Unutilized Tool for the Web in the Developing World

Practitioners of technology in the developing world have long accepted that the "normal" ways of interacting with the Internet, the ways that we Westerners have become accustomed to, don't always apply in the developing world. Mobile is a central and critical aspect to any well thought out technological offering for the developing context. At Google, we focus on it relentlessly. The numbers are clear: mobile penetration outstrips traditional Internet penetration by at least an order of magnitude in Africa. This picture becomes even more revealing when we look at the types of phones that people have. The majority of African mobile users don't own smart phones or even feature phones; the majority rely on phones with only basic calling and messaging services like SMS and MMS. So if we're going to reach the vast majority of Africans, we need to focus there. To this effect, a lot of work has been done around SMS. Google has launched its Health and Agriculture Tips, for instance, but SMS has a number of serious contextual limitations: illiteracy, lack of functional literacy, and local languages not supported by phone keyboards. But there's also another route that hasn't been so explored: What about voice? What about voice as a tool for interacting with the Internet?

Political Turmoil and the Internet in Africa

On December 17, a young Tunisian college grad, frustrated by his inability to find a job and the harassment he received from the police, publicly set himself on fire and, in effect, set off an explosive chain of events that would change the political landscape of his country forever. In just the last few months, there has been an unprecedented surge in the continent's political instability. The dictator of Tunisia has been ousted; the former president of Cote d'Ivoire hanging onto his post despite calls from a united international community to step down, and the most recent anti-government riots in Egypt calling for the resignation of the country's leader. Technology has played an pivotal role in each of these situations, whether by its innovative use, as a tool for governmental oppression, or by its notable absence. 

Atop the Great Firewall of China

When I was in Shanghai last month, one of the first things to hit me was just how prevalent Internet censorship is in China. Dubbed the Great Firewall, China's Internet restriction policies are widespread and, arguably, the most extensive in the world. In fact, one of the main reasons there were no new blog posts from that period was because Blogger is blocked. For that matter, so is Facebook, Twitter, and a whole host of other commonly used online tools. Speaking of Facebook, someone from my old team there created a stunning data visualization of Facebook friendships around the world that illustrate the Great Firewall quite well.

As many commentators have pointed out, there's an awfully glaring hole in this world map: China's nowhere to be seen. In addition to general censorship of the Internet, China also employs a small army of "Internet police", rumored to number over 50,000, who "guide discussion" in online forums, or to put it more bluntly, disseminate propaganda. The government also monitors the Internet activity of individual citizens, specifically ones suspected of dissidence. To this point, Amnesty International points out that China has actually imprisoned more journalists and cyber-dissidents than any other country in the world. As an American, I have to admit it was quite jarring to all of a sudden not have the same liberties that I've grown up with. I wonder how the actual inhabitants of the country come to deal with the restrictions or if they even have an impact on people's day to day lives. Perhaps I'll just have to go back to find out for myself...

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Year in Review: A Look Back at 2010

365 days, 8,760 hours, 525,600 minutes, one year. To think, if it weren't for a few natural laws, these numbers would be nothing more than that, just numbers. And yet, we each use these constants to measure the progress of our lives. How much have we grown in the past year? How much have our lives changed? In a way, I'm grateful for this cyclic nature of life -- it forces us at certain intervals to step and reflect.

Growing up, my plans for the future only ever went up to the year 2010, and even that always seemed impossibly far away. 2010: The year I would graduate college, the year I would enter this "real world" I had heard so much about, the year I would be forced to be independent, and in many ways, the year I would have to say goodbye to those last vestiges of childhood. Sounds kind of terrifying, doesn't it? Well it was. 2010 was a year of many emotions: fear, yes, but also love, wonder, happiness, anxiety, and so many others.

Just before January 1 of last year, I found a present for myself in a random bookstore in New York. It was a five-year journal. Each page is assigned a day of the year, and seven lines of each page is allotted to each of the five years. (Complete the first seven lines on each page in your first year, start from the beginning going through the second seven lines, and so on.) I knew that the year ahead would be one of the most memorable of my life, and so I've been very persistent at keeping up with it, bringing it with me everywhere I travel, and even defying the laws of my personal nature by not losing it. It chronicles a number of monumental experiences that this last year has encompassed: exploring eastern Europe with Robyn, living atop a bookstore in Paris, visiting friends in the UK, spring break in Cancun, my final semester at Cornell, senior week and graduation, backpacking through Europe yet again, starting a new job, moving to Africa, and traveling the world over. I did the calculation the other day, and in one year, I've managed to spend time in 20 countries spanning 4 continents. During my travels in Asia, I heard an old Chinese proverb that seemed to relate particularly well to this past year. Roughly translated, it says "to go 1,000 miles is to have read 10,000 books". In that case, I've done pretty well for myself this year.

Here are some of my most memorable entries from 2010:

Singapore: Government that Works?

As some of you may know, I spent last week working in Singapore. I have to say, when I decided to move to Africa, I didn't expect my job to take me through an entirely different continent. Three months in, and I may have to reassess the name of this blog and start calling it Google's Man in Transit. But that's the subject for another blog post. For now, I want to highlight a few observations I had in Singapore, another truly fascinating place.