Sometimes it takes the worst of events to help you fathom new fads. With my personal laptop crashing just two days before this adventure in Sudan, my hard drive was the back-up and the only entity holding my digital belongings. My database counterpart had conveniently nabbed my small USB stick whilst handing over laptops to County staff had me wipe clean my work as I changed workspace again; so this was all I was left with in Eastern Equatoria. So when I plugged my hard drive into a colleague’s laptop to help him email some files from my laptop, contracting a virus that turned every folder of my hard drive into a 1Kb shortcut was a heart-wrenching moment.
The thought that every photo, map, and academic memory I own was now rendered dead, and with any attempt to open or retrieve my files feeble; my reliance and attachment to the digital world became overwhelmingly conscious. As did the apprehension that without my masses of pirate baggage I brought with me, there could be no GIS component to this project.
With only slight but steep-costing satellite connection, it felt like an age just to update the virus database to even recognise my disease. After learning that she’d attached herself to the hidden folders connected with the OS and placed my own folders there too, I was already winning. Sixty hours after my initial panic, my digital life was back on track!
Now I and my pirate software are heading to the Relief and Rehabilitation Commission State Headquarters to show the government how easy it is to make simple conflict maps. All that’s left after that is to smooth over another workshop with County staff entitled “Sending your conflict via email” and my work here should be done. With all my training materials now recovered and completed, I can smell the snow from here…
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