Category Archives: Centre for Micro Finance

It poured all night again and was still pouring when I got up. The internet wasn’t working either, but the indoor water was running and the water heater had been turned on so I was able to have a lovely hot shower. Usually we keep the heater turned off because the water gets way too hot and the shower only has the one tap. But, with the slightly cooler weather and keeping the dunking time to a minimum, I didn’t get scalded.

When the CECI staff started coming into the office I got them to bump the router to get us back on the internet and I spent the rest of the morning hiding out from the deluge and working on the fresh install of the Knowledgetree software. It was quite frustrating to discover that the new version didn’t change the situation and many of the documents are still not getting indexed. It seems I may have to resort to my alternative shared directory structure. The problem with that is limiting access to only certain computers and users. I need to do a bit more research. I submitted a bug report to Knowledgetree support but I don’t know how quickly they will respond to a request from the Community edition (ie free) version of the software.

The rain had stopped by noon so I headed in to the CMF office and spent the rest of the afternoon working with Ruchi organizing documents into the directory structure. I set up the file-sharing capabilities to see whether Ruchi could access the documents from her desktop and that worked. But we need to restrict access so I had to turn it back off for the time being. I really wish we could resolve this Knowledgetree issue. That would still be the best solution.

Some of the CMF volunteers are leaving soon and they were having a party for them after work. I took my gear back to CECI, tidied up and then returned for the party. I thought I had timed it properly and arrived about 1/2 hour late but the party didn’t start for another 1/2 hour. I will learn. Anne (being a former CMFer) showed up and after visiting with everyone for a while we headed over to Trendy Cafe for supper.

We met up with some VSO’s (a British agency like CUSO but they take people from all over the world) who were friends of Anne. Julie and Anil are a married couple and Pam is on her own. All three have grown children and are from Britain. They have all been in the country for well over a year mainly working with various NGOs. Anil gave me some advice on travelling to Chitwan and Hetauda next weekend. It might be best to fly there since I don’t have a lot of time and the roads are rough. We shall see.

Back at CECI I discovered that the wet shoes I had put on earlier have left lovely black markings on my feet. Will the shoes ever dry? Will my feet ever recover?

It poured rain all night and I got up to no running water inside (though I could still hear it beating down outside) and still no internet. I didn’t realize how addictive the internet is, especially when you can’t just call up your family or friends.

It was still pouring when I headed for CMF, but I had learned how to turn on the water pump when it goes off and Rajendra had booted the office router so we were able to access the internet. I found a response to my forum query suggesting that we upgrade to 3.6.1 because it was more stable than 3.6.0.

My puny umbrella was next to useless so I was quite wet by the time I got to CMF. Their internet was down as well so I couldn’t follow up on the response about our indexing problem. To be on the safe side, I decided to exercise my alternate option of storing all the documents in an organized directory structure that I can set up for sharing. Ruchi and I spent the rest of the day making sure that all the documents that we had loaded into Knowledgetree so far were replicated in the alternate directory structure.

Once we were finished, I asked her to carry on collecting documents on the pin drive and I would head back to CECI to download the newer version of the software and install it. Downloading ended up taking about three hours.

Meanwhile I had heard from Luni Bista (her brother-in-law, Ajoy, in Canada had sent a parcel for his mother) inviting me to come to her place for dinner. The rain had stopped by then so I headed out to try to find Jawalakhel – in the southern part of the city near Patan. I ran into Bernie so invited him along. Our taxi driver wasn’t sure where to go, but after checking with a policeman he headed out. This time of day traffic is fierce, but the strike was settled so the buses were also back on the road. There seemed to be some military action as well because some streets were blocked off with long lines of military and we ended up going a round-about route. It took over an hour, but we were dropped off near the bakery where Luni requested we meet and she easily picked me out in the crowd.

She led us a couple of blocks then down a muddy alley to an area of lovely big homes surrounding an ancient brick Newari-style house with the typical wooden shuttered windows. Luni said that the old house was the original and when the family grew too big, the surrounding land was parcelled out to the sons who then built the big homes all around. She then led us into her courtyard and up the steps to the second level, past the little white spitz-like dog who seemed to take a liking to me. We were settled into a little sitting room where her son Ashram (I think that was his name) who would be around thirteen joined us. He is a really sweet boy who helped his mom with the host duties and translated for the grandmother when she also joined us. We were presented with a pile of photo albums that traced the history of the young family – Luni, her husband (Ajoy’s older brother) and their son. The wedding pictures were fascinating, with all the finery and Hindu traditions. Ajoy’s brother is in the military and has done a number of stints with the UN. His pictures of Somalia, Sierra Leone and Liberia were fascinating.

Ajoy’s mother was a lively little woman who welcomed us warmly. If we could have spoken the same language I know we would have been chatting up a storm.

