IDDS 2011 - My Team

I was really lucky to have such an amazing team. Of course, all the people at IDDS are wonderful, but that doesn't always ensure that people will work well together. In our case, I was blown away with how much we were able to accomplish and by everyone's energy in carrying the project forward. My team was one of the least geographically diverse with everyone coming from East Africa, West Africa or the US (all the other teams had at least one member from Latin America or Asia), but we still had a wide variety of perspectives. We were also one of the older teams with three team members around 40 years old (for several teams everyone was under 30) which did mean that unlike many other teams we were not working past 11 pm, but the richness of their experiences proved invaluable for our project.

Abby is a schoolteacher in central Ghana and her father has a large plot of moringa trees, so she was able to provide a lot of context and ensure continuity for our project. She was our youngest team member at 21, but she was always eager for us to learn some of the language and she was regularly checking on what other people were working on in case she could bring a sample back to her community. The other participants really appreciated her energy and they voted for her to give a speech at the final ceremony, which was really nice.

Denis came from Uganda and does a lot of work up there with people who have lived in refugee camps their whole lives. He brought an incredibly positive attitude and good sense of humor to our sessions everyday. He was incredibly handy in the workshop and was always thinking about what we could do to make the design better. He also brought a lot of national pride and made sure that we all knew how beautiful Uganda was everyday (there was only one time where he talked about what he had lived through under the reign of Idi Amin).

Rose came from Tanzania and spoke very little English (she could often understand the general concepts that people were saying, but was a bit shy about speaking English). During a lot of our team meetings and class sessions, Dennis and I would be sure to sit close to her to translate (there were a few times where we were doing community interviews where the speaker would say something in Twi, which Abby would translate into English, which I would translate into Kiswahili). She was very thoughtful and always made sure that she had something to keep her busy. Rose also had a difficult time convincing people that she was 39--in fact, at one point, she showed us a picture of her wearing her son's school uniform and we all would have sworn she was about 16.

Sylvester came from Sierra Leone where he teaches workshop skills near the capital. He had a certain impatience which really helped to propel us forward. He brought a very interesting sense of humor and liked to take lots of pictures. Once we started building in the workshop, he was a constant fountain of ideas and we all had to struggle to keep up with him.

Tish came from the US and is about to start working at MIT (she graduated two years after me, but we knew each other when we were there). She had also spent a lot of time in Kenya and Tanzania working on mechanical engineering projects while she was there, so she and I made the East African bent of our team even stronger (also meant that two-thirds of our team could speak some Kiswahili, so by the end Sylvester and Abby were picking up some of the words). She was by far the most organized person on the team and was good at helping us plan so that we could get everything done.

Amy Smith was our mentor, which was really amazing. Even though she had a million things going on the whole summer, she always made herself available to us and was able to provide guidance without steering the project in a particular direction. She also has spent a lot of time in Ghana and provided additional perspective on the communities where we were working.

Our team had a really strong bond, and whenever there were tasks where the team was supposed to split up and divide the labor, we found ourselves doing everything together until later in the summit where we were building prototypes and it was impossible to all work on one thing. In one of our first activities, we used colored pieces of rubber to make mini-Ghanaian flags for other participants as souvenirs, which we received lots of compliments for. We definitely had a few rough patches and at times, we spent too much time thinking and not enough time doing, but in the end, we had a wonderful balance.

Introduction
My Project (Part 1)
My Project (Part 2)
Other Work
Delivering Content
My Team
Language
Where We Stayed
Suame Magazine
New Longoro
Maker Faire
Food
Potluck
Ramadan
Transportation
Accra