Teaching Those that Teach

It was teacher training on Tuesday and we didn't get started as far from on time as one might expect (i mean, TIA...) just as we did expect though, it was raining heavily, but to be honest I think it gave the small dirty classroom that served as the Jamadianle school's main hall before they moved to the knew and bigger location some miles away some atmosphere and made all of us who were working inside feel a little closer. At least that's the way I try to look at the rain situation, for looking at it any other way would perhaps be rather dire as it is raining almost every day now. But on to the actual training :) we had about 15 teachers show up, including the Head Teacher of the primary school, and the Head Teacher of the nursery. Most of the teachers were well dressed in traditional looking attire and appeared to be in their thirties, quite a contrast with many of the Rwandan teachers who were quite a bit younger. We started out the training by mainly focusing on the fundamentals of the XO, how to open and close programs, how to turn on and shut down the computer, how to navigate the different views etc. We then went through a short sample lesson involving Record and Write, where they took a picture of themselves and copy and pasted it into write so they could label it. We also showed them several more of the XO's features including how to make a spreadsheet in Write, something that was very practical for their own use in the classroom and with which the head nursery instructor immediately began to compile a table of her students and their contact info with. 2 hours into the training and we decided to wrap it up, feeling like any more would be too much to introduce all at once and besides we were getting pretty hungry for lunch. Many of the teacher seemed very pleased and several approached me with questions about using the computers in their classrooms and were also eager to further explore the laptops at the next training, which we will be having weekly for the duration of the program. All in all this training went perhaps better than I had expected and I think the teachers may really be as open to them, given real evidence and a thorough understanding of their potential, as the Mr. Orock, the director of the UAC, has said on many occasion, though at one point one teacher did ask to speak privately with us at some point and I can only postulate that there may be skeptics among them who we would do well to sit down with and discuss rather than just read the feel of the room. All that remains to be done now is the grand launching ceremony on Monday, after which we will have another, more in depth training on Tuesday, in preparation for the start of classes and the Summer Holiday Caravan come this Wednesday. I can hardly wait!

BBB Back in the Cameroo-ooon

Arriving back In Douala we were both eager to try out our new
bargaining skills gained from negotiating motorcycle taxis and
Ethernet cable at the market in Kigali with the various baggage
“helpers” who had swarmed us the previous time, but tour
disappointment the airport was fairly empty and we had very few
requests to assist us through customs. We spent the ride back to Buea
getting updates on what had been going on at the UAC from Taco and
remembering that Cameroon was a country that had a charm all its own,
perhaps not the quiet rolling hills of Rwanda, but something wild and
sweaty that was no less interesting. After exchanging stories with the
other volunteers and adjusting to the reality of no water a severe
lack of variety in our diet (bread, bread, and maybe some cucumbers
and mayonnaise) we settled back into the pace of life as we prepared
for our trip to Yaoundé at the start of the next week. Most of the
other volunteers were busy preparing for a grueling ascent of Mt.
Cameroon that weekend, the tallest second tallest mountain on the
continent after Kilimanjaro and the looming background to Buea that
was one of the region’s major attractions. Team DBF decided to stay
behind and work on setting up our classrooms in hope that this would
bring our laptops to us sooner, or at very least allow us to start as
soon as they arrived. Although Sam was sick and spent his weekend on a
quest for the movie Blood Diamond instead of joining us, Brittney and
I did join a few of the other volunteers who had decided not to brave
the Mountain in a trip to Limbe, a nearby coastal town, where not only
did we enjoy a lovely day on the beach, but were able to have a real
shower afterwards!
That evening we talked with Mr. Orock about what we wanted to do for
our Opening Ceremony when we finally got the laptops and we could
begin the Summer Holiday Caravan we had been talking about so much. He
mentioned that we would pay a “courtesy call” on several figures of
importance the next day and so we waited in anticipation for the
morning. In the morning we tossed on some clothes of a finer nature
and piled into the UAC van and 30 minutes later arrived at the
regional TV and Radio station, where we met with the Director as a
group and gave several individual interviews about our program. We
left with them promising to cover our opening ceremony and assured us
that the whole country would be aware of what we were doing this
summer. Next stop was the Regional Delegate in charge of Basic
Education who greeted us warmly in his top floor office. With him we
stayed longer and discussed the many opportunities that the XO’s
presented and how likely it would be that the Government of Cameroon
might like to go the Rwanda route and purchase them in large
quantities in a real bid for one laptop per Cameroonian child. This
was good to talk about, but was a bit premature in my opinion,
especially considering we weren’t even in possession of our 100 yet,
and so had yet to prove their feasibility or effectiveness. We ended
our meeting with an invitation to the delegate to attend our ceremony,
to which he readily promised to make an appearance.
So, all we really needed were those darn laptops…the next day Mr.
Orock traveled to Douala to pick up a package and to purchase a
subscription to the new Internet provider we were subscribing to, MTN
having failed us (no internet for the past week!) we were switching to
Orange and upgrading the speed of the connection to work with the
laptops. We graciously begged off his offer to accompany him, a trip
to Douala being next to scheduling a root canal in our books, and
continued to plan how we would make our case in Yaoundé to get our
laptops released. Lo and Behold, Mr. Orock was planning a surprise,
for as we were walking home that evening he pulled up in his pick-up
truck, the bed filled with large brown boxes, and triumphantly
announced that he had returned with the XOs! We were completely
unaware that he had succeeded in getting a pass from the government
and so this came us a very unexpected, though very pleasant, surprise.
We resolved the next day to post-pone our trip to Yaoundé and instead
devote the remainder of the week to preparing the classrooms and main
hall for the grand opening ceremony, for it was to be held the
following Monday.

