This is the thirteenth in an ongoing series of posts that capture journal entries from my incredible trip to Zimbabwe in 1997. You can read more about my motivation for the journey and why I’m revisiting it now in the original post. I was 21 at the time I wrote this.
 
Part 13
7/8/97, Chitungwiza, Zimbabwe
On Monday I discovered that I was to spend yet another day in a meeting but I didn’t mind. It was a staff meeting that takes place on the first Monday of every month. I actually participated a lot between writing letters and sending email when the discussions got too bogged down. I’ve finally started receiving messages from people. On Friday I got email from Jennie and Francis. On Saturday while I was away I got a postcard from Mom, two letters from Grandma Betty and a card from Graham. Monday I got email from Jennie and today I got a letter from her and a package containing my hairbrush.

The saga of that hairbrush continues. I took it from ex-boyfriend Dylan because it was the only brush I had found to get through my often tangled curls. I forgot it at home and Jennie, wonderful woman that she is, sent it to Zimbabwe for me. Soon, maybe it will travel completely around the world! So anyway, I’m feeling much better simply because I now have some sort of contact with most of the people I love and miss very much. I called Mom and Dad on Monday morning (Sunday night their time). They were happy to hear from me, I had been sending Mom email but I guess her account is disconnected. I called Dad at the regular home number and he gave me Mom’s number at the Catholic church rectory. I guess they have been staying there too because it is currently vacant. I hope that house they are building gets done soon because their living situation is getting stranger by the minute!

My hand is hurting so I’m going to stop now. I am unsure of how this “travelog” will play out. I’ve been using it as a record, but worry that I’m writing too much or not enough, am I getting too emotional? I have a separate journal for more private reflection. I wonder who will read this when my trip is over. Anyway, whoever you are, reading this account, I hope you find this adventure that I’m on to be interesting. I’m trying to make note of the cultural differences so that I, and perhaps you, can have a better understanding of life in this particular part of the world. So without guidance, I will continue to plow on…

Another point of interest, I washed my underwear in a bucket full of soap in the shower/toilet room last night. I guess it is taboo for someone else to wash it. Anna the maid washes everything else for me, even socks and bras, but not underwear. So I washed it and left them in a bucked overnight and she hung them up outside for me today. Apparently, once they are washed it is OK to at least hang them up. They came back a bit wrinkled but clean at last. It feels good to have clean underwear!
 
To be continued…

This is the twelfth in an ongoing series of posts that capture journal entries from my incredible trip to Zimbabwe in 1997. You can read more about my motivation for the journey and why I’m revisiting it now in the original post. I was 21 at the time I wrote this.
 
Part 12
7/8/97, Chitungwiza, Zimbabwe
I was supposed to go to the movies with Jayson, but he had more family obligations so I had Lucilia drop me off near the theaters in city center but they didn’t have anything I wanted to see. I ate at a place called Wimpey’s. They server breakfast, burgers, milkshakes, etc. It is a pretty common chain (no McDonald’s here), but the food wasn’t very good. Here the french fries are called ‘chips’ and you are expected to put vinegar on them. Lucky for me there was also ketchup on the table. I got a paper from one of the waiters and discovered that The Fifth Element was playing at Westgate, a mall which I discovered was very far away. I took a taxi and it cost me over $70z. I got out there early, a very fancy mall, but as I wandered around, most of the shops were closed because it was Sunday.

I bought my ticket, only $13z! Then I looked at the fabric store, I haven’t figured out how much meter of cloth is so I didn’t want to buy anything. They had some really nice polished cotton prints, $80z for 5 meters. The woman there said it was enough to make one outfit. Everyone around the mall and in the theater was clearly wealthy, no one from Chitungwiza would go to this mall. It made me feel a little uncomfortable. The movie had assigned seats which was strange, but the movie was good, it was nice to lose myself in something familiar.

The taxi was waiting as I had instructed, to get back I just gave him $100z. He let me off at the wrong bus stop though and I had to ask several people where to go. The bus stops have recently changed so nobody really knew where to to, it was getting dark and I was getting pretty worried. I finally was directed to the right bus stop for Zengeza 3 and actually managed to get off at the right stop and find my way home unmolested. Florence, Anna, Kuda and Tapiewa were in the living room with the fireplace going. They had just returned from a weekend in the ‘rural areas.’ Francis was asleep, I guess he had too much to drink. The power had been off due to high winds and it went off again soon after I got home. We ate around the fire and I went to bed, exhausted from my adventure.
 
Continued in Part 13

I received a copy of Cases in Online Interview Research in the mail last month. I created an illustration and helped write Chapter 7 “Guides and Visitors: Capturing Stories in Virtual-World and Interactive Web Experiences” with team members Patricial Wall, Jonas Karlsson, Tong Sun, Wei Peng, Eric Bier, Christian Overland, Mike Butman, Suzanne Fischer and Lisa Korzetz. The chapter documents our work on a collaborative project between the Xerox Research Center Webster (XRCW), Palo Alto Research Center (PARC)  and The Henry Ford Museum called Document Interactions. In partnership with the museum, our research team created a web application and a 3-D virtual world to facilitate the sharing of stories around museum artifacts.

This was one of the first projects I worked on when I joined XRCW in late 2009. My role on the team was to improve the usability of the web application and virtual world interactions. I evaluated the web application and gave suggestions for improvement, I planned and led the user evaluation of the web application (combining user testing and structured interview techniques), and helped plan the user evaluation of the 3-D virtual world. All of the user evaluations took place virtually over the phone and via shared screens, rather than face-to-face, which made our project a prime candidate for inclusion in the book.

