Angel and the 23,000

Another exciting project that RLabs have been involved in has been the Angel on MXit project where we offer people support and advice in the areas of substance abuse, abuse, depression, debt counselling,stress and coping via their mobile phones. This partnership with MXit Lifestyle will allow us to scale our services and also provide much needed access to all MXit users. The Angel project allows MXit users to "find their Angel" where they can get help for the social issue they are dealing with.

Over the next few weeks we will increase the capacity of our mobile counselling support centre and grow it to support thousands of MXit users across South Africa. Since starting our new campaign yesterday we've already attracted more than 23,000 users to the service.

Launch National AIDS Helpline Mobile Instant Messaging service

Today will be the launch of our hard labour over the past few weeks providing National AIDS Helpline with the technology to offer mobile counselling service to thousands accross South Africa. Why this is such wodnerful opportunity? Interesting facts about South Africa:

1. Highest number of HIV+ people in the world
2. Most unequal countries in the world
3. Best technical infrastructure in Africa, especially cellphones

"Massive potential to use cellphones to provide communication & info services to millions infected or affected by HIV"


We salute the world's first HIV/AIDS Mobile Counsellors as we looking forward seeing how communities will be reconstructed through the use of technology.

National AIDS Helpline counsellors are available Mondays to Thursdays 3-5pm. Add the contact redchatzone@gmail.com (Jabber) or redchatzone (Google Talk) and nickname: Red Chat Zone.

Drug Advice Support going strong

Looking back at how the project has grown not just in number of subscribers but also our advisors on the Drug Advice Support (DAS) is so encouraging. Today as the guys were setting up (see image above) and getting ready to run DAS it is so exciting to see the passion that our advisors have to reconstruct the lives of thousands of people accross our nation. I know that the sacrifices the advisors have made are not in vain and we are seeing the fruits of their labour.

A year ago the team offering advice support on DAS
Well done to the Reconstructed Team for changing the world of citizens of our nation using technology.

National AIDS Help Line on MXit

Today we started a world's first by offering training to the National AIDS Help Line using our Advice Support technology to offer counselling via Mobile Instant Messaging (MIM). This Pilot is supported by Cell-Life, HIV organisation Right To Care and PEPFAR which will allow for this service to be fully funded for the duration of the Pilot. What this mean for the National AIDS Helpline is that it would be now the only organisation in the world to offer counselling with regard to HIV/AIDS using Mobile Instant Messaging using the technology (see image below)that was developed by a community on the Cape Flats in the Athlone Living Lab.

The first day went well as we introduced the future mobile counselors to "The Art of Mobile Counselling" and "Mobile Phones for Social Good". The training is being done by myself and Craig Ross, member of the Reconstructed Team, and will keep you updated on the progress of the week. Also look out for a post on the "Art of Mobile Counselling". To add the National AIDS Help Line on MXit you do the following:

1) Add Contacts
2) Got to Jabber or Google Talk option
3) ID: redchatzone@gmail.com (Jabber) or redchatzone (Google Talk) and Nickname: Red Chat Zone
4) Accept Contact

This service will be live Mondays to Thursdays between 3pm and 5pm.

A year of Drugs, Sex & Mobile Phones

One year has passed and so many things has happened since we "officially" launched Drug Advice Support (previously known as idmtalk). Drug Advice Support (DAS) is one of our large projects, part of our Living Lab activity, and it emerged out of a need in a community that were experiencing the scourge of drug addiction and violence. Using men and women from the community we started a journey that will change our lives and thousands others forever. This service uses mobile phones as a medium to connect with people all across South Africa offering advice and support to those in need (Mobile Active description of DAS).

Since then we've been in more than 50 articles (that we are aware of!!), 3 television appearances, more than 20 radio interviews and we still believe that we have so much to offer of how technology can be used to make a difference in the lives of many. We've had our server crash, got a team from UWC (Wesley and Paul) using the Chisimba platform as a basis for DAS to co-develop with the community a system that could support the large number of requests. With 19 registered advisors (4 Full time)who all come from the local community of Bridgetown, Cape Town, South Africa the following are some indication of what was achieved during 250 hours online (31 July 2009):

- Number of Subscribers: 9,193
- Number of Messages: 746,440
- Number of Conversations : 30,685
- Number of Conversations related to drugs: 18,963
- Average number of conversations per session: 30,685 / 250 hours = 122.5 per hour or 245 per session
- Maximum number of conversations 473 and the Minimum 21
- Average number of Messages = 1422 per session (Max 3678, Min 234)
- Average number of conversations per Advisor in a session = 24 (Min 4, Maximum 56)

Other interesting statistics were:

- TiK (Crystal Meth) was the most popular drug with 6637 related conversations followed by Heroin with 3223.
- 13% [1211] of subscribers were using this service to get support for a family member.
- 4% [403] of Subscribers are getting offline help/support or counselling after using the service (This is known cases through feedback conversations).




This clearly shows us an example of where mobile phones can be used for social good and make the difference in the lives of literally thousands in a nation. Bare in mind that all this was done with very little resources bu a group of extraordinary individuals passionate about reconstructing their communities.
So through all of this we cried and laughed together, celebrated when DAS subscribers were victorious and saddened when they were struggling, but we've made it and we are still standing. So what makes this year so special that others want to read or hear about it? Simple it is about people caring about other people and giving the little that they have to see lives being Reconstructed. A special thanks to the team of DAS who makes this more than a project of Drugs, Sex and Mobile Phones, but one of where we united can make a difference in our communities and nation.

MXit for HIV: Red

Today we launch another exciting inititiave a collaboration with Cell-Life. South Africa has 5.7 million people living with HIV of which and estimated 3 million between the ages of 12 and 35. This is also the age group that has the most mobile and mobile chat (e.g. MXit) users. To ensure that people in this age group are reached with information and advice about HIV on a communications platform that they use daily MXit proved to be an ideal medium.

This is the Cell-Life Red project that will provide users FREE access to information and advice to information about HIV and AIDS. This service is available 24 hours a day and is easily accessible. This new service will offer people opportunity to be part of a community that will support those in need.

Information about HIV will be available in 5 languages (including a chat language)and will also have competitions, contact details and much more as part of reaching the 14 million users on MXit.

If you want to go Red on MXit then you can do the following:

- Go to Tradepost
- Select MXit Mix
- Select My Culture option
- Select Red
- Add Contact



Our goal is to reach at least 250,000 users who will use this contact for information and advice relating to HIV and AIDS. The Red revolution has surely begun.

Angels and Mobiles

Thanks to Nick Booth for recording this quick video displaying our MXit Angel project.

Angel service for Drug Addicts in South Africa from Podnosh on Vimeo.

Read his post about the Reconstructed project here

Using Free and Open Source Software to fight drug abuse

An article appeared in the UWC campus newsletter...

"An increase in gang and drug activity on the Cape Flats in the Western Cape Province has been causing tension within communities. These activities have a negative impact on citizens in these communities and contribute to a sense of helplessness. Reconstruction or rehabilitation of ex-drug addicts and ex-gangsters are challenging due to communities with tension not being able to empower these citizens or the addicts themselves being unwilling to be rehabilitated. This presented the opportunity for the use of technology as part of the helping substance abusers to rebuild their lives.

A project called DAS@Mxit was the brain child of Marlon Parker, an IT lecturer from the Cape Peninsula University of Technology (CPUT). The project uses mobile and web technologies, including the popular cell phone chat application Mxit. In collaboration between CPUT and UWC's Free Software Innovation Unit in ICS, a system was developed to offer counselling, advice, frequently asked questions for people impacted by drug and substance abuse. DAS@Mxit is aimed at (but not limited to) MXit users. This allows a user to send and receive text and multimedia messages to and from PCs and phones via the Internet, rather than with standard SMS technology." ...

Paul and Wesley, key architects and developers on the DAS project (Source:dkeats.com)

Find your Angel on MXit

Last Friday, 12 December 2008, at the graduation of The Reconstructed we launched a new 24hour service "Angel". The Angel project on MXit was birthed out of the need that many of our young people need to be informed about the dangers of substance abuse on a platform that they will be able to interact with. Angel is a collaboration between CPUT, MXit and Impact Direct that provides MXit users with information concerning: substance abuse, HIV/Aids, Abuse, depression, stress and coping.

Each of these topics are then further explored. For example Substance Abuse have topics such as "What is Substance Abuse?, What is Addiction?, Type of Substances, Stages of drug dependency, Signs of Drug Use and categories of drugs. Under the Type of substances Angel gives more details about the most common drugs and this will be updated on a regular basis. Each of these substances are then further broken down. Each drug will be described and discussed (Street names, how it is used, characteristics, short term effects, long term effects and withdrawal symptoms).

Other than just giving more information about the various topics Angel also provide a "Find your Angel" service which gives users of Angel contact numbers to various services in the different provinces. We realised that many people don't know where to go to for help when facing certain social issues and we're trying to help people especially our youth with the info in a way that they are comfortable with.

Angel is an additional service to DAS (Drug Advice Support which only runs Tue and Thu 3-5pm) and runs 24/7 and no cost involved to subscribe to the service. We are excited to see how Angel will be used to change lives accross our nation.

Drug Advice Support Stats

Today we had another successful session with DAS using MXit. In our two hour session we managed to get more than 1400 messages. The good news is that we are moving in the right direction with the development of the system as it seems to be more stable in recent sessions. We definitely excited of the prospects of what lies ahead with this project.

More interesting stats on this is that since our inception of DAS on MXit we've had over 8000 conversations and more than 20 000 messages. This is really indicating that what we're doing is needed in our communities. Special thanks to all the men and women who works endlessly on this system ensuring that many people accross our nation are being assisted.