I was given a few moments to talk about the project; I had to do a little work to clarify some of the simplifications Momoh had made on our behalf. And we unrolled the maps and showed them the preliminary work we had done. I had simply taken a satellite image and drawn many of the key buildings, roads and other features on top. We presented a copy of this to the Paramount Chief and I posed rather awkwardly for a photograph for the website. A few words of thanks from the Paramount Chief himself, where he told us that he trusted the good work of the project so far, and that any friend of Momoh’s was a friend of his. We were so grateful for this – I must admit in all the years I have worked in Africa I have been uneasy over my imposition on the communities in which I work. When I have a fixer or a local who introduces us to those communities, I am so much more relieved and confident we shall get cooperation.
Handing the chief a copy of our satellite map
I was a little overoptimistic here, but for reasons that did not reveal themselves for several days. We commenced our training with the three guys straight after the meeting with the chief. We started by heading back to our own guest house and spreading the materials over the table on the veranda. I explained to them the basic theory of what we were doing and got them to orientate themselves from the printed out satellite image. Then Kofi took over and gave them a detailed lesson in how to use a GPS. He had quite a sophisticated GPS, which used a pen and a touch screen and for people who rarely used a small mobile phone, let alone any other digital device, it took a bit of getting used to. We wandered across the road in front of our house to an area of cleared land right on the edge of the village. Kofi walked around the edge of the plot with the GPS and came back, saved the result with his magic pen and showed the trainees the results on the little grey screen on the unit. The GPS had recorded his movements every few seconds and he had created a neat little square on the screen. He handed the unit to Demba who eagerly took it in his hands. Kofi was a good trainer – very serious and strict but incredibly patient. With this GPS there were several things to do to set up the unit ready for walking the boundaries. Then you let it go and it made beeping noises when it was recording data. We stood next to the road as we watched Demba walk half way round the field. Then he said “It has stopped beeping”. Kofi walked over to fix it. He completed the walk. Kofi helped him press all the right buttons to ensure that he saved the track in the unit and we took a look at the results on the screen. There were one or two short lines in different places in the screen and that was all. Kofi reset it and off he went again. This time he was more successful at having a track that went all the way round the plot but it was a very peculiar shape. I’d spotted what was going wrong. With a GPS you have to have the unit exactly where you want it to record – there is no point in walking a boundary if you wiggle around any obstacle, or hold the machine away from where the actual boundary was. And some of the lines went haywire, points all over the place. The problem stemmed from Demba being in too much of a hurry to get round. GPS is like a Hansel and Gretel breadcrumb trail. It does not record every step you take, but records a point every few seconds. If you walk too fast you end up with very few points and in some places, where there is tree cover, for example, the precision of the location accuracy can drop. With this unit, it can average out and help make a smoother picture of the route you took, but only if you walk slowly. This guy kept on cutting corners which made the shape of the plot very dubious. If he had stood in each corner he would have got a much cleaner shape on the GPS.
When I Went To 