WASAMS evaluated : Ken Gibbs

Don’t be put off by the title because this is all about a waterbed, Margie Karp and, finally, computers (yet again).

At some stage in 1984, I had been asked to visit New York for some obscure reason and thought – naturally – that I could ask Margie who was Martin Beyer’s long suffering secretary – to arrange the purchase of a double sized waterbed bag (with baffles) for me as our sleep patterns at home were being disturbed whenever one of us happened to sneeze in bed. The ripples went on and on in our existing bag that didn’t have any baffles.

Margie, by then having been trained by Martin always to expect the unexpected, saw my request as perfectly normal and made the arrangements so that I walked away from the New York office with bundled waterbed bag under my arm, having thanked Margie, effusively. I will pass over some of the ribald comments made by my less than well-cultured colleagues when they discovered what the parcel contained.

Move on a few years to around 1992 when I and a motley crew of WatSan professionals from our region met in Swaziland to be briefed on WASAMS which was being touted as the answer to monitoring and evaluation in the WatSan sector at all levels, globally. Certainly, this software package, we discovered, was supported at the highest level in UNICEF and had even involved WHO from whom we were told their ‘EPI Map’ was included to allow us to – yes, you guessed it – map our results. We were curious but perhaps a bit hesitant because there had been quite a lot of hype about the launch of WASAMS which I believe was the acronym for the ‘Water and Sanitation Monitoring System’. So far, so good.

WET NYHQ had brought something like 22 laptops all loaded with WASAMS for the workshop. Margie, being the NYHQ WET secretary, had been required to attend the workshop and she had a nightmare on her hands. How to ensure that all 22 laptops were fully charged at the start, and could be connected to the mains if their charge was running out ? Somehow she managed this balancing act probably because most WET professionals were by that time capable of connecting computers to a power source.

The workshop started and we were briefed as to what to expect. Naturally, some of our number decided to explore even before the starting gun was fired and there were murmurs that some of the laptops were not giving the expected output. Without going into details, we all found that even if we followed what we were told to do, the output was, well, totally unpredictable.

Two or three days of this followed. The more I saw, the more uncertain I became, but when faced with something new, it’s best to persevere and try and try again. Wasn’t that what mother always said we should do – Try and try again ? By the time that the end of the workshop was declared, I was really quite vexed as I simply could not get the software to do what we were told it should do. At the end, the organiser had decided that he was due some leave and that Margie should pack up all the laptops and tidy the venue before travelling back to New York. He departed.

I was incensed that Margie was left to handle everything without any help and as I and a couple of others had to wait for our flights back to our duty stations, we set to and helped her. I suggested to Margie that there was a game farm close by where we could ride horses and view the game – would she be my guest there ? She accepted immediately, and we set off and had a very pleasant couple of hours game viewing on horseback. Luckily, this game farm had no big cats, nor elephant, hippos or rhinos or you wouldn’t be reading this.

On arrival back at my duty station, Maputo, it was decided that I should brief the WES section staff on the software which was a real poisoned chalice. Ask me to brief others on a piece of software that I had been unable to get to function as we were told it should ? I spent one long weekend trying everything in the book to get it to do what it was supposed to do, unsuccessfully. I became very familiar with the blue-screen which computers threw up when they couldn’t execute something with which they were tasked.

My colleagues in Maputo listening to my explanations must have been as confused as I was because I would say that something should happen, and when I pressed the execute button, it did not happen. Just another blue screen. Trying to print input and output threw up an interesting problem: We had not been supplied any printer codes and even though I was quite familiar with how printer codes worked at that time, even I couldn’t find any that would let our printers produce anything. We saved a lot of paper that way. Trying to get EPIMap to load and function at all was a lost cause, entirely. In addition, Mozambique had a parallel economy where the official and unofficial exchange rates between the US dollar and the Mozambican Metical were wildly different. This required us to minimize our conversions of dollars to Meticais but, guess what, WASAMS refused to accept two different currencies for one country.

Having gone through the motions of briefing our colleagues who had not been fortunate enough to have attended the Swaziland workshop, it was clear to me as it was to them that WASAMS was a work-in-progress which had been launched far too early and without proper checking that it actually delivered what was intended, so I ended my presentation with a couple of Harvard Graphics pictures, using the well known story of William Tell and his child with an apple on his head.

I asked whether WASAMS was ‘absolutely on the mark’ with an accompanying picture of an arrow which went through the apple, with William Tell’s son looking a bit worried.(here place the graphic)

which I immediately followed by almost the same graphic of William Tell’s son with apple on his head, asking as I showed it whether it was ‘as much use as a hole in the head’ ?

The Chief of WES, Mozambique, was really quite upset about my presentation but could do little about it because he, too, had been in Swaziland and knew that the software was – well – a little premature. Nothing I said or showed could be challenged. So, why did UNICEF, New York, go ahead with the workshop in the first place ?

*****

Curiously, WASAMS seems to have sunk completely out of sight. I wonder if anyone was ever asked to justify the US $ 3 million I was told it had cost to develop up to that point ?

*****

Interestingly, shortly after arrival back in Maputo from Swaziland, I became ill and it took three doctors almost a week to diagnose that I had tick bite fever, obviously from a tick when we went riding on the game farm. This is an infection you do not want to acquire as it gives one the most acute headaches I have ever had to suffer. Was this in retribution for having criticised WASAMS, I wonder ?