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GENBAND employees in Madrid have dedicated their GENBAND Day in 2012 to
Angel Olaran's foundation
a nonprofit organization that provides relief efforts in Ethiopia
They have a problem. They work in rural areas and need mobile phones to coordinate
the tasks of all the volunteers and workers
and the villages where they operate
don't have a continuous supply of electricity
They need as many mobile phones as volunteers
and when the batteries run out, they also need spare phones that are charged and
ready to be used
but phones are very expensive
Old mobile phone, the ones that we have in cabinets and drawers in our houses
have very few features
but they can still do the most important tasks
calling and messaging
and because they have few features
their batteries last longer
So GENBAND employees talked to friends, family, neighbors,
collected all the old phones that could be found
And on GENBAND Day they dedicated their workday to unlock,
erase, clean
and package the terminals
for delivery to Ethiopia
So remember the purpose of this activity
is to collect very old mobile phones that we are going to give
to non-government agency in Ethiopia
they're using it for relief efforts and they need mobiles that can stand a lot of
time without recharging the battery because they have very few hours a day of
electricity, So they need those kind of devices, they don't need fancy Internet
or anything they just need
voice and SMS
And here we have Daniel, he's going to show us one of the old
jewels of the crown which is
this is probably one of
the earliest mobiles produced by Nortel back in those days
maybe some people
remember them, pretty well advanced
I didn't even know that Nortel manufactured their own devices
This is probably a piece of museum now, it's probably worth
It probably cannot work
we're going to try it, we're going to see if it works and if it does we're going
to give it away and if it doesn't we can use it for display
would you mind telling me what you're doing in your post in English
classifying the material
mobile with chargers
so basically paring the mobile with the charger which sometimes is not
that easy
data cables
putting them aside
and then also
putting the earphones aside
This is the starting point
right and once we have paired
the phones
with the chargers
we take them
to the other stations
which takes care off
first of all
finding out
if they have been SIM unlocked
so what are you doing Juan?
Testing the phones, trying to unlock
and checking if they
are the locked or unlocked
okay and Begoña is also checking to see if they are locked or unlocked
and then she is cleaning the
contact lists and the messages on the phone to make sure they're sanitized
from data point of view
before we package them
clean them and put them in the bags
And here we have Ruben, he's testing
that the devices work that the batteries charge
We're all doing our part
You see how difficult it is with this amount of chargers here
many of them don't even have the brand of the mobile so pairing them
with this huge box of old terminals is pretty hard to do
okay so Iñaki,
Would you mind explaining us what you're doing here
This is the first one
so Javier just managed to unlock the first mobile on the Internet
using one of the codes
so it is great
Nathan, one of Genband employees in Madrid
had a project of his own
we raw materials funded by the company
he cooked the Spanish dessert called "Torrijas" that employees could purchase
to provide the money to "Caritas" a non-profit organization in Spain
Some employees purchased several torrijas to share with the colleagues in the office
at coffee break during GENBAND Day
is very a very sweet break
the task we had to do was a little complex
In fact, we collected more than a hundred terminals
But only about thirty are packaged for shipment
The rest, however, will continue to be processed in the coming days
to prepare a second or third shipment
GENBAND Day in Madrid had one main purpose
helping those who bring water, agriculture and progress to the people in need
in Ethiopia
But it also had a side effect
we avoided that all those mobiles with their hazardous materials could
end in a landfill and contaminate the soil and underground waters in Madrid