Today was kind of crazy…they had me running around at the church all day to teach some of the girls who stay at the church the computer. Most of them have either never used a computer or have very little computer experience. It took most of the day to get the computer set up, and required a trip into town to get a different mouse, and who knows what else. And then of course, had to find a desk to set up the computer on, and have the guy with electrical experience come in the office and splice the power cable the light socket dangles from to add on a wire down to the power-strip.
They actually had a UPS hooked up which was good since five minutes after they hooked it up and turned it on it started beeping that it did not have power. Guess what the problem was? One of the wires they’d attached fell disconnected…seeing as how they neither soldered it nor used pincher caps…just exposed bare wires. The only place I think I’ve seen a more dangerous looking electrical setup was that school in Costa Rica that didn’t have a circuit breaker because it was hard-wired into the electric without a meter and caused shocks. At least this one didn’t cause any shocks :).
Pastor wants to set up a whole computer training school…giving me plans for all the things we’d need like uniforms and notebooks and school fees and this and that and the other. The vision is good, other than that I think it really needs to be spelled out more clearly what the goal is and what kind of length of program we are talking about and a lot of other things…and then in the meanwhile they send me about eight teenagers to teach the computer for an hour on a single computer…which by the way the CPU was borrowed as I understand it. But if the vision is there, and prayer is there, God can supply the missing parts.
It is a little like ahhh, slow down, somebody communicate to me what the plan is of what is going on. With the culture difference, sometimes it is a little extra challenging to communicate because they just assume “this is how things are” and to an American “how things are” is a completely different perspective. But I’m sure we’ll get through a lot of that. At the very least a good handful of kids learned how to use a keyboard today. Space-bar and upper-case letters and punctuation and backspace were all kind of challenging concepts to them, but the ones who got a turn on the keyboard were all able to clunk out a sentence or two in broken English in Microsoft Word. Sometimes in America its easy to lose perspective of explaining things from no knowledge, because we are so exposed to computers that most people have some idea how a keyboard works, for example.
The other thing that’s challenging is that of course, when I asked the kids what they wanted to know how to do on the computer, every one said “I want to send messages” (ie. email), and of course the church does not have internet, so I can’t teach them that. Of course, learning to use the keyboard and mouse and typing sentences might be a good prerequisite for that.