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.