I have been mapping the little village Tchankada of my friend Cyprien in Benin lately. It’s not much work, but it was exciting enough for them to have their village mapped for the first time, it caused a wild story night.

Shortly after this, I contacted another person that mapped in this region, because having a local person helping can be useful for others as well. His main concern was to know the street names of the many streets around there.

There aren’t any.

My friend’s house is known by the family name inside the village, and the bigger municipality receives their mail at a post box in Cotonou. When he studied, and I mailed something to him, I used the post box of his university, and that arrived well.

For a long time, I was completely unaware about where my friend lived. Any description fell short. It’s also really hard to explain lat/long to local people, and the lat long I did receive was way off. Until my friend started to use my quickly hacked together app https://whenwhere.cf, which is basically a proof of concept for OLC for offline usage without maps. It worked brilliantly! I found his place on the map and he walked to some other places as well to add them to the map. He used it before in Cotonou to find the place back where he was before.

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Ontem foi a primeira vez que fiz qualquer coisa para o projeto de OSM. Comecei a adicionar nomes e umas ruas esquecidas, como também pontos de ônibus, na cidade onde moro agora. Alguém já conseguiu adicionar a maioria das ruas na mapa usando o material de Bing, mas fica até agora totalmente sem nomes, então isso é meu trabalho agora. Já que aqui somente o povo mesmo parece saber sobre os detalhes das ruas e os nomes, é um trabalho que eu acho que tem muito valor, já que a segunda cidade do estado sem boa mapa é uma vergonha...

Se mora por perto e tem vontade para ajudar, agradecerei!

Joop Kiefte