The Man Pulling Radishes
Pointed My Way
With A Radish

- Issa (1763 - 1827)

Friday, June 26, 2009

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.

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