We were then fed probably the best Nepali meal I have eaten since arriving. According to their traditions, Luni and the grandmother did not eat with us but Ashram did. The grandmother brought in a pickle that had been in the brine for months. It was delicious and set off the flavours of the Dal Bhat perfectly. After the main meal, we were brought tea and dessert. The dessert was another Nepali dish which, I’m afraid, I’ve lost the name for, but was wonderful as well.

By then the rain had begun again and I remembered that I had come away without my umbrella. Luni and Ashram walked us to our taxi after we had a session of pictures. Grandmother stood beside me and we laughed at how short she was compared to me.

Back at CECI I sloshed my way through ankle-deep puddles to our door. I hope my shoes survive this. I was totally drenched by the time I made it to my room.

This morning I called Jasmine on Skype – computer to computer. I went up to the roof with the computer, turned on the video and was able to give her a panoramic view from the top of CECI Place. It really is quite spectacular.

At work I noticed that we are having an indexing problem with a number of the documents that we loaded into the system. It uses the Tika Apache Extractor to pull out the words from the document for indexing and for some reason a large percentage of the documents are being rejected. I believe it may have something to do with control characters but I haven’t found a way to get the extractor to ignore them. From checking the knowledgebase it seems there is a way to do that but I haven’t discovered what it is. It just says that the problem was resolved by ignoring them. Help!

Despite that, we were able to load another bunch of documents into the system. In fact, Ruchi did all the work and I just sat on the sidelines as coach. We both felt wiped by the end of the day but satisfied that we had accomplished a lot.

She was heading off to visit family out of town this weekend. I told her I was heading for Nagarkot to see if I could get a glimpse of Everest.

When I got back to CECI Place, Carly was there ready to wisk me off to the main shopping district downtown (New Road area) where we found a great shop selling lovely material. You can buy a package which contains material for a salwar kurta (also called kameez) outfit consisting of a long top often containing embroidery or some design, pants (either tight fitting or loose) and a matching scarf. I found two packages that I couldn’t pass up and then Carly led me to a nearby seamstress. We had to climb up a steep and narrow staircase (somewhat like the stairs to my attic) to a little shop where three generations were (wo?)manning the business – a toddler grabbing at her wrinkled granny’s glasses and a very efficient mom who measured me thoroughly for my new outfits. I emerged from there excited about the prospect of wowing my friends back home with my new clothes.

Back out on the street again, Carly led me on a shortcut through some back streets to where we could catch a cab home. But the shortcut!! It was camera heaven! The streets were crowded with vendors plying everything you could think of from spices to wooden marionette Ganeshes, from shoes to copper and brass plates. The colours and movement were incredible. There were wonderful old (and I imagine VERY old) shrines with amazing carvings and metal sculptures dotted throughout. I couldn’t get enough of it.

A taxi took us back past the palace where Carly tells me the locals line up to go through the grounds on Saturdays. The king was dethroned over a year ago and is no longer here.

Here I thought I was getting to know Kathmandu but I’ve been cocooned in a very small and quite privileged area. There is a whole big wild and crazy city out there.

After resting up a bit I headed out with a number of the kids to Buzz Cafe to meet up with Anne and Bernie and celebrate with Pakesh – the owner – who is a great friend of the kids. Pakesh enjoys throwing parties for his friends.

Bernie and I are heading for Nagarkot tomorrow to do some site-seeing, try to get a glimpse of Everest and possibly do some trekking.

No meetings and only 10 minutes of power loss – a great day! Ruchi and I dug in and tackled the new system and came out smiling. We proved that we could very quickly enter a whole sub directory of reports in one fell swoop and within a minute they were indexed and therefore searchable. We set up the main users and assigned group privileges and then proved that we could log into the system from other computers. We set up some project information metadata and then loaded some project reports. The system forced us to enter the mandatory project info metadata before allowing the load to complete.

In the afternoon, the IT consultant’s right-hand man, Karan, joined us to try and figure out how to assign a static IP address to the Knowledgetree server. I don’t think he quite understood what I was trying to get at so Ruchi took a stab at it in Nepali. Finally I googled the problem and once he saw it in plain text he caught on. I guess the Canadian accent is as tough for him as the Nepali one is for me. Between the three of us we figured out how to do it and now it works like a charm. We decided that we make a good team. One other thing Karan was able to help me with was loading the fonts for Nepali characters. Now Word documents in Nepali display properly. I had been having trouble because I had installed Word before I left but had not tried running it. It wouldn’t accept my product code so Karan was able to re-install using the CMF product code. Much later it struck me that I had changed the time zone on the computer when I got here and I wonder if the product code hashing depends on time zone. Who knows?