An Escapade into the Rwanda hills, with some intense XO learning on the side

Trip to Rwanda
So we arrived in Rwanda and besides the overnight flight with a
6 hour layover in the Kenya airport it was a lovely flight. Kenya
Airways, despite all the trouble we had trying to book with them,
manages to try to feed you whenever possible, so we received meals at
around 2 am on our 4 hour flight, and another full meal on our little
1 hour flight from Nairobi to Kigali International Airport, which, if
you’ll excuse the term, has got to be one of the cutest little
airports I’ve ever seen, resembling most closely an overlarge Cabana
you might find housing a bar somewhere on a tropical beach. The fact
that we had absolutely no trouble walking through customs, getting our
free visa, and grabbing our waiting luggage should have informed us
that Rwanda was a very different place than Cameroon, and as we were
driven over to where the workshop was being held in a nice tour bus we
got a chance to see just what an understatement that was. A cool
breeze blowing through the trees, growing next to clean red-dirt roads
along which pretty red-roofed houses were scattered among the many
rolling hills of this “land of one thousand hills”, all this was
enough to make it apparent that that contrary to the perception held
by most Westerners, most likely informed by knowledge of the 1994
Genocide and movies such as Hotel Rwanda and Sometimes in April,
Rwanda today embodies bucolic beauty and peaceful progress. Indeed the
facility where much of our training was to occur was a modern marvel
that housed the Kigali Institute for Science and Technology, or KIST,
an important partner to OLPC in Rwanda. Rwanda has further
distinguished itself by having purchase more XO laptops than any other
country in Africa, and is pursuing a goal to have one for every child
in the country. These laptops are already being used to propagate
public health warnings and to facilitate the transfer over of the
language taught in the public school system from French to English, a
move that the Rwandan Government hopes will further increase the
opportunities for foreign business investment and growth. This is just
one example of the many new policies implemented by Rwanda’s much
admired president Paul Kagame, who gained fame as the leader of the
Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) the Tutsi led army that put an end to
the genocide and brought stability back to the country.

But back to the training. Unfortunately Team DBF had to miss the first
two days, where the grand ceremony involving the OLPC and Rwandan
leadership occurred, though we heard mixed results on how exciting it
was (from “it was sooo looong and boring you guys are lucky” to “omg
you missed the biggest thing ever! I got to shake the president’s hand
and meet Nick! (the chairman of OLPC)). Whatever the case, we arrived
on Wednesday and got right to work meeting the other teams and getting
the technical rundown on everything we ever wanted to know about
updating the XO, setting up our server, and establishing network
protocols, setting up access points, and our personal favorite,
NANDblasting (a way to update all 100 of our XO’s to the latest
operating system. We also ( I think perhaps most importantly) got the
chance to visit a primary school that already had over 3,000 of the
XO’s (almost enough for every student there) but where they were
significantly underutilized, mainly because the teachers were a little
scared of them and not very comfortable using them in their classrooms
yet. At the school we had training sessions where we (the OLPCCorps
members) taught the teachers how to use a few of the programs (mainly
Scratch, Record, and Write), and worked with them to brainstorm how
they could use them in their classrooms. These sessions were somewhat
frustrating, due mainly to the language barrier and a technology
learning curve, but they were also very useful as it helped us to
identify many of the issues we would probably have in our deployment
country when it came time to familiarize our local teachers with the
XO and get them comfortable using it in the classroom. We also had the
great opportunity to interact with many of the children at the school,
and a more curious lot I have never seen, with groups of them
gathering around us during their recess time and staring at us like we
were alien life forms. We responded by using the few words in
Kinyarwanda we had learned from the teachers and the hotel staff to
surprise them with a hearty “Mwaremutse” (good morning) and an even
less expected “Nimeza” (Well or Fine) when they found their voices to
ask us how we were. The evidence that much of their limited English
was gained through rote learning was pretty plain by their response of
“Fine, Thank you” to almost any question posed them. That and other
aspects of the education system were somewhat new to me, especially
the extreme discipline the students were under, where they responded
like machinery to whistles blown by their principle and any student
out of line would receive a sharp smack from a light wooden cane that
they were obviously quite terrified of. These kids were still kids
enjoyed rousing games of volleyball and soccer during recess which
they graciously allowed us to join to our unending embarrassment. More
than anything I think this interaction with students made us eager to
return to Cameroon and start using the XO’s with the children there,
though as we were to soon find out that was not to happen as soon as
we might have hoped…

