I'll seal the breakfast on plus TV Africa time for us to check out the papers We call it off the press and we have a Zika. Yeah, I took who joins the conversation Good morning. Is Zika. Yeah, I took is good to have you join us and Merry Christmas Good morning and Merry Christmas to everybody in plus TV Africa. That's all right. Thank you so much we start off with a daily independent newspaper and As always we would be looking at the big stories on the daily independence the banner caption reads electoral act amendment bill Senate to consult with reps Response to Buhari in January that will be in 2022 Passes seventeen point one two trillion era budget for 2022 a John's plenary to January 18 National Assembly to transmit 2022 budget today Lawan is quoted on that. I mean this arrived as you have underneath the board caption You also have APC scuttle electoral act amendment for fear of 2023 That's what the PDP is saying and sure electoral bill becomes lower Sarah key urges nas and a boy governor inaugurates a boobie ago regional security outfit 2022 budget will be difficult to fund says CPP E You also have another boat caption here federal government ok's full implementation of new national development plan Buhari administration most economically inclusive the Nigeria's governor's forum quoted on that the federal executive council ok's 5.7 billion narrow for agric sector and Senate approves Buhari's 276.8 billion narrow the airmen's requests. I hope they got that correctly and just before we move away NNPC rakes in 203 billion narrow from patrol product sales in January and Air Force promotes 29 air vise Marshals and 31 air commandos. This is some of the headlines on the daily independence newspaper this morning and now to the punch Newspapers electoral act amendment bill Senate backs down on overriding Buhari refers a bill to constituents We will consult our constituents during recess. They have a role to play says law one Why rejected bill in order to rig 2023 poll and APC plans to manipulate results as the PDP Also verification federal government in introduces digital token to replace 11-digit NIN Petro subsidy rises hits 1.16 trillion in 11 months Also, and we can also find a national assembly to transmit 17 trillion our budget to Buhari today 12,547 patients in isolation centers could be 19 cases increased by 847% Also on the Pontius morning Federal government rakes in 2.56 trillion are from petrol kerosene and diesel sales in 13 months Federal government declares Monday and Tuesday January 3rd also as you tied a new year holidays DSS operatives kill admission seeker suspect released after order from above and Magoda residents protest plan demolition of buildings as they barricade their gates. I Think that's all we can take or we will be taking this morning on the punch newspapers Away from the punch newspaper this morning Let's check out the Guardian newspaper and the boat caption quite different from what you have on the punch and on the daily independent COVID-19 Niger records highest single-day infection. That's what you find the several riders underneath We'll just take a few of them for debts 2123 new cases as you tied festivities heighten. You also find Delta state reports 395 cases of Omicron variant Vaccine inequality booster programs would prolong pandemic You have the who lamenting Consensus Nigerians may need a may need a fourth dose of vaccine to ensure protection from Omicron Expert insist country remains vulnerable to mass Fourth and more waves of the variant That's it away from the boat caption Bandits abduct 70 traders on canoe Kaduna road And government unveils five-year blueprints to focus economy Senate passes And raises budgets by 800 billion error to 17.126 trillion Gone men kill seven peasants abduct five women in Katsina Electro bill senate holds action to override Buhari to consult reps These are the headlines on the Guardian newspaper this morning and out of the leadership newspapers state of the nation convene Reconciliation confab now obj sultan tell president Muhammad of Buhari Say insecurity driven largely by social injustice and failed economy 1999 constitution lacks principles of justice fairness and equity We could also find the air oshoom apc leaders unite to unseat oya tola We spend 30 billion naira on n power monthly military promotes 233 generals and others And electoral bill senators chicken out on overriding president Muhammad of Buhari as they pass a 17.1 trillion naira budget Um, all right. I think we would stop here also Mr. Ezekiel nyayatok. Good morning. Once again, and thanks for joining us The big one of course that has made headlines in most of the papers is the national assembly and their The steps that they are taking after the president fail to ascend to the electoral act amendment bill It says yeah that senator's chickened out Do you agree with that term? Yeah, um Chickening out is more of um too much of a plus for them You you chicken out when you had the lever to at least attempt I never thought they even had any lever to as much as attempt because this is a situation where Mr. President says jump and their question is how high So the thought of them Overriding the president was actually a thought that um was more infuriating to the people You know, I don't know if they try to find out what Nigerians think of the national assembly They are setting statements. They will not even bother to make because We just feel that they are a rubber stamp You know and every day they give us more cost, but you see that's not as important As a fact that we really don't understand a lot the national assembly Doesn't seem to understand what election is They to them it's like a game. It's like a play But the most important thing in a company is a choice of the management team A man gets into an office or get into a company and all of a sudden The company is turned around for good Another person gets into the office and all of a sudden the company starts the fortunes of the company start to decline Election is not the leadership recruitment process of Nigeria election is the selection of the management team of the Nigeria project Now it's only common Surgical it's not rocket science for you to know that the super eagles today are looking for a coach And there's a process of recruitment of a coach because they know that the fortunes of the team Depends on the quality of the coaching team This are simple things we know Then please let Nigerians know that election is the selection process of the Nigeria project management team And that the Nigeria project management team determines what our life is going to be As a people and as a nation and take elections serious now The senate is more interested In passing the budget It means that they have no understanding Of the concept of prioritization You can't you can't in any way Bring the budget Close to the management team with respect to priorities As the matter of fact This is one project that they will need to work on saturday and sunday Knowing two things and this is very important for Nigerians to know First The senate refused To take the electronic transmission of results That's number one number two all of us in the civil society Rows and mounted the level of pressure that is almost unprecedented And then i'll say they went back to the acocoons and it's like two can play So they say okay, you wanted we give it to you and clandestinely They put in something that they knew up in issue they knew from the beginning Will not fly Now while this was going on The national assembly The presidency through the presidentializer officer that he has The attorney general through his oversight function Knew the law the new what was going on they played the game So this is a game between these people against the Nigerian people. That's my understanding When they finally sent The bill to mr. President Mr. President on his own part started the second part of the game Where he left it Meanwhile, he knew when the bargaining was going on he knew when the debating was going or he knew when the Discussions were going on he knew every single thing but he kept it for 30 good days After 30 days, he says, oh, no, we can't do it because of and this is a president That a text message to the senate president the night before the bill is passed Attorney general would have said what's going on, you know organo go sign this to you Don't do it if there was sincerity or purpose. No, that was not done Then they brought it and kept it for 30 days the maximum stretch And sent it back to them when they were supposed to be very busy about to go on recess In fact, they were so unfortunate that the 30 days did not move into the recess. So when God helped us and the 30 days is not getting to the recess The senate and then the national assembly all they needed to do was what are you going to do?  President if there was sincerity or purpose You don't like this class we expunge it and went from one of the national assembly members What he said was that this is our thing maximum because they already have a clean copy of the version that was to be sent before this Nocturnal thing was introduced So he just put it back and sent it back to him and by today Mr. President having seen that his objection is would have ascended to it. No National assembly kicking in their own second part and what is the second part? Oh, we go and consult and in january we'll be back when they come back in january They'll take a while to go through it will we will we not yes or no and all those things and then They will send it back to mr. President Mr. President will take a good time again to see whether those things align and do you know what happens in the amendment This process should be one year before the elections and in february the campaign is supposed to start So what's going to happen? Mr. President is going to say on technical grounds You know, it is not up to one year. So it's time bad Let's manage what we have and then they would have clapped for themselves Oh, we've succeeded in playing the Nigerian people, but I want to tell them a very sad news for them We understand the game and we know what's going on And we are not going to let it be All right, let's move away from the electoral act amendment bill. We'll be looking at the daily independent newspaper now A boy in the state government to inaugurate a bubu agu a regional security outfit Do you think that that's we'll go a long way in you know, covering the insecurity concerns or sort of the security issues in the region Yeah, I think it it's a positive I thought they had done that long ago because you know this a bubu agu had come up a while back But I guess probably they were looking at the funding structures and other things So I think it's better late than never the way the things are now Security is being left in our hands as as as the federal government is not giving us what we want Or one reason or the other good or bad the state the regionals are taking Their own steps and it's going right down to the individuals We're all starting as individuals to be our local security providers To decide where to go how to go whether to go in the mass or to go as individuals Nigerians have actually it has come down to not just the the state or the regional level It's come down to personal level where security is no longer taken for granted. You