Day 32 - What's in a Name?

I spent the morning auditing an Operating Systems and Architecture class and also hanging around with the cadets and instructors. Lately the instructors have been giving me the last ten minutes of class or so to answer questions from the students and just talk with them. Today I recruited a few more Ultimate players. The students also put me on the spot with a couple questions. One asked me to teach him cryptography in the five minutes remaining in class. Another asked me my opinion of NMAA, the instructors, and the curriculum. The cryptography question was sort of easy to dodge once I told him we teach an entire semester course on it and still don't offer the full depth it deserves. I did commit to doing a one hour presentation/overview to the students and faculty though. The other question was a bit tougher because I wanted to be as candid as possible about the current developmental state of NMAA.

Since I've been auditing and teaching from their syllabus for a while now I was able to provide a decent answer for the second question. Essentially, they are very much at the technical training/system administration level with the CompSci major now. It is much better than any other college or university in Afghanistan except perhaps the American University of Afghanistan. Continuous improvements are being made, and the US mentor role will be involved for some time to come. As primary and secondary schools continue to get better over the next 10 years or more, NMAA will be able to continually get better as well.

I just read that June 2010 is shaping up to be the worst month in the history of the nine year war here in Afghanistan. The coalition has lost 44 soldiers already this month and two US and three British soldiers were killed in action today. Much of it is down south where the major offensive is. Keep their families in your thoughts and prayers.

So, what's in a name? It turns out, an entire family history sometimes. One of the things we're assisting with at NMAA is a database system to help track students. NMAA has graduated two classes now, and the registrar's job is starting to become a bit tougher. Managing grades, class standing, graduation order of merit, and transcripts results in a lot of data. The problem is, love it or hate it, Afghanistan has nothing akin to the ubiquitous US social security number. Uniquely identifying students (and citizens for that matter) is quite difficult. The tradition here is to name your children after a fondly remembered relative or two. After just a few generations, you can imagine how repetitive some of the names become. Sometimes it may help to include a town of birth also, but even that doesn't result in much uniqueness given the population density and mass migration of people to the cities. The cities is where all the foreign aid is directed after all, so everyone migrates to them looking for ways to provide for their family.

One might consider using current addresses or birthdays also. However, addresses are out since they don't exist for most of the country, and birthdays simply aren't tracked. Many of the NMAA cadets aren't really sure exactly how old they are. They can get within a few years plus or minus, but that probably varies depending on when they're asked. There are no birth certificates. Also, birth dates are totally unimportant. Over half the entering class at NMAA, when asked, said they were born on January 1st of some year. Technically, NMAA has a maximum age for entry and graduation which is in the mid-twenties, but I swear some of the cadets I see must be in their early thirties. Maybe it's too much exposure to the sun. Who knows. The bottom line for a database developer is, there is no key field!

We have yet to crack this nut, but we don't feel too bad since the government and NATO coalition here haven't worked it out either. I'm not sure what we'll come up with, but we're still looking. We're open to suggestions. The current administration is considering a national ID number of some sort, but there is a lot of resistance to that. On the one hand, the government really needs a way to track folks and to raise taxes to pay for the ANA, ANP, and infrastructure improvements. On the other hand, people would have to start paying taxes! I really should have reconsidered that tax exemption when my daughters were born and allowed them to choose whether or not they wanted a social security number...