The last few days of the Kigali workshop were spent saying goodbye to
the new friends we had made, sharing contact info and advice on each
other’s deployments, and working out last minute kinks in our
technical setups. We met a man who would also be working in Cameroon
in the North of the country with a deployment of 5,000 XO’s that he
was financing through a partnership with a major Islamic Bank and so
we made sure to network with him and made plans to meet up in a few
weeks once we were back and started in on our deployments. By the end
of the week we were sad to be saying goodbye to plentiful food,
showers, the cool climate and the interesting people from all over the
world we had spent the past 8 days with, but we were also ready to get
back to the UAC and the program we were itching to now get off the
ground. Of course as we were to be reminded time and time again,
things in Africa are rarely that simple. Before we left Kigali,
Brittney, who had stayed behind in Buea to assist with some
preparations, (and to visit lovely beaches, waterfalls, and pigmy
villages in the exotic southern town of Kribi) informed us that we
were unable to get our shipment of XO’s out of customs because their
monetary value was of such a size that they required a hefty duty to
be paid, somewhere along the lines of 3 million Central African
Francs! Mr. Orock had been in Yaoundé the capital attempting to
negotiate their release for several days but was unsure of his chances
at success, and so we needed to think of something to get our laptops
and save our project, fast. The only thing that we could come up with
as we packed our bags to return was that we would go to Yaoundé
ourselves and plead our case before the highest official we could get
access to, and if that didn’t work, well, it would just have to.

No Day but the first Day (time to start paying our rent ;)

The last post should really have been called "first evening in Cameroon, as we had yet to experience a typical day with the UAC. The next morning, after waking and having our breakfast at Mr. Orock's house, we learned that this would not be a typical day either, as it was the day of graduation for the students at the Jamadianle School, and in fact the graduation of the first class to go through each grade in the school, 6th graders who started at the school 6 years ago. After a bit of waiting around (a condition we would quickly find was just going to be the norm as nothing was ever really meant to start of time, we took a van to the school, were were were swarmed by hundred of kids dressed in the cutest graduation outfits you have ever seen in your life, full robes, and graduation hats complete with tassels, all in the stunning purple and gold that is the colors of the Jamadianle School and also is present in their day to day uniforms, which include purple bow ties and suspenders for the sharp dressed little boys and gold skirts and purple blouses for the exceedingly put together little girls.

After some time of just exploring the school while everyone just hung out and listened to music, the ceremony began, and in the largest classroom we all gathered to watch the school choir and various groups sing an dance to praise their school and country. As the afternoon approached the ceremony continued on, as it seemed each and every student in every grade received an award or a prize of some sort, including such categories as "most bilingual" and "most cultural family". After these awards drew on for several hours the ceremony ended and the graduation was finally complete, at which point we headed back to Mr. Orock's house for lunch and afternoon celebration.

A little later the three of us had out meeting with Mr. Orock in the UAC office, where we began by discussing our expectations, goals, and all around opinions and philosophy of education, the role of NGO's and their relationship to the government, the importance of reaching all levels of society, the best ways to be effective, and our role in bringing our project in cooperation with the UAC to fruition during the time that we are here, as well as ensuring that what we created would be sustainable and would be supported after our stay had ended. We were very happy to find that our views and the views of Mr. Orock, informed as they were by his extensive experience in this work as well as his deep roots in the area, meshed very well and we found ourselves very much on the same page. From here it was a more simple step to plan out how we would outreach to the surrounding villages, announcing our program to students there and here in Buea that there would be a Summer Holiday Caravan that would pick them up and bring them to the Jamadianle School were we would be setting up the laptops and the wireless network to connect them. We would be meeting very soon with some of the teachers at the school to introduce them to the XO and to work with them on developing lessons to implement with the students, as well as the IT staff at the UAC to ensure the continued support of the laptops during the school year.