can't just wake up and say Oh, I'm going one place or the other in my country You have to sit down make a lot of calls plan and plot and if possible like the story about the nyc You carry some ransom, you know, so that they can be instant appeasement You know, it's like please take this. Let me go and things like that It's sad and I look forward to when that should be a story that was told in the past All right, and of course on the punch this morning there's a talk about the 2022 budget 17.126 trillion naira. It says national assembly to transmit 17 trillion naira budgets to buhari today And that's from amad lawan We're saying I talk anything exciting about the budget Absolutely none. Absolutely none if you You know, I've contested the election twice Like I said and the very first one for the first time almost in my life I had migraines for about three days. I can go for Three months. Let me not exaggerate and say six months without having headache. I never have had I had migraine terrible headache for about three days Because when you look at the budget take the budget of Nigeria look at what was passed And then go back and look at the implementation You realize that the budget is just a ritual It's just a piece of paper that nobody takes serious down to the state level And I think it's even worse at the state level. You realize that there's a subhead that had maybe about say 800 million and another one that had about maybe 50 million At the end of the day in terms of implementation, you know, they hide things and they make it It's a game for them governance has become a big game for the players It's not it's not what it ought to be you discover that the one that had about 800 million The release is maybe about 20 or 30 million But the one that had 50 million it realizes the spend has gone up to maybe about seven or 800 million So it's just a A manipulative kind of piece of paper that they throw to the public and then the public looks at it and debate it Debate it at the end of the one look at the implementation You know the cash release is what really matters at the end of the day environment and things like that And they have a good relationship between the office of the accountant general the national assembly the presidency or at the state level We talk about the budget office years and then maybe the house of assembly and the governor's office These guys have an understanding to play Nigerians That's why in acquirable for instance We set up a special group where we did the budget monitoring and what came up was almost scandalous And I think that the time has come when citizens should actually come in And be a lot more interested in the affairs of state and put pressure on the system to do what they ought to do These are not our lords. They are Our managers recruited by us and they ought to fear us instead of us fearing them So I'm not as excited as I should be about the budget because I really don't see what I should be excited about If they had given education something like 20 percent. I'll say yeah, we're thinking. Have you noticed something? Have you noticed that the tech investors the fintech? They are moving into Nigeria in droves and as of today we have about four unicorns Go to Lagos come to your go to some of these Tech, you know Units you see how much foreigners are coming into Nigeria and they are so interested in Nigeria tech sector Have you noticed that our government don't even know anything about what's going on? Just think about it They take the IT sub sector People are coming look at the unicorns and ask me. How did they get there? How did they get bought at those prices? How did these people get to know? Where is the government? This is one area that the government would have said wow, this makes a lot of sense Do you know what it means for you to be a unicorn? Do you know what it means for you to get those things resident here and go out of your way to create our own what may call Silicon Valley? Come to a place like Uyo where you have some of the brightest best IT guys And set up this infrastructure Where you will be able to make money in the billions in dollars We don't have thinking governments, federal governors All they do is budget oil share Meanwhile, there's a bigger cake. I look forward to when we start to recruit Managers that understand governance and harness the resources that we have Okay, the federal government okay's implementation of new national development plan. Does this sound like a sherry news No, not to me You see it all the same thing We run a governance and a system where your administration goes with you And if you understand that two things should happen When you get into office within your first year you have four years Do even if you want to do a 10 year development plan In your first year So that by the time you run your four years You have gotten the buy-in of the people in the consistency in the paradigms You understand me in the infrastructure of that development plan By the time you get into four years you really need to a stage where there is an animation of we the people In that plan there's a buy-in of the people so much so that even if you live in four years It has almost entered an auto drive But you do this with less than two years to go Who is going to implement your your plan the new person is going to come in and think in terms of His own legacy so to speak So they should concentrate on finishing strong forget about the year 2023 forget about it Concentrate on where you are now and how you are going to exit on a blaze of glory That is my honest advice to them all this development plan of five years Who are you living that for if pdb takes over tomorrow or if a tc takes over tomorrow What are you going to say you got to bind them to it meanwhile? We don't have a believability in it in the six years you've done to what extent that we believed in it for us to say Oh, no no no we can see the consistency Even if you want to check look at some like I always bring this in in cross river state Mr. Donald Duke Started this concept of calabar carnival He sat on it as if his life depended on it He created it to come into an auto mode version And even when the next governor came in it became very difficult for you to just even when they tried to do a few things Well, like no no no no no no no no The citizens had come to bind to it not just cross riverian But people from outside and it has become a culture. How did that happen? There was a vision. There was a consistency. There was a believability. There was you know These principles that make people to say this makes sense and today How many years after the only consistent thing in Nigeria that came from 1999 is a calabar carnival How did that happen? You know over time we've continued to hear of vision 2020 and vision 2000 and the likes vision 2010 there's been so much of them Millennium development goals also You know and it doesn't seem like any of them actually takes off all leads anywhere So, you know, I think you know our viewers will agree with you That you know, this doesn't seem to be exciting But one more thing we will talk about on the leadership newspapers There's something from from a president to lushe goba sanjo and sultan It says convene reconciliation confab now obj and sultan tell president muamad upohari Saying security driven largely by social injustice and failed economy Um, zyan talk do we need another reconciliation confab or do we just need You know the government to do what is necessary and justice, you know, you know across the system I I I always talk maybe because I'm an architect. I talk from foundational standpoint And the question is what is a nation?  What are the basics? What are the paradigms the things you cannot do without in a nation One word that stands out is equality Equality of all citizens equality You've got to know That the different nationalities that come together to form that nation Every individual Is equal And the best way that kind of illustrates equality in Nigeria if it was done right is voting Where it is one man One vote it doesn't matter whether you are dangote. It doesn't matter whether you are fabio It doesn't matter whether you are in gyato. It's one man one vote I hope yes. I hope my my my my this is not so based on that foundation Then we are able to discuss based on equality based on equity based on fairness And as of today The the the the gap between us the fault lines have become Almost unacceptable in nationhood. So I think there's a point somewhere when we start to say let us convoke A talk shop of some sort where we see to what extent we can have some level of understanding and reconciliation There is a point And um, whether this administration can do that all I want to appeal to Nigeria is try and manage and see to what extent We can just go through this motion and at the end of the day Let us wise up wake up and bring into office people that understand what governance is all about We should be sick and tired of going through the same route the same cycles and achieving nothing That is what my take would be on the matter for now All right, uh, I think at this point in time, it would be okay to say thank you for being part of the conversation Ezekiel Yaito Is public affairs analysts. We really appreciate your time and we look forward to sharing more of your thoughts on this platform America's was what thank you. Thank you. I appreciate it. God bless you. Thank you Okay, so, uh, we just had straight to telling you what happened today in history Today being the 23rd of december We'll tell you what happened today when when we come back we head straight to our first major conversation of the day


