Tuesday, July 19, 2005
Sauri Schools
Yesterday, Kristen and I visited the villages in the Sauri sublocation in the Siaya district of Nyanza Province (about 44 Kilometers from Kisumu). There are 3 schools located there; Kristen will be teaching teachers some basic computer skills. In these pictures, you will see the room where these classes will be held (the villagers shown represent the education committee) and a few pictures of some of the children. Finally, the last 2 are related to the difficulty of there being sufficient food to eat for all school children. The pile of beans in the corner of the room was donated by parents who had a small surplus so that those children who had nothing to eat, could have something. In another, a boy is roasting an ear of maize in the school kitchen for his lunch. This year each school has a maize field located nearby that the students maintain as a part of their agriculture education. The harvest looks promising, and their goