International Day of Peace
Everyday when I go to work, my mom tells me, “Have a good day, son.” Today was different. When I was saying goodbye to her this morning she came to the gate with me and said, “Be careful, OK?” Just go to you office and come back straight home, she said. September 21st was like any other day normal day in Jalalabad. Most of the time, when there is a national or international day of celebration and there are officials…
read more »Government aid too late
A couple of weeks ago my colleagues and I went to Kama district for gathering data for mapping the area on the open source mapping site, Open Street Map, we came across a team of the government aid distributors. They were distributing mosquito nets. Now that the summer season is over and there will be almost no mosquito anymore, these people don’t need these nets this year. “We will keep them for next year”, said one of the locals. This…
read more »Thankfully my Brother Got Hit by a Car
My little brother, Imran was riding on his bicycle to school yesterday. He got hit by a car from the back. Imran’s backpack which had a broken zipper was on his back. When he got hit, his backpack fell to the ground and all his books got scattered all around in the middle of the road. Imran got up unscathed and started picking up his books to put back in his backpack. Suddenly, he saw a big scorpion with its…
read more »Tech Tools and Skills for Emergency Management
Together with my colleague, Una Moore, I am taking an online course on Tech Tools and Skills for Emergency Management at TechChange Institute for Social Change: http://techchange.org/. It’s a 3‑week course and today is the last day of week 1. It’s my first online course ever and Una is helping me a lot with how it works and the course materials too. Yesterday evening, we took turns and read aloud the first week course materials at a French restaurant in…
read more »New Computer lab in Khogyani
About five months ago, my colleague, Noor and I set up a computer and English language training lab in Kaga, Khogyani. Kaga is about 35 kilometers south west of Jalalabad city. It has a small main bazaar which is basically all on a one-hundred-meter long street. There are many small and sparsely located villages all around the main bazaar. It’s a beautiful place with a lot of snow in winter and cool weather in summer. We went there back in…
read more »Surkhrod Trip of OSM
Nearly two weeks ago, we had an OSM maps editing trip to Behsood District. Our team spent the last ten days and a few days before the trip to finish editing the entire district in very detail: OSM/Behsood This week, when we were finished with Behsood as per our plan we took a mapping trip to Surkhrod District of Nangarhar Province. Luckily, our mapping manager, Habib Raza is from Surkhrod and he knows the area like the back of his…
read more »Officially for Sale
I spotted an old man sitting in a crowded bazar, sewing army and police patches onto uniforms. I haggled and picked up a dozen.
read more »OpenStreetMap Trips
As I said in my earlier blog, our company (J Synergy Tech Development) is working on a mapping project to edit Nangarhar Province in the eastern Afghanistan on OpenStreetMap. There are a few different ways to edit on OSM: You can edit by having local knowledge of the area you are editing. You can also edit by recording gps tracks with a gps or a smart phone and then uploading those tracks on OSM and edit all the places you…
read more »My University Graduation
Four years ago in February I took the Kankor Exam, the university entrance exam in Afghanistan. Kankor is like the American SAT. It is developed and scored by the Ministry of Higher Education (MoHE) of Afghanistan. Kankor includes questions about the several subjects we study in high school (mathematics, physics, chemistry, languages, geography, history and Islamic studies) and it normally takes three and a half hours. That year (2007) more than 80000 students took the exam and less than 2000…
read more »Celebrating Nowruz in Mazar-i-Sharif
We chose to celebrate the Persian New Year, Nowruz in Mazar-i-Sharif because it is the epicenter of celebration in Afghanistan. Over 200,000 people congregate at the Rowze-e-Sharif Mosque which the Afghan Shia believe houses the tomb of Hazrat Ali ibn Abi Talib whom they consider Islam’s first Imam. Nowruz is officially recognized as a national holiday and high ranking officials attend the celebrations. Although the festivities are centered on the Mosque, Novruz is a pre-Islamic holiday that is not mentioned…
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