Alright, so before I tell you what's the one thing I did to get here really is, I think you gain more by understanding how it all happened first. So hi, my name is Kwame. I'm a documentary filmmaker and photographer, as well as a voiceover artist based in Accra, Ghana. And you are welcome to my channel. It's okay. Now, this channel is my attempt to make sense of life and the human experience in general. And I'm just happy that you're here. Now, today's video is going to be one about my sincere gratitude to every one of you, 1,092 subscribers currently part of my journey on this channel. You guys are just amazing. So the big 1K happened a week ago, Wednesday, 17th of June, 2020. And I got to say that, look, this day will forever be memorable in my life. And on the morning of that day, my account had 965 subscribers. And so I had been doing my usual promo post of soliciting for people to click that subscribe button and join me on my journey. I do that every once in a while. So a couple of days before this happened, actually, I noticed that my account was getting a lot of attention from new people who were so kind enough to reach out and express their love for what I was putting out. So let me just say shout out to Pam and Gloria. If you guys don't know them, they are also YouTubers. So I'll leave a link to their channels so that you can subscribe and follow their journeys as well. They are awesome people. They're really, really awesome people, very genuine and open. So that kind of gave me confidence, though, that I may be onto something, you know. And I've always had that creator's insecurity of not being sure about the true quality of my work. And so this external validation did a lot for my confidence. So back to the 17th of June, I'd been, you know, promoting on Twitter and Instagram, Facebook, the same avenues I used to share my work. And I needed just 35 to hit 1K, just 35 people to subscribe. Then something happened that evening. I discovered that Twitter had a new update for Voice Notes. I was like, whoa, so everyone that knows me, you know, kept pointing it out to me that this was specifically made for me. And I decided, you know, to test this voice note thing with a random voiceover and boom, like everything started going up from then up until 11 p.m. My phone was still blowing up. Suddenly, like there were new eyeballs on this thing that I've been doing for the last eight years, which is voiceovers. I've been doing it for such a long time and they were giving me compliments and whatnot. It felt really good. I got to say it felt really good. I'd almost forgotten to even use that attention. I was getting to direct more attention to what I did as a professional freelancer at the moment, which is filmmaking and YouTubeing and all that. But thankfully, I have friends who look out for me like that. So big ups to all those people. So I began using the opportunity to shout out my YouTube to the new people. So I went from 965 to 1013 in just a couple of hours. Look, I couldn't even sleep. I was just too excited. So if you're watching this video and you're waiting for some hack to grow your channel, yes, it's not magic.  No, as far as my channel and my journey is concerned, I've done one thing and one thing only to get here and I can describe it with just one word, consistency. That is all I have been. I've been consistent. This year, I decided to live by the mantra of do, learn, repeat. I've always had that insatiable want of growth and improvement and that's what this channel is about in the first place, self-development and growth. So if I tell you I was so sure that I was gonna get 1000 subs this quick in six months, then look, I'll be lying. It took me by surprise. Same way that looking at my videos from a few months ago, I mean, takes me by surprise, realizing how much I've grown with the video quality, the look plus even how relaxed I am on camera and everything. So I'm not sure where I need to be, but I can see the difference. So that's good enough for me. For six months, I posted every single week and sometimes even twice at the peak of the lockdown season. So I've been doing a lot of work. All I've done is to post consistently even when I wasn't sure what to work on. Somehow I knew I had a quota to meet posting something every single week. Remember, presence is what counts. Presence is very important. So let me tell you what I've learned also about YouTube listening to the bigger YouTubers and this whole YouTube thing and how it works. So there are millions of new accounts that get created every single year, millions. Now YouTube does pay contents creators because your content is used to sell ads to other brands and in the beginning you only needed one case subscribers to be eligible for monetization. Just that, nothing more, just one case subscribers. Now a few years down the line, YouTube realizes that getting the 1,000 subscribers wasn't such a big deal. People could easily get it based on how much you can promote your channel using your social media to meet that 1,000 subscriber mark without necessarily putting in the work with your videos. So this is what they decided to do. With 1,000 subscribers and your 10 mediocre videos, you expect to benefit from it? Nah, it doesn't work that way. So YouTube decided to, I mean, change their tactics and make it a little more worth your while to be able to get the content from you to sell to advertisers and also start monetizing. So now they require you to have 4,000 watch hours in addition to the one case subscribers over a period of 12 months. That is the rule. 4,000 watch hours is equal to 240,000 minutes of watch. Now that's a lot of work. And even though I have one case subscribers, I'm nowhere near meeting that mark of four case subscribers. 4,000 watch hours. So that's why you should watch more of my videos. You know, I need the minutes. Yeah, plus if you're having a YouTube channel in the genre that is heavily saturated, then you do know that you have even more work to do to stand out. So anyway, what I'm saying is the one thing I've done all this while is being consistent, super consistent. I've been consistent with posting every single week, sometimes even twice. I've been consistent with improving the video quality that I put out. I've been consistent with researching. I've been consistent with promoting what I upload. I've been consistent with engaging people who watch my content, liking and commenting. Now, when I learned more about what it took to get somewhere good on this platform, I just lowered my expectations of expecting to blow up, for example, in three months or six months. I was aiming more for like a year to make it somewhere that I can look back and be proud of what I have done so far. So I didn't expect to see it in six months. So if you're looking for some magic hack, I'm sorry to disappoint you, do your research, commit to improving your content in every aspect of video quality, light, sound, presentation, everything. And make sure that you show up when you need to. That is how you see growth that you can be proud of. So consistency is the one hack. And on that note, I'm gonna say I'm truly grateful for all the 1K and over people who subscribe and watch my videos. That's if you like this video, don't forget to like, subscribe, and also hit the bell button to get notified when I post a new video. I appreciate all of you. And I'll catch you again on the channel another time. Peace and hopefully the hack works for you. Adios.


Hey guys, what's up? I'm gonna do a little vlogging today Off and on all day, so I'm gonna make a birdhouse already built one for a couple years ago But I think I'm gonna make another one. So I'm gonna get my stuff out here and do some vlogging Hey guys, so I got everything cut out See there's the roof pieces. There's the front back There's sides, and there's the perch, but look at this Wood is warped. So I don't know what I'm gonna do about that. I was just gonna glue it together, but I Don't know I don't know that's one of them things that I Don't know may have to Shoot a couple little nails in it. You're supposed to anyway, but I Wish I had some small screws Then I would put a couple screws in it Then if it splits once it's glued on there, it doesn't really matter because the glue will hold it, but I don't know We'll just see so Saturday Got my nephew's graduation thing to go to so I Don't think I'm going to go to the graduation because it's like at eight o'clock And I don't know why they do it so damn early 8 o'clock for the graduation ceremony Yeah, I don't think we'll make it because I'm an hour away from there to begin with so We're going to go to the reception thing the little graduation party afterwards. So it's supposed to be pretty nice I got everything all set up and stuff. So Here real soon monkey and I was going on a camping trip Found a good place to go very cheap It's going to be down around New Smyrna. So keep your eye out for that The next couple weeks or so So anyway, I'm going to try to get this birdhouse put somewhat together I don't know how it's going to work out, but I Don't know I may have to split them like set them down and then step on them and then split them and Then put them on there. That's probably what I'll have to do. We'll see. All right. I Don't know guys Story of my life, right? Oh It's hot out here. It's like 91 No, I ain't got the birdhouse done made them a little porch Screwed up over here But that's all right. It's a freaking birdhouse, right? So it's got his little perch on there So it'll work Would it look pretty good? If the wood wasn't so so I mean Look at that. So but that there was my fault, but it's okay because I glued it on the inside and The birds won't get wet now. So there's a birdhouse back of it Just saw it was just a piece of board that sat over here in a garage for a long time. So I Don't know. All right Well, the birdhouse is done. What else we're gonna do? Let's see. Okay. Let's try out this little TV Okay There was a lot more I wanted to do out in the garage today, but it's pretty damn hot. So All right First thing let's take this old camera up to this thing Try to do this one handed. I'm gonna mess bunch of stuff up yellow white And red I won't plug it in because I Don't know Now it's got some power in it All right, like I said, I don't know what these two black dots are But I think this will be all right for a monitor. Okay, let's go to mode on TV whoops mode AV AV in all right, let's turn the Camera on Whoops Hey, it works and let's hit so it is working cool One from two black dots Let's see if it'll play something here So that works. See how well it does in the bathroom. All right So and we'll shut that off Now let's plug in the antenna This is from from our antenna that's outside all right now Let's go to mode. We'll take it up to TV All right, it's working channel. That's one channel. There's two three channels four seven The picks up seven channels. That's pretty cool awesome Okay, you know so that works That'll make a good monitor. I'll make me a mount to mount it on the tripod or it's also got Stand in the back. You can stand it up It's supposed to have an antenna that clips on up here that screws in there I'm thinking about just getting one of those $15 ones from Walmart That I had reviewed That I don't have anymore We took them back. So I was gonna keep one. I thought nah, I don't really need I wish I would have now because that'll be all right handy like in the tent if it's raining or something you watch the Little TV, but the main thing I got it for was to make a monitor, which that's what it is It's a monitor. So that's pretty cool So I get to look into this thing It's got a mount on the back like a where you screw it into Say your Your tripod so I can have I've got plenty of tripods I can set it up on one of my tripods and again use it as a monitor focus awesome and in here we've got some Mulligan stew Oh, it is kind of like a vegetable soup But it's when you take a bunch of vegetables and potatoes.  So we got some of that going on. That's gonna be for supper tonight The monkey's gonna be eating good me too. So I'm outside Working on that little birdhouse, right? It's talking to Bruno.  I kept hearing like a Boon Boon coming from inside the house do you need okay? Like like if you call a company about a bill or something they put you on hold and you hear that boop boop Like every few seconds boop boop. That's what I kept hearing from inside the house I Came in the house came in the garage went through the door Nothing didn't hear nothing come back out and I kept hearing it and Bruno heard it, too I don't know what it was wasn't my phone wasn't the computer, you know, I don't have my computer turned on right now Besides, I always shut the speakers off on my computer because you know, they make that buzz of noise You know that humming noise So I don't know what the hell that was man And then it just quit it just quit but it was coming from in the house and Bruno kept looking at the door He heard it every time So I don't know it was kind of and he was like whining like Like you know like it wasn't right. I don't know. I don't know what the hell was Weird thought I'd share that with you So I've been getting all your guys's comments. I just haven't had a chance to respond yet So but I'll I'll get to you.  I promise Okay guys, so quite a productive day. We built a birdhouse We checked we done some vlogging We checked this monitor here, so I'll be able to Still looking at the screen like this all time. I can use that monitor. So that's gonna be good Just got to see how long the battery holds out You can still get the batteries for them. So they just plug in All right guys, so drink a little strawberry stuff here. We're good to go Thanks for watching and If you're down here in Florida try to stay cool. So all right guys, we'll chat at you soon. See you in the next one Bye-bye now


So welcome everybody. We will start. So we are OVH. You probably heard about us this morning during the keynote. We are a cloud provider. And we are here to share you a little bit about our experience on Swift infrastructure management and what we did with the automation part. My name is Jean-Dél Bonne-Toux. I work at OVH since two years as a technical evangelist. You can find me on Twitter with my nickname. And as I'm not the technical guy, I came with Romain. And I'm Romain. So I'm a developer at OVH since three years. And I've been working on Swift for almost three years. I'm one of the two guys of the Swift team at OVH. And I'm sometimes on the ISC channel of Swift. OK, let me show you and explain a little bit about our Swift journey and what we do with Swift. So we started our first cloud product in 2011. The name was Hubic. And the goal was to provide space in the cloud for our user to synchronize their data across their different devices. It was based on OpenVT. So as the success comes, quickly we had to think about a more scalable solution. And one year later, we made some R&D on Swift. So we were in 2012. And after three months to move all the counts from OpenVT to Swift, we were able to run a large cluster. It was not so very large in 2012, but it's still the same cluster we are running now. So we had a lot of upgrades and scale actions on this cluster. Last year, we launched our public cloud offer, which is a classical yes product. We provide the Nova, Neutron, Glance, Cinder, Keystone, and of course, Swift. So if you used to use Swift in another provider, at another provider, you could use it the same at OVH. So you have some number here. Oh, sorry. The difference between, maybe I should explain, the difference between a big and a public cloud. On a big, we don't provide the Keystone API. We want to provide access through our application, web application, or mobile application. On public cloud products, we provide all the API, the classical API from Keystone, every product I already mentioned. So you have some number here. We manage more than 25 petabytes of user data, which means we have almost 75 petabytes of space on our disks. We manage more than 10 billion of objects, and everything is running on 23,000 devices. So now, let's me explain you a little bit of our infrastructure. This is a very high view of our infrastructure. We have many clusters. The three most important are two in France and one in North America. They all be the same. So we deployed the configuration with Puppet. And we monitor our cluster with Shinkan. Currently, we are running Juno and Mitaka. And on the right side, you have a Zoom on our infrastructure. First, you have the HAProxy, which is targeted by a round-robin DNS, which is the swifting point, in fact. The reason why we use HAProxy is for the SSL computation. HAProxy use the hardware acceleration, so it's really efficient for the SSL transaction. Then you have the Keystone Galera. I will show you a little bit more on the next slide on these parts. The proxy node holds the account job and the container job. That's why we had to use hardware with good IOPS. And then we have the large storage node. From here, we have different hardware profile. The goal is to have the good ratio between the CPU power and the space available on disks. So this is a quick Zoom on the relation between HAProxy and the Keystone Galera cluster. As you can see, we root the requests, depending on the type of the requests. So if it's a right request, we will send it to one node. And if it's a read request, we will send it to the other node. The reason why we do that is because when we didn't do that, we had many locks on the database. Every right request was sent in and distributed to the different nodes. And we had a lot of locks on the database. And with this routing algorithm, we don't have any lock. And this is a priority list. So if the first node is not available, the HAProxy will select the second node, et cetera. And we had a similar problem to manage when a node failed and he wanted to re-sync itself. So we used the same list, but in a reverse order to avoid the selection of the right node. And with this workflow, we are able to re-sync without disturbing the whole cluster. So now you have an idea of our infrastructure and the size we managed. We wanted to share you our automation. So this is the two most important actions we have to manage every day, almost every day. The first one is adding a node in the cluster. And the second one is manage the failed disk. So what happened when we had the node? This is an overview of our process. The first thing to know is the OVH storage team is a classical customer of the OVH dedicated server team. So as a classical customer, we had to order a new server in our data center through our OVH API. When the server is available, our robot will launch the installation. And when the installation is done, we will collect the hardware profile of the node and then associate a role to this server in a database. So now we have an available server and a role defined. We are able to launch the POPET models. We have 20 POPET models to manage from the disk partitioning and formatting to the H-approxied configuration, for example. So there is no human intervention. The whole configuration of the node is managed by POPET. And then it's time to add the node in the Swift cluster. So it's managed by Swift ring manipulation by our robot. Roman will explain you a little bit more about it. That's what I wanted to share you here, is that for us, adding a new server to our cluster is just about ordering a new server through our API. There is no other human intervention. And this is a screenshot of our Swift Recon which describes the device usage. It's one of our clusters. We have many of them like this. So yes, it describes the device usage. So as you can see, most of our device are used between 85% and 92%. And as you can see, we have some device used a little bit more than 50%. And it's probably because these devices are added a few hours or a few days ago, maybe. And the robot is feeling them more and more, manipulating the ring. And now Roman will explain to you how it's done. So one of the most important part of increasing the cluster size is to add the devices to the ring. As Jean Daniel told you, we describe our cluster in a database that you can see on the left of the slide. And we have a robot that will try to synchronize the ring with what is in our database so that the ring eventually match what we have in our database. But first of all, it's important to check that you can effectively manipulate the ring. So you have to check if the cluster is healthy enough to be rebalanced. So the metric we want to control is called dispersion. So we run on every storage server a probe that will calculate the dispersion of all the local devices. And this information is sent to our monitoring so we can get a learning if dispersion is too high on some devices. And also we get graph of the evolution of the dispersion on each device. This information is also collected on the Swift Proxies using an adapted version of a Swift recon, middleware, and a command line interface. So before explaining you how the probe works, I'm just going to explain you quickly what is dispersion. Dispersion is when data are not where they are supposed to be. Each time you rebalance your ring to hot devices, you create dispersion because you ask Swift to move data from one device to another. But moving the data is not immediate, as it may be a gigabyte or terabyte of data. Also, if you have a disk that is down, Swift will write data temporary on the backup device, which is called end-of-device. This is also dispersion. So back to our probe. On the left, you can see an example of a small ring. It's actually a simplified vision of the ring with three replicas and four devices. We see that on this ring, device two is a storing partition three, partition one, and partition two. So this is a view of the ring. If you check on your device, a partition is just a folder. So you can see what partitions are on your device by just listing its content. So on this example, we have partition one, two, and three. But we also have partition zero. Partition zero must not be here. It must be on device zero, device one, and device three. So we will call it a dispersed partition. It may be here because you just rebalance your ring right before. And the process that must fix the dispersion didn't move the data yet. It may also be here because maybe device zero is down. And Swift is writing data on device two until device zero get back. Dispersion is fixed by two processes in Swift. It's object replicator and object reconstructors. So our probe just compare what's on the device and what's in the ring. This information is sent to monitoring. And it will also be collected on the proxy. So all the object servers on the right will calculate their dispersion. And the proxy will collect the dispersion of all the devices and calculate an average of the cluster. When our robot decided to modify the ring to increase the cluster, it will first get the dispersion of the cluster from a proxy. And it will decide if the cluster is OK to be rebalanced. We consider that the dispersion is OK when it is lower than 0.1%. It's a really low value. But on a normal cluster, it should be under almost every time. So the robot checks the dispersion. If it's OK, it will fetch all the information from the database. It will fetch all the information from the ring of the cluster. And it will compare both. And it will create a list of jobs. We have three kind of jobs, adding a device to the ring, removing a device, and updating the weights of a device. Quick note on the update of the weights. I like to keep a friendly relationship with my network team. So I want to avoid to create too much data movement at the time. That's why we only increase the weight by 100 points at each run. So we have this list of jobs. They will be applied to the ring. And finally, the ring will be rebalanced. Then all the object server will gate this new ring. We use everything for that. They will fetch the new ring every 30 minutes. And then it's up to Swift to move the data to their correct devices, object replicator, or object reconstructor. We use the size of the device as a weight we want to reach. So it's a size in gigabytes. So for example, if we are adding a 6 terabyte device in the ring, we will try to reach 6,000 points for the weight. So if you do a quick math, because we add only 100 points at each run, it means that we have to place this whole scenario up to 60 times for a device to be fully added to the ring. I don't imagine to do the same thing 60 times in a row, because it's boring and because it's error-prone. So that's why we automated it. Increasing a cluster is something we do a lot. But there is something we do more. It's replacing the failing disk. Every year, we replace about 1,000 disks in our clusters. It's an average of three disks per day. If you work 24-hour a day, seven days a week. I don't do that. I only work five days a week. And clearly not 24-hour a day. So it's more like five disks per day. So if we had to do it by a human, it will be a half-time job. Because replacing a disk is not just replacing the disk. You have to do some check before. And there is a lot of operation to do after the replacement. For that, for the disk replacement, we rely a lot on monitoring. As Jean-Daniel told you, we use a shinkan for the monitoring. And because the number of servers and device we have in our clusters, we use a passive check. Passive check means it's a server that sends the information to the monitoring server. So to be able to write good automation, you have to have the right information of the state of your cluster. So we basically write a probe for every recurring problem. And of course, failing disk is one of the most recurring problem. And we have three ways to consume all the information in our monitoring. The first one is a web interface for the human. The second one is text messages for the people on duty. And the last one is an API for all of our robots. There is one we really like. We call it self-filling. That's him on the picture. Its job is to control what is going on in our clusters and to take decisions. For example, if a server is non-responsive, the robot will out-reboot it. If an object replicator is stuck, self-filling will restart the process. And if we have a disk failing, the robot will decide to replace it. As I told you, replacing a disk involves many steps and many checks. It's mainly a four-step process. The first one is collecting the information about the alarms in the monitoring. So the robots will connect to the monitoring API and get all the alarms of the failing disk. Then it will decide if it's safe or not to replace the disk. I will say more about that just later. And if it's safe, it will set the server on maintenance. It will create a ticket to our data center team so that they physically replace the disk. And then when it's done, it will reinstall the operating system if it's needed, if it was a primary disk. And it will run Poopette. Poopette will format the disk, mount it, restart the process if it's needed. And once it's done, if we have no more alarms on the server, the server will be set off maintenance, and then it's back in production. I just told you that the robot have to decide if it's safe to replace the disk or not. What it means for a disk replacement to be safe? It's the safety of all the partition it is storing. We have another example of a ring here. And we have an alarm on the device 2. So we will check what partitions are on device 2. So in this example, it's a partition 3, 1, and 2. So we will check that each of these partitions are safe. For example, if we check partition 3, we see it is stored on device 0 and device 5. So we will check that device 0 and device 5 are OK. What does it mean? They are OK if there is no alarm for this device, but also if the device haven't been replaced recently. Why that? Because if device 0 was changed one hour ago, sure, there are no alarms on it. But also, there is no data on the disk because it takes time to re-synchronize the disk to reconstruct all the data that must be on it. We made some bench, and we know that in our cluster, one terabyte of data, it takes 12 hours to reconstruct it. So depending on the size of the disk, we know how long we must wait to be sure every data are back on the disk. So we will do this check for every partition. And if every partition are OK, it means we can safely change the disk. So in this example, if device 0, device 5, and device 6 are OK, it's safe to replace device 2 so the robot will do all the steps I just described right before. There is one last thing about disk replacement, a tricky thing. If you try to hot replace a disk in your server if it's supported, you cannot always unmount the disk because some IOs may be stuck on your file system because it is corrupted. So we tried many ways to do it the right way, like killing the process, like trying to unmount force the disk or unmount lazily the disk. And at best, it was not working. And at worst, the kernel was crashing. So we took the easy way, the most secure way, to just take off the disk without unmounting the file system first. Sure, the kernel will cry a bit, but in the end, it's OK for it. But the tricky part is if you take off the disk without unmounting it, the block device is still in use in the kernel. So when the new disk will be put in the server, it won't get the same letter. For example, if you're taking off SDB, you rack a new disk, it will be named SDC because SDB is still in use. And as we automated the formatting of the disk, it was a bit tricky to say to Poupet that now the disk that was SDB is SDC. And we don't like to guess this kind of information when it's about formatting a device. So we implemented a kind of constant naming of the device in UDAVE. We use a name for the device based on the enclosure ID and the slot ID of the disk. Some people are OK with me. So this way, no matter the order, you put your disk in the server. Even if you reboot the server, they will always get the same name. So it's safe to do formatting with Poupet or stuff like that. So this is how we automated the disk replacement in our clusters. As you can see, no human intervention because humans do wrong things. They do errors when they do things. And our robots are really reliable. But with all these automations, I mean, there are no more work for humans because the robots do everything. It was almost getting boring to manage shift clusters. So that's why we had to create some new challenges for us. The current challenge we are trying to achieve is to convert about 20 petabytes of data to a razor coding. And I'm sure we will have a nice feedback to give on that pretty soon. It's a work in progress. So we hope to be able to present this result in Barcelona in six months. Thank you. If you have any questions, it's a tie. It's a tie. Well, I'd like to thank David, which is in France and which is managing the cluster while I'm having fun here. How you deal with the enclosure hangups because sometimes drives can hang ball enclosure and all disks become unresponsible. How you do know which drive to extract? Thank you. So we check smart values and we check the kernel messages from the, we check the kernel messages in our probe. And we are able to link the kernel name, so SDB, with the name we gave. We wrote in Perla some stuff for that. And it was not your question, maybe. Not exactly. There is a cases when device block all IO on enclosure it connected to. So you get kernel messages for every device in this enclosure. They all looks like failed, but only one device is real source of the problem. We never had this kind of issue. You're lucky. Yeah, maybe. Hi, what base operating system are you using? We are running on DBN. And are you using the puppet open stack modules? We are using some of them for, for example, for Keystone. And for Swift, we started our own module a long time ago. So we are still running on it. Thanks. Hi.  It depends really on the size of the cluster and the kind of disk you choose. No matter the size of the disk, if you're running SATA disk, you have the same amount of IO's available. So if you have more disk, you don't have this kind of issue. So we try to create big clusters with small disk, and it works better. Of course, there is some impact on the performance of the cluster, but most of the time, it's not really important. OK. And can you talk a little bit through what your zoning strategy is within the ring? Can you repeat, please? Yeah, can you talk about how you structure your zones in the actual Swift ring? Yeah, sure. So we create a cluster. We don't use the multi-region feature in Swift. All of our cluster is built on one zone in one data center. And we use to start a cluster a part power of 18 or 19, depending on what we think would be the future of the cluster. And that's basically all for a ring. Yeah, one zone in one data center. When you were describing the dispersion collection that you have, it's run per node. And then you're retrieving those metrics via the proxy, which is not your stock dispersion populate dispersion report commands. So I wonder if those enhancements or changes that you guys have made is something that's currently available, or if you think that they might be interesting enough to share. Or maybe you could go into more detail about how they're different from what other people are maybe using. They're not available for now. They can be, but they are based on our probe, which I don't think would be made upstream, because it runs every five minutes. And it sometimes takes a lot of time to run because we have to do a list here of all devices. And also we have to check if the partition really has data. So we check the content of the partition. And so it takes time. So we cannot do it in the recon middleware because it will block a worker during the time of the run, which is about one minute. So it's a probe running cron and information collected with the sweep recon. Yeah, I think that's a great strategy, just run it in cron and dump it out into bar run Swift and then have the recon interface to deploy. If you think it can be interesting for everybody, I will try to commit it, of course. I think so. I think, yeah, in some ways it's a better way to organize the problem. Does the collection look for both misplaced partitions and also missing partitions? I mean, at 10 billion objects, you guys have a pretty filled out cluster. So every partition that might exist in the cluster surely does. That directory is somewhere. So with the dispersion metric that that node is collecting for a device, say, hey, according to the ring, this partition should exist on me. And it's not here as much as, say, I have this partition that actually belongs somewhere else. Do you report either direction or do you differentiate or is one more important than the other in your experience? We only report a misplaced partition because when a cluster is starting, there is no way to know if a partition is missing or if it just doesn't exist yet. So for now, we only report misplaced partition. And when you do the collection, do you have something running in the proxy as sort of like admin middleware, or do you just hit the recon interface on all of the object nodes concurrently? So we extended the recon middleware on the object server, and we patched the sweep recon key to generate a JSON file for every metric the recon can get. That sounds like another interesting enhancement. I knew it. All right, I think that's it for now. Great work. OK, thank you. OK, I think we're good. Thank you, everybody.


