African Enterprises Rwanda runs a school, Center for Champions, in Rwamagana, about an hour east of Kigali. It has 500 students in its primary school for street kids. Some of these kids are in their 20s yet they have not been schooled, often due to the upheaval following the Genocide. The school runs a fast track primary curriculum in which students complete the 6-year primary curriculum in 3 years. It has designated a room for a computer laboratory but it has no computers yet, by the time we arrived in 2013.
We raised some funds among our friends and bought 10 computers for the laboratory. We also bought a server, a router, 2 network switches, and hundreds of meters of network cable. The computers and cables were physically set up in an hour, because we had planned and prepared in great detail ahead of time. We had a connection diagram prepared and put it up on the board as soon as we started, and everybody knew what to do. We set up an e-library of hundreds of useful e-books on the server. Again, all the e-books had been collected and written in Hong Kong. All we had to do was to install them in the server. Now the school can teach with its own local area network, even though it has no access to the Internet (it was too expensive at the time).
(In 2013, Internet service was very expensive and SIM cards were practically impossible to buy. The situations has improved tremendously since then. By 2020 SIM cards are fairly inexpensive and affordable. However, coverage is still weak or non-existent in many places outside the main cities. Therein lies many important lessons for service-learning. We need one type of solution for Rwanda in 2013 which does not depend on the Internet. In 2020, we can employ solutions that can work with weak coverage. We really have to have intimate and relevant knowledge of the local need in order to develop appropriate solutions for the local context. We also have to evolve as the local situation evolves - what works one day may not work the following day. Knowing the history and having a long term relationship certainly helps. And a lot more. This is all partly why we work so hard to cultivate a long term relationship with partners and work on a site for a long time.)
And then we ran 3 days of workshops for the ~10 teachers and ~30 selected students. We taught the teachers basic computer network concepts, how to set up their own LAN, and how to make use of the resources in the e-library for teaching. We also taught the students, many of whom had not toughed a computer before, how to make and edit movies, as a way to teach them some common IT skills, and motivate them to learn. We seemed to have succeeded - many of them refuse to leave even after the class was finished.
In the evening, we have finished all the lessons. While we were cleaning up, the electrical power went out. Fortunately, we came prepared. We quickly whipped out 2 solar power charged LED packs so that we can continue to work. It feels great to be given a chance to demonstrate a practical use of the solar panels. The brief-case-sized solar panel pack consists of a solar panel, battery, and LED lights. They were designed and assembled for use in another project in Cambodia just before we came to Rwanda.
(In 2015, we will start switching to the installation of solar panels to generate electricity as a major project in Rwanda and elsewhere. We will cover that story somewhere else.)
Both the head mistress of the school, and the leaders of AE thank us earnestly and beseech us to come back. It it gratifying to know that our efforts are appreciated. And we have been coming back to Rwanda every year until the corona-virus hit in 2020.
No comments:
Post a Comment