We are waiting on Mr. Orock to take the van into Douala to buy supplies and get phones and more local currency, as well as our laptops which evidently have arrived! We are excited about finally having the equipment to show to everyone and to lend some out to the teachers to learn on their own while we are in Rwanda for the OLPC training all next week.

Until Later,

Team DBF

Our Ship Having Finally Come In...

Hello again,

This entry finds us Sam, Siler and Brittney, having arrived safely in Douala the night before yesterday, walking out of the airplane into an immediate sauna of heat and humidity. After a long wait for our luggage we finally made it through customs and out to where the staff of the United Action for Children was waiting for us. It took us 2.5 hour drive from Douala to Buea where the UAC is based and where will will be implementing our project.

On this van ride we had the opportunity to speak with some of the UAC staff and they answered many of our questions about the part of the country we were passing through and how we would find our stay in Cameroon. of the 5 or 6 staff who came to us, one named Barkley turned out to be in charge of coordinating the volunteers, of which there were already 5 others staying at the volunteer house before the 3 of us arrived. Both Barkley and another staff member named Taco both immediately struck me as incredibly friendly and did their best to make us feel immediately welcome and at home.

When we finally arrived at the house we would be staying in Buea, after what seemed to be, though it was night, a beautiful drive through tropical countryside, we were shown to our rooms, where we each had a very pretty bed to ourselves, and then were invited over the house of the director and founder of the UAC Mr. Orock Thomas, where we were given delicious omelets made by his wife Amelia that were a perfect closure to this part of our journey. Sipping tea with Mr. Orock we learned that he was not only the man behind the UAC, and local NGO that had grown from one small room and a few staff to encompass many building at several locations, several schools, and a staff of over 50, but he was also deputy mayor of his home town of Mamfe and was the chief of service for vocational education in the southwest province. After discussing our trip and a few other things about the UAC and the area, we made a plan to meet the following day and discuss in detail our expectations for this summer and how we would accomplish all the goals we had been preparing for now that we had arrived in Buea.

At this point we said goodnight and retired to our rooms, happy to have arrived, and confident that we were working with a great man and had every chance to accomplish what we set out to do this summer.

A Reintroduction and a Welcome from the road (sky)

We are Siler, Sam, and Brittney, three rising juniors at the University of Pennsylvania who are doing a project in Cameroon this summer with One Laptop Per Child. We got this opportunity through applying for a competitive grant through One Laptop Per Child's new AfricaCorps Intiative: http://wiki.laptop.org/go/OLPCorps_Africa based on a proposal that Sam and I put together this spring: http://wiki.laptop.org/go/University_of_Pennsylvania_OLPC

One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) is a non-profit organization started by students at MIT with the goal of providing a low cost, rugged laptop to the children in the developing world, in order to use these incredible machines as a tool for teaching young children how to think for themselves and create knowledge and build skills that will open up a new world of possibilities for them. (See Constructionist Learning/constructionism for more on the educational philosophy that OLPC subscribes to)

The goal of our project is to work with OLPC to bring 100 of their XO Laptops to a village in the southwest province of Cameroon and implement an educational program based on these learning principles. To do this we are partnering with a local NGO called the United Action for Children http://www.unitedactionforchildren.org/, an NGO founded in 1996 with the mission of providing access to quality education to the underprivileged youth of this area. The UAC runs an alternative school called the Jamadianle School outside of the town of Buea and this school will serve as our major base of operations.

Among the numerous challenges that we will face will be how to provide power to our 100 XO laptops at the school which has limited power input and sometimes unstable electricity, how to transfer an internet connection found at the UAC's IT center 10km distant to the school and then broadcast it to the laptops so they can access the vast resources of the web and network,how to come up with interesting yet purposeful learning projects that use the XO to further the development of the students at the school, and how to ensure the sustainability of our project after we have gone (We will be there until August 15th).

Over the next few weeks we plan to face and overcome there and many more challenges in the pursuit of one amazing, productive, and exciting summer where a large serving of learning will be doled out all around.
As I write this we are in London at Sam's aunt's house, preparing for the second leg of our journey which should bring us into Douala, Cameroon tomorrow evening.

Until then, Cheers from the UK
Team Developing Brighter Futures (DBF)