I'm Paul Scanlon. I'm an introvert. It has been three years since my last party. I do not need fixing. There's nothing wrong with me.


We'll give you the microphone at the end of the session if you have a question, if you have raised your hand. Okay, so hopefully everybody is ready to go. I know our speakers are, so I'll just introduce the speakers. I turned it on. So our speakers today are three. The first speaker is Yvonne Simpson. Yvonne is the immediate past president of the Thoreoptimus International Federation of the Southwest Pacific and Project Liaison Coordinator. She's a member on the Committee of the Birthing in the Pacific Project, and in her personal life she works for Westland High School in New Zealand, director of international programs and career advisor. Our second speaker is Judy Malep, and Judy is from Papua New Guinea and is a member of the Thoreoptimus International of the Southwest Pacific. Her role in the organization is the national representative of Papua New Guinea, a member of the Ramu Club, and she's also on the Committee of the Birthing in the Pacific Project. In her personal life she works for Ramu Sugar as a Supply and Logistics Manager. And our third speaker is May Lamont, and May is the Thoreoptimus International Federation of the Southwest Pacific Project Manager. And in her personal life her background is in education, specifically that of teaching, the teaching of English as a second language. So welcome ladies to the virtual International Day of the Midwife, and we really look forward to your session. So Yvonne, I will hand it over to you. Thank you Gillian, and welcome everybody to our presentation on our Thoreoptimus International of the Southwest Pacific Project Dressing in the Pacific. This is based in Papua New Guinea to address the issue of maternal mortality. The federation project has started with support from our federation Thoreoptimus, and we had clubs in Australia, New Zealand, Mongolia, Hong Kong, Thailand, Cambodia, Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore, Fiji, Samoa, and the Solomon, plus Papua New Guinea. Thoreoptimus International is an international organisation of multi-grave and business and professional women in 127 countries. We had general conservative status for the United Nations at UK SOC. Our mission is to transform the lives of women and girls, and our focus is on education and our freedom of Thoreoptimus education to lead. Now Thoreo means sister, and Optimus means the best, and so together they combine to mean women working for the best of women, and we aim to educate, empower, and enable women and girls to reach their potential. So having a safe delivery as a mother is one of those objectives. Our presentation today is for Gillian. Gillian earlier will come on next and see us from Rama, and Gillian has been a fantastic support person on the ground in Papua New Guinea. She's an amazing Thoreoptimus. I'm from New Zealand, and as you introduced me, I am the project liaison, and may be from this one, she is the project manager. Now we chose Papua New Guinea as a focus because we have three clubs there, Leigh, Ramu, and Port Nordby, and they are passionate women about maternal care and can provide the work on the ground. And the criminal mortality rate in Papua New Guinea is the highest in our federation. In Papua New Guinea, 100,000 live births equate to 733 women, mothers who die as a result of birth-related factors, and most of these are preventable. It started as a proposal from a modern plan for Optimus International Business on Columns, and was developed through that by our then-project manager, Janet Eston from Townsville. She's been in these photographs. And Janet was passionate about literacy and has done a lot of work to get our project to the stage it is. The appeal attracted that attention that our international president made it to the International President's appeal, and so this project went from being supported by our 13 countries to the 120th event of the International Organization. So we have well-supported biases around the world. Our goal is to make a difference for Papua New Guinea mothers and contribute to the United Nations' Development Goal No. 5 to decrease maternal mortality. So I'll now hand on to Jeanne Neely-App, and she will try to explain a little bit further. But the women in this project are very active and passionate to make a difference, and we would like to take this opportunity to thank Janet Eston for her work. Hello, Jeanne. This is Jeanne here. Hello, Judy. Can you just move the microphone just slightly a little further down from your mouth? It was just a little bit blurry with Yvonne. Hi. Is it okay now? Yes. Can I just have a soul of hands? Is that better for everyone? Can you just say, say, Virtual International Day of the Midlife for me, Judy? Yes. It's under my skin, so is it okay? Yeah. It's still a little bit blurry from my end. Just try and drop it a little bit further. Hello. Is it okay now? Yes, that's a little bit better. Thank you. Okay. Excellent. Yep, you want to go ahead? Thanks, Judy. Thank you. Thank you, Julie, for this opportunity. The project that the BIP, the South West Statistics Optimist International started its project, the project is located in two areas in Papua New Guinea. One is in Ramu, and the other one is in Lehi. The project means a lot to us Papua New Guinea women, and there's a lot of challenges that Papua New Guinea women face, and one challenge would be the geographical location of the areas within Papua New Guinea, as you know we have 850 languages in Papua New Guinea, and the isolation of the remote areas makes it very difficult for women, especially women are pregnant mothers to travel from the isolated villages down to the nearest aid posts or health centers. And in Papua New Guinea we have limited number of health centers operating within the rural areas, and quite a lot of these health centers do not operate, do not have the delivery facilities or birth facilities for mothers are able to deliver. So a lot of them would deliver in the villages, and again when they deliver in the villages the other women would help them to deliver, and that makes it so possible for them to deliver. The other challenges that mothers face are not enough money to pay for a book, to go for antenatal visits to the clinic or health center, and a lot of times these mothers just to get money to pay for that they have to go to a nearby market to sell their corpse, and they need to walk all the way from where they are, they need to cross rivers, even over mountains, and then to the nearest market, and to sell the corpse it doesn't take a day to sell all the corpse, and it takes about a week to sell the corpse. So these are the things, whether they get enough money to pay for the antenatal visits, or even they pay for their deliveries, because when they deliver at the health center it will cost them about $15 to $20, which is equivalent to $3 to $4. So these are the very important points that I've mentioned. These are the challenges that women face, and I will tell you a story for mother of how she traveled from a rural area called Tauta Village, and that is in Medan, and now she managed to get down to the health center. Unfortunately, she couldn't make it, and it took her two days to travel from where she was, and she delivered on the way. Unfortunately, she delivered the baby but the baby died, and she was hanging. They couldn't cut the umbilical cord because there wasn't any aid post-audility or someone who can assist to help her, and so she was taken by a husband and uncle down until they reached the road, and she also passed away. And they didn't know that she passed away. She was in the ambulance. Fortunately, she had made it to the hand-by-road and took care of the health center, and she lived her life. So that was another very, very sad story that she had gone through. The families who say they can't do anything, they cannot complain to the health center about what has happened to the woman because everything has happened that way, and even it's not only them. Other people that come to the health center, especially mothers, when they die, they cannot even complain or they cannot say anything. They just accept the fact that they lost their loved one. And why this training was important and we targeted the village that attended because we saw that the village that attended were the majority of them helping to deliver this woman back in the village. So that's why the project was targeted at that. So the village that attended, known as the local or the traditional, traditional breast attendants, they attend to women back in the village. And we brought this training up so that they are secure and they are taught to use the modern and clean tools and equipment. In the previous times, they normally used the bamboo to cut the umbilical cord and also they used the rope of the bush or the tree to tie the umbilical cord. And with this training, we trained about 39 village that attended and they've attended the training and a lot of them, most of them were illiterate so we also ran about literacy training for them and that was in talk teaching because a lot of them, they don't speak English, they haven't been to school. So that training was very fortunate to this woman and as soon as they attended the training, it gave them a lot of confidence now that they can help a mother to deliver using the modern technology and in a better and clean way using whatever was given to them. So one of the reasons we told the story was that she never knew that the job that she was doing back at home was just something like a woman going to the garden and she never felt so important but after when she attended the training, she felt so important, she felt that the role that she was doing back at home was very important that she needs to be acknowledged, she needs to be recognized by the community. And going back to the community, you cannot be made a very important person in the community. It's always the men, the men are known to be important in the community but this training has also taught them that when they go back to the community, they need to also educate or they need to talk to the community leaders to the men that that job that they're doing is very important. And a lot of these videos also face challenges that when they go and deliver a woman in another village, they need to work in the night. So this project, the upskilling program has also been given a set