This is the eleventh in an ongoing series of posts that capture journal entries from my incredible trip to Zimbabwe in 1997. You can read more about my motivation for the journey and why I’m revisiting it now in the original post. I was 21 at the time I wrote this.
 
Part 11
7/8/97, Chitungwiza, Zimbabwe
I left the theatre meeting early, at noon on Saturday, to catch a bus into Harare. I was just going to walk to the stop nearest to the CHIYSAP offices, but Lance insisted on driving me to Makoni where the buses originate. It took 20 minutes just to get there! So I got on a bus there and after basically re-tracing the path I had just taken, we headed for Harare. The walk from the bus stop to the hotel was much farther than I thought so I was about half an hour late to meet Jayson (the South African boy I met on the bus from Johannesburg). It turns out that he only lives 15 minutes (walking distance) from the hotel so he had at least been there on time. We got into a taxi to try to find the 4th of July picnic for Americans that I had heard about from the embassy. It was in Mt. Pleasant, one of the poshest suburbs and pretty darn far away, it cost $50 Z to get out there! There was baseball, pony rides and one of those jumpy castles for kids, lots of tables with American theme stuff as well as a books and magazines table containing old American publications for purchase. Jayson, being only 18, wasn’t too excited about the name tags and the silly American flags. It was nice to hear familiar accents and eat hot dogs and hamburgers, but it only made me realize that I don’t much fit in among Americans either. The soon to be ex-ambassador was there and some Marines. There was a speech, they displayed the colors, played the national anthem, then we said the Pledge of Allegiance, it was all a little silly. We ate, drank several beers, then left. The taxi driver actually came back as agreed! We went back to the hotel for more beers and I called Graham’s (my friend in San Francisco who helped me organize this trip) friend Lucilia as we had arranged earlier in the week. She came and picked me up, I left Jayson to deal with his relatives who were coming to see his Grandma because she just got out of the hospital.

Lucilia had just moved all of her stuff into a new ‘flat’ and was still cleaning so she took me to her girlfriend Leslie’s house (an apartment). Lucilia is from Mozambique but she is here attending the University of Zimbabwe studying business. It is illegal to be homosexual in Zimbabwe so very few people are out. I would never have met these friends if Graham hadn’t initiated this contact. Leslie was very sweet, she works for an architectural firm in town and she is also a painter on the side. She is white and a native of Zimbabwe so some of our discussions touching race were colored by her views of black people which were not negative but occasionally ignorant. Lucilia, her girlfriend, is park black like me so she doesn’t have that much prejudice I suppose. I got to take a hot bath at her house and it was heaven! While Lucilia was cleaning up back at her new flat I talked with Leslie, we discovered we had a lot of things in common. Later Juan, another friend of Graham’s, came over. He was very cute and very gay, he helps run GALZ (Gays and Lesbians of Zimbabwe). We ate dinner: some chicken and broccoli baked in the oven with bread, then went to pick up another friend, Ruth. It was decided we would go to “The Tube” club first to see if it was crowded. It wasn’t so we headed to Xscape, in a suburb called Borrowdale. The people there were a mix of gays and straights. It was almost like the Blue Lagoon (at home in Santa Cruz, except that the music was different.

I spent most of the night dancing, it was a mix of predominantly ’80s music but it included some stuff like Michael Bolton, AC/DC and Guns & Roses which I didn’t find very danceable. Juan is a fabulous dancer and we spent a lot of time together after he had cruised the place and declared that there was no ‘eligible talent’ for him to take home that evening. Ruth had a bit of a crush on me I think, but I found her a bit abrasive. She knew I had a girlfriend at home. We danced all night and went home around 3:30am. Lucilia dropped me off at her place and she slept at Leslie’s house. It was nice to have the bed to myself. In the morning after several tries I manage to talk to Jennie on the phone. My Sprint card doesn’t work in Zimbabwe and I couldn’t remember the AT&T number so I had her call me back and I left money for Lucilia’s phone bill. It was so great to hear her voice. I think her phone bill is going to be huge though…

 
Continued in Part 12

Last week was the 4th annual Xerox Innovation Group (XIG) conference in Webster, NY. It is an event that brings together researchers from all of our centers: Xerox Research Center Canada, Europe, India and Webster (my center) as well as the Palo Alto Research Center (PARC). I was on the conference committee as the one of the keynote speaker chairs (I brought Professor Judy Olson to speak to our researchers about scientific collaboration over distance), so I was pretty busy during the event, helping with the logistics and networking with all of the amazing people in our organization.

In the midst of all this activity, I was surprised with an Excellence in Science and Technology award, along with 5 other team members, for our work on on Open Xerox. Open Xerox is the web portal that hosts technology prototypes from XIG, making them accessible to the external user community well before the launch of a product offering. I am responsible for the design and usability of the site and it’s associated services. Here’s the text from the award:

This award recognizes the Open Xerox Team. It has over a thousand users and is being used to support RFPs, customer engagement and technology licensing as well as share R&D across the XIG and broader research community. Designed to combine technologies, facilitate transfer, ease integration into customer applications and host software at very different levels of maturity the proprietary platform also has built-in IP protection.

The team for Open Xerox is a cross-center team, including people from Xerox Research Center Europe (XRCE) and Xerox Research Center Webster (XRCW). Pictured (from left to right) are Irene Maxwell (XRCE), Sophie Vandebroek (CTO of Xerox and President of XIG), me and Mike Kehoe (XRCW). Behind us is the video screen that shows some of our other team members connecting via video conference from XRCE in Grenoble, France: Jutta Willamowski and Nicola (hidden off screen). Herve Poirier (XRCE) is also on our team and was present at the conference, but did not make it for the awards ceremony. We were all given a nice plaque and an iPad 2 for our efforts. I’m very proud of the team and the project so I decided to post about it here.