Power Outages

The power outages here are making it really hard for me to teach the eight to ten students who have become my afternoon class. As a group, they have little English and fewer computer skills. What they need is time on the computer, to become comfortable with the mouse and keyboard. I can’t teach that – you gain it through exposure.

But you should see their enthusiasm, as they cluster around my laptop, the only hardware able to persist through a power outage – nodding their understanding as I coach them through the use of PowerPoint. What an ideal tool for computer literacy, PowerPoint is turning out to be.

But try to explain the difference between a drawing object with a cursor inside, and a drawing object with the border highlighted, and that the former can’t be dragged and dropped – all without any English! Everyone is picking up the word “Click”, as well as “Click-Click.” And how many times have I thrust two or four fingers in front of some poor student’s face, to emphasize the difference between a two-headed arrow and a four-headed arrow. And now that I think back, I have the horrible realization that I was holding up three fingers, rather than four. No wonder there’s confusion!

But despite these challenges, these students, who range in age from mid-twenties to early forties, are determined to learn, excited to learn – and that’s contagious.

Computers and technology, even here, in a continent which has faced so many challenges, are going to change things. I think people believe that, which is why there is such an appetite for technology. You wouldn’t believe the number of street vendors here who are hawking mCel Internet cards, or cell phone cards.

Today, one of my students came over to show me some accounting printouts, and volunteered to loan me his mCel USB modem. So we drove to the small market nearby, and sure enough, there were five different places with the yellow “mCel” signs, all within eyeshot – each with a street seller eager to do business. For about $7, I bought a couple of cards, from a young man who had a thick wad of them in his pocket! Only a few steps away, I bought two mangoes from a woman who had them spread out on a small, bright piece of fabric, and eyed the small bags of soya nuts someone else was selling. Another guy had plastic jugs full of petrol, and I saw cases of pop for sale. It’s quite a cornucopia – but I get the feeling that some people do without the basics, just to get their communication and connectivity fix.

Oh, and I finally got some more toilet paper, too. Speaking of which, the local toilet paper brings new meaning to the term “see-through.”