of equipment to use. I thought that they can use while they attend to a delivery in another village and that has really helped them and not forgetting, they have also been taught that they need to report back to the health center of how many babies that they have delivered. So far, about 39 babies have been trained. We had about 160 deliveries, all done without any complications. Half of them were delivered at the village and half of them were referred to the health center due to complications. But, you know, it shows that at least even now there wasn't any statistics kept in the past but we're trying to maintain that this project is a sustainable project and we want to live with the government to take that on board. Even though this project is going to go away, but still for us, we're still going to continue this project because it means a lot to us and we want the government to be very active involved and to know where we're coming at and to whatever plans that we want to put in there, they need to take on board and make it a sustainable project. The mobilization, during the reporting of the VDA, we did a mobilization program and upon the national policy of the VDA and VHB of the Health Department of Papua New Guinea, we had to follow a policy on the reporting of VDA. So we had to go to the villages in the community and they were the ones to choose which women were suitable to handle the job. It's not like we're just going and choosing ladies in the village now. It is through their community that they nominate the women who have been doing work within the same area, within the birthing project for almost 10 to 15 years and a lot of these women came to attend the training. They were in working, delivering medicine in the village from 10 to 15 years. We had quite a number of women in that sense, but we had a few of them away. They feel that they wanted to give back to the community and help the community. So far we, like I said, we had 39 village spread attendants, and we covered about 23 villages within the districts of the Utsino district and the Danhao Rau district. And also we went as far as Bogia in the Medellin province. So we've done a lot. We also came in contact with the World Vision which we are partnering with the World Vision. Like you can see as I've gone back, as I've mentioned about women dying, you see a lot of women dying. They reach the health center and unfortunately because there's no doctors there, there's no qualified doctors. So there's no assistance there. And also because they cannot get to the hospital.   So I'll pass it to Amin. Go ahead. I am, I'm sorry. I am right to go ahead. Can you just stop your microphone slightly? This is a little bit blurry. We re-adjusted it. Is that better? It's still a little bit blurry. Just point it away from your mouth a little bit more. It's nowhere near my mouth. It's underneath my chin. Is that better now? I think that's a little bit better, yes. That's great. I'm sorry for the gap. I'm re-adjusting the headphones. They seem to be slipping. I'm Neil Mont. I'm the project manager of the Birthing in the Pacific project now. I was the assistant project manager with Jammuq before. And a company tour on many of her journeys. So the transition has been fairly smooth to my management. As you can see on your screen, the project developed out of the UN Millennium Development Goals specifically looking at the improvement of maternal health. But Papua New Guinea is concerned. You've already heard about the maternal mortality rate. It is very high. It's one of the worst in the Asia Pacific region. The Asia Pacific region, other statistics are better. But Papua New Guinea has been a nation now for 30 years. It has many difficulties that would compound being able to address this issue. But they are very aware that they will need to by 2015. As you can see, the implications for girls is very difficult. With a population of 7 million, 50% of whom are under 15 years of age. A facility rate of 5.6 children, which is quite high. Health expenditure, which is quite low, only 0.6% of the GDP. Whereas with comparison in other areas, the MOAs 4.9 and CG is 4.1, Australia is 8.8%, you can see that it's very low by comparison. The terrain itself that Julie was talking about, and you can see more slides here, is not the only difficulty where this project is concerned. Where the women are presenting pregnancy, the health of the women generally is a great concern. Many of the women are malnourished, suffering from TB or hepatitis. Anemia and heart disease are huge problems. Many of the pregnancies are too many. Many pregnancies are really too close. And they generally poor access to family planning services. There's also a campaign to really promote this. And a lot of effort being put into not only the improvement of the services, but the acceptance of family planning in itself. And of course many of these women leave it in extreme poverty. What I would like to say about the previous statistics is this particular project, of course, is covering none of that. The project is specifically looking at specific upskilling in various areas where the birth attendants are. And that word we're using generally to cover everybody from mid-wide community health workers down to the believed birth attendants that Judy is talking about. Where the lay province is concerned, that's where the SHI lay is in the Morabee province. And where that province is concerned, we could not start by looking at these statistics to build on the project. So that is why where the lay project is concerned, this concentration has been on two huge mobilization trips into very remote areas under very big difficulties in just the human district. They are building partnerships as they go along. This is the type of terrain that Judy has alluded to. And this is the focus for the project in lay. And as you can see with terrain like this, although the focus of all the programs, specifically the VBA program, is ensuring that in all possibilities, the first stage is to accompany these women to the health centers. Health centers are either not existent or the terrain is too difficult. We have to remember that 80% of the population live in the rural areas and many of them living in very remote areas. So the constraints there are being not only with transport though and access. These women have family roles. There are cultural constraints of going to a health center for a birth and of course as Judy has told you there is a cost. As you can see this young mother looks as though maybe this is her first baby and she actually looks very young. Many of the girls are married at 13. So this particular mother may well have a number of children that she has left at home and those children will be maybe in education more often than not, not because they're either the school is non-existent or once again it's in a remote area that they must walk to. Where the babies are bursting are concerned. There is a great difficulty with the gathering of statistics because there's a lack of registration and also where the maternal mortality figures are concerned. They really are quite rubbery. They are really a best guess and because many of the deaths are not recorded in the first place. Down in the market area these are the women that we are talking about that we need to within our project be resistant to the people who are working with them. So Optimist Internationally as you have heard are raising money for these projects. We also have a component of the project which is the major component and this is working on two national health departments, that's PNG National Health Department initiative. They set up a reproductive health training unit and there are two programs within that that we are beginning to assist with funding. The programs themselves are being run by the people who are experts in the field. Our role in that is really to assist in a very major component of the program actually and that's the provision of the teaching models and the teaching aids that are needed to ensure that that project works. So as part of the program, by the way the Community Health Worker Program is a pilot program in itself and it is quite unique there. It's hospital based at Mount Hargan. It's also a program that has an eight month course. It's residential and it's very much based on the practical work to give the community health workers who attend it experience a good practice as well as the lecture side of it which is a lesser component that occurs every day. So they get to know good birthing practices and the backgrounds in a good training hospital. The models that we've just looked at are models that will be distributed to the training hospitals where those courses have been facilitated. The resourcing of the midwives in the general hospital, this is one resource that we have found everybody has asked for and we are using this wherever training models have been given and the work villains that you can see there. They're also asking for many other things in terms of things as small as gloves for working even in the major hospitals. There is a midwives society in Papua New Guinea and we're helping to build that midwives society. The society itself is beginning to grow and that's a great joy to us. Where the birthing attendants are concerned who are in the villages to ensure that because their training is really based on good health and good practice yes they had to attend the birth and this is what will be contained in a kit that they will receive. There are other resources as you can see on the right that they will be given two quite simple resources that they will take back to assist them in their work. There is a huge emphasis on community support and so in the community centres that we are using we are also looking at what is needed in the community centres for the training to become much more professional. So in the goose up health centre which is in Ramu we have provided beds and also provided other equipment that they know are necessary. They know that they are able to use their training to use but that equipment doesn't exist and that's a stress actually not only for people who are at that midwife level it's a constraint for many of the specialised people who are working in the PNG health department. So our aim, our aim is safe and healthy mothers and babies but more than that we really are aiming that this project which has been today extended to 2016 as far as a project for our federation is concerned and the countries within this project is a one that we are hoping to build sustainability. The need is huge and will take many years to accomplish so as Judy has already said we will pass this on to hopefully the provincial government and the national government to take up as something that they can then perhaps sustainably support. We at the moment are doing this work with our own budgets mainly because the health department itself does not on the provincial health department do not have the money to facilitate this work themselves. They know for what they would like to do we are working within their programs we are trying to assist in achieving their goals so this doesn't stand aside. This is part and parcel of what PNG itself is aiming to do and within that though our hope is that in the end it will be a sustainable project. Oh Judy I'm sorry I finished. The time is up. Okay thank you very much for that May. That was an excellent presentation that was very clear your voice was lovely so thank you very much for that. Now we certainly have lots of questions coming through here so I'll maybe start with now her name on the thing is Tom down under so I'll just check. Tom would you like to ask the question you were talking about whether the high mortality rates were evident like quite a while ago as opposed to now. So would you like to ask that question. Thank you very much Hannah. I'll enable your microphone. I'm sorry I thought you were answering the question for that person. As I have said the statistics are very difficult and in fact many people who are working academics in this area are suggesting that we don't use figures at all. But of course we know how important they are. Statistically no the figures are becoming more and more apparent knowledge of the need and knowledge of what's been happening. Yes it's been known for many years especially by the professionals and the great deal of work has gone on behind the scenes in order to get the state government itself and the focus and the community, the big communities out there who are helping to fund this like I said are getting them more focused on this particular area. Excellent thanks Mae. There was also some questions that came through in relation to the training models that were used and someone made the comment that Ogade and who is supporting midwifery education. I think that was the rocker midwife made that comment. So are you finding that in all of the areas? You're talking about the Ogade funding. Just talking about the models that are used. You had a couple of models which I think were a prompt trainer and a thing like Natalie. Yeah that's Charlie Dolls and what was the question about those models? They're being funded through our project. We thought 60 of them and they will eventually as I say deliver back to people we have trained who will then use them to continue in their training in their training centres. That's great. Excellent. Yes we used the same model here in Australia so that's why I knew them so that's great. One of the other questions was around and we heard from the previous session in India that midwifery is taught as part of a nursing curriculum. There's not a separate curriculum for midwifery. Is that correct? The situation at the moment is very interesting in the country where the midwifery course is concerned at in the training hospitals where it still exists. There are four of them where it still exists because what has happened is the people who were up till in the past seven years who were attending those courses were not getting accreditation and registration. What happens now is that also aid has funded eight trainers from Australia headed up by Pat Brody who many of your listeners may well know and they are looking at the training component updating it assisting in that and so the hope is then that from now on that course will be a better course and the people finishing the course will automatically receive accreditation. Excellent. There's a question from Shannon and she'd like to ask a question. She's raised her hand so I'll just enable her microphone. Shannon would you like to go ahead? I think we've lost Shannon. I'm sorry. I can't read exactly what she's written. No, that's okay. She seems to have stopped off. Hello. This is Shannon. Hello. I just want to know that in India we have a lot of traditional midwives and government have started their training and now stopped but I want to know that what is one of the traditional midwives in your country? I didn't understand all of that. The line was very bad so I don't know what the question was. Julian, can you find the question? Yes, I think it was around the role of traditional midwives in your country. Yes, I think it was around the role of traditional midwives in your country. So the ones that were not or have not been trained, what is their role currently now in T&D? Are they still attending women? Many of the nurses themselves are instrumental in doing the birthing in the hospitals. They do not have midwifery training themselves but they become experienced in that birthing practice. There is such a lack of midwives in the country. The looking at retraining all of those women to get them all certificated is really too large. I have asked the figures how many midwives there are that are properly certificated midwives registered in the whole country and the figures have varied from just a little over 300 in the whole country to 270-ish within the public health system. Okay, all right, thank you for that. All right, it seems like Shannon's back. Sorry, Shannon, would you like to ask your question now? Yes, it takes me a second to get it on so you can hear me. Yes? I can hear you, Shannon, yes. There's a delay from back and forth. The question is, oftentimes those of us in the states are given things like this and so these little kits are told to donate or send these kits. And what we're trying to figure out is are these kits actually, are all of these items used per birth? Is this just something that people are doing to make them feel better on this side? Are these actual materials that you need? How are these being used in each individual birth? And would there be other things that would be better to send? Or are there different things that will be meeting real needs? Yes, the line once again is not good. I didn't understand all those questions. Are you talking about the slides that I put up to deal with the birth in kit that we're getting the midwives to work with? The one with the plastic? The one with the razor blade? Yes, the one with the razor blade. I think it was a razor blade. Somebody asked where the solar torch was. That, right there. Well, unfortunately, you've not got these slides that I've got in front of me that just say they're all scalpel. You've got one that says razor blade apparently. Scalpel is not a live scalpel. Everybody has seen the slide that you've got up here. May now called basic birth in kit with a plastic seat, soap, gloves, gore, square, string, scalpel and a seat to cover the mother. Are they all the items that are used? And I think she's asking, were there the other things that you would like in these kits that would be of more use to you? Oh, this is only in what's called the basic birth in kit. There are other things that these belief birth attendants go away with, disguise the limit not only with them but with the community health workers who are telling us what the situation is in their own health centers or they may be working in a clinic and of course there are also age posts here. All of them all need a lot of basic equipment which they do not have. I think when you said before that women have to pay $3 to $4 per birth and that's a lot of money for them and it's hard to find. From our perspective it just seems $3 is so insignificant for what we do and it really does make you want to, even if everyone donated $18, it's just such a small amount of money that could provide women with just basic items necessary to care. The interesting thing about that is that in fact there was a government initiative that suggested that in, which came from the women's movement, the NGO movement itself there, that there would be, that cost would be completely right. What I found in going back last time is it's not the case. Although there might have been government legislation, the people who are delivering the health services are the provincial government and largely, and they have the money, and largely the health centers and the hospitals are making their own rules. One of the reasons why they've retained having a structure for payment, and I agree with you, you sound very, very little to us, but if you're talking about a money employed person and you're talking about a person who is a sustainable farmer, that is a huge amount of money and the aid centers and the health clinics and hospitals are saying we're retaining that because in fact we are so short of other equipment that we in fact are using that money for that, and so they're very, very reluctant themselves to get it up. I know that there are, I've heard of organizations here in Australia who actually organize days where they get a whole group of people together and I'm not sure exactly what it's called, so if anybody knows please put it in the tab box, but where they actually have this making up of these basic birthing kits to send and I'm not sure they're sending them to Papua New Guinea, but I know that they're quite frequent around Australia. So does anyone know what they're called? Yeah, it's called Birthing Assembly. I thought what you might be calling the work that the Birthing Foundation in Australia is doing. And they are asking community groups to help them with assembling the birthing kits. They provide all the material. I actually attended one in Brisbane that was organized by Zonta and in that we had the CEO from the Birthing Kit Foundation there and we packed while they assembled the 10,000th birthing kit that they had sent off. They have their own way of distributing them and although Zonta provided that service they were not doing any distribution. We are going to link in with the Birthing Kit Foundation in order to set up within their organization the supply of birthing kits that we need. Lovely. Thank you very much for that May. It was a wonderful session and thank you very much to Yvonne and Judy and Christine being in the background for helping with the technical support. So thanks very much for those. I'll just go through a couple of the slides at the end.