Day 5 - A day of challenges

Today was not a very good day.  It happens at home so I guess I should not be so surprised that it happens in Ghana too.

It started last night when I tried to use the ATM cash machine near the hotel in Tema Community 6.  I inserted my Scotiabank ATM De bit Card and went throught the process of entering my PIN etc, etc.  No cash.  Tranaction cancelled.  I went to another ATM around the corner.  No cash.  Transaction cancelled.  I inquired at the hotel desk - they said that ATMs only take Visa cards.  Hmmm - this is a problem due to the fact that I had mistakenly left my Visa card at my neighbourhood drug store the night before I left for Africa.  Now I was faced with the prospect of 5 weeks in Africa without any access to cash and less than $100 in my wallet.  The hotel suggested I try a bank in Accra today - after several phone calls to local banks I was still without a solution.

Adding to the general frustration of the day was our lack of reliable internet access.  Internet access has been a real problem for us - both the internet at the hotel and the internet at the client site is sporatic and quite unreliable.  There seems to be no real pattern for when things work and when they dont work although it seems that the more people that are trying to use the internet, the worse it is.  Our success at this client depends on getting access to the templates and tools that IBM has made available to us, so it is tremendiously frustrating to be non-productive as we hit connect over and over again.

Mid-morning I finally managed to connect to my personal e-mail only to find a number of notes from both my sister and brother that my mother was not doing well.  She has been in the hospital in Canada for several weeks and seemed to be making steady improvements.  However, last night she had severe abdominal cramps through the night and now the medical staff at the hospital were suspecting a bladder infection.  I became worried

My difficulties continued through the day as I managed to lock myself out of my IBM dialer application through too many failed password resets.  Without access to the dialer I cant get into my IBM e-mail or the IBM intranet - which means I have no way to reset the password and no access to the IBM "mother ship".  At home I would have made a simple call to the IBM help desk, but this was not as easy to accomplish from where I was in Ghana.

To top it all off, for some reason my laptop kept shutting itself down every 5 minutes or so - I suspected I had picked up a virus from sharing files with my clients.  How many things can go wrong in one day? 

Hardware support?

So this got me to thinking.  When IBM sends a team of consultants into developing countries to assist local business, they do it with the realization that these consultants are going to be facing some of the challenges that the local population face on a day to day basis - challenges such as unreliable or nonexistent telecommunications network infrastructure, or challenges related to the lack of basic financial services that we take for granted in North America, or challenges related to time zone differences, and costs of long distance telephone charges to North America.  Maybe this is what I am supposed to be learning and this is part of the reason I am here?  Maybe my bad day today is a normal day in Ghana?

Canadian Embassy in Ghana - today I was homesick

In any case, I hope that tomorrow is a better day.  And so ends Day 5 - and not a minute too soon enough for me.