Bernie came by after work. I think he is making some headway in his project but he says his clients are very much like his Canadian clients – more concerned with the visual than the functional. We wandered over to Anne’s to pick her up to go to Trendy Cafe for supper. She had already eaten but kept us company. Bernie and I tried vegetable thali which was delicious. Trendy is on the top floor of an office building close to my place. It affords a decent view and is a fairly classy joint, but best of all, the food can be trusted.

Anne may go with us to Nagarkut on the weekend. If there aren’t too many clouds we should be able to see Everest from there.

I was up on the roof by 5:30 am ready to take in the solar eclipse but somehow I seem to have missed it. Of course, the clouds were thick and pretty much obscured the sun for much of the time, but even when you could see the sun there didn’t seem to be any eclipsing going on. According to news reports, though, this was the eclipse of the century. What do I know?

Looking east towards the eclipse and clouds.

I think I should have taken the eclipse as an omen. Ruchi was in meetings all morning so we didn’t do any document collecting, but I was able to spend the time fruitfully anyway. I set up some of the metadata for the various documents that we will be loading into the system. I’m becoming more familiar with the software and catching onto its capabilities. I’m sure Ruchi will pick this up quickly. I was also able to resolve my indexing problem – we need to get the IT consultant, Arbinda, to assign us a static IP address. Once I configured the indexing server with the IP address of the machine and the software port number properly, indexing was back in business. But I did also find out that the manuals I downloaded are images saved to pdf so the content won’t get indexed unless it is run through an OCR utility. I believe that is a purchased add-on. C’est la vie. I don’t think that will be an issue here though. Hopefully the pdf’s they have will be the original and not a scan.

I went back to CECI place for lunch and then on returning to CMF ran into Anne so invited her for supper. Ruchi was still at a meeting (or at another one) so there wasn’t a lot I could do. When the power went off and looked like it was going to stay off for a while, I headed back home to bed. The heat and mugginess seems to wipe me right out.

Cooked up my rice and beans dinner (with a few adaptations) in a lovely rice cooker. Anne showed up with a couple of mangoes which added the piece de resistance to the rice dish. She has done a lot of traveling and working in this part of the world – Japan and India as well as Nepal. She has probably spent most of that time here so is full of good advice on places to see.

Ended the night by walking her back to her place. I hadn’t gone up the road in that direction. We walked by the Prime Minister’s house, the Chief Justice’s house and a couple of American diplomatic homes. Quite an impressive neighbourhood she lives in.

I was really eager to do a good job on the first day and, in truth, I’m still not over the jet lag, so I was awake by 5 am. It gave me lots of time to get myself organized for my first day at CMF. Nine o’clock turned out to be too early cuz Tej was in a meeting but by ten Nikunja and I were walking down to the offices of CMF. It’s not very far – maybe ten minutes of dodging traffic.

There is a very strong relationship between CECI and CMF since CMF was actually begun through a CECI project. Nikunja knew everyone there and introduced me to Tejhari (the CEO) who then introduced me to everyone else. I am still not very retentive with the names. Ruchi (a young Nepalese woman with the title Senior Program officer) was assigned to work with me exclusively for the time I am here. She is smart and beautiful as so many of the women here are. She holds an MBA from the University of Nepal. It was refreshing to work with her. We spent the morning analyzing the document situation of CMF and fairly quickly came up with a workable structure or hierarchy for sorting the documents. We discussed categorizing by document type and assigning other attributes based on the document type. She listed the CMF Strategic objectives which were very impressive. We realized that all the projects fell under one or more of the strategic objectives and so determined that this would be an extremely important attribute for project classification.

I went off to Trendy Cafe for lunch with Anne Burnside (a former CMF volunteer) and Amel (sp?) an Armenian lawyer studying at Harvard and doing a fellowship research project in Kathmandu at CMF. I ate Dal Bhat for the first time (the national Nepalese dish) and really enjoyed it.

After lunch I went up the road to CECI Place to pick up the HP laptop that contains the software I want to use for the project then headed back to CMF. Everyone was at a meeting so I settled into Ruchi’s office and tried to put into place some of the structure we had discussed in the morning. I ended up puttering around until 5 pm and noone showed up so I headed back home. Hopefully tomorrow we will be able to put a full day’s work in.

Bernie came over in the early evening and we ended up at Buzz Cafe for beer and nachos. His first day was quite productive and he has lots of plans for his time with the Non-timber Forest Product group. We discussed families and generally got to know each other better. Before long the kids and Anne joined us. A dart tournament got underway and Bernie headed home. It wasn’t much later that Anne and I left the kids to the tournament.

Tomorrow morning at 5:47 am Nepalese time there is supposed to be a full solar eclipse. I intend to go up onto the roof and try to take some pictures – as long as it isn’t cloudy or raining.