Human Terms
In the not-too-distant past, much of my profession centered around the design, cultivation, analysis and manipulation of that most precious of commodities in the Information Age: data. Raw data, the precursor to useful information, informs and fuels the decisions made by consumers, investors, business, government and increasingly all facets of contemporary life. While the job of writing software involves a myriad of processes, methodologies, languages and even personal styles, any developer worth his salt will tell you that everything begins with a rock-solid data model. Failure to do so usually produces the software equivalent of the leaning Tower of Pisa. Data forms the foundation of the complex architecture that drives every big website, networked consumer service and multi-tiered business application. Shaping data into a form more useful to human beings falls under the charge of the database modeler.
Before arriving in Cameroon, the vocabulary of the databases I’d worked on were defined by the requirements of business. Datasets focused on discrete, quantifiable entities like units ordered, cost, volume, base price, vendors, suppliers, inventory and so on. Somewhere at the end of the chain of order fulfillment was an actual product—whether it existed in bits or atoms was unimportant. It was abstracted behind so many layers of code that in the programmer’s eyes it scarcely mattered what existed on the other side of the conveyor belt. That the system worked is what mattered most. An oversight in the data model, a software bug or other glitch meant long evenings and weekends for the unlucky coders in the trenches.
At Link-Up, the NGO I’ve been working with as a secondary project, the database I’ve labored on has acquired quite a different form. I collaborated over many afternoons with Roland Musi, the director, to transform a laborious paper process into an electronic one that will (hopefully) streamline things and direct assistance to the kids that need it most. After the first two hundred-odd cases were entered, I received a copy of the database to make some enhancements. At home I surveyed the data that had been populated in the fields I had defined.
In the process, a curious thing happened. The mission of Link-Up, which I understood quite well (or so I thought) became excruciatingly clear in the simplest and most vivid of terms. They were defined in anonymous and yet intimate pieces of data. Take, for example, a sample of the contents of the field used to track the description of the child’s illness:
- Constant headache
- Handicap on the right leg
- Always having fever
- Suffering from Filaria all over the body
- Cough and frequent malaria
- Suffers from TB
- Malaria
- Fever
- Paralyzed
- Blind
- Chronic cough
- Swollen body, especially the legs
Fever, malaria and headache make up roughly half of all the recorded child illnesses. Records of hospital visits are rare. Most of it, one might guess, goes untreated or only by traditional medicine in the countless small villages that lie just off the tarred roads surrounding Buea.
Since Link-Up exists to serve the most vulnerable, critical child cases while need exists in varying degrees throughout the southwest, a triage must be performed. One of the criteria for assistance is that one or both of the parents either be deceased or disabled and unable to provide for the child. In the process of evaluating need, various factors related to family health history and economic situation are recorded. Among them are the parent’s cause of death. Some are specific while others so vague as to leave one guessing as to ultimate cause and the lost opportunity for effective diagnosis and treatment:
- Sickness
- Witchcraft
- Poison
- Drowned
- Malaria
- Stomach ache
- Chest pain
- Unknown
- HIV/AIDS
- Side pain
- Childbirth
- God fire
- Sudden illness
A substantial number simply report “got sick” as the prelude to mortality. The vast majority of the deceased are impoverished peasant workers; subsistence farmers, tea pluckers, rubber tappers, Cameroon Development Corp (CDC) laborers, housewives. I couldn’t help but wonder about the personal stories behind the unprocessed facts and figures my application had collected.
In these moments, pouring over the raw data of Link-Up that represented Cameroonians I’d never meet, I can say with conviction that the work finally hit home. At the same time, the needs and best laid plans of commerce as I’d known it seemed to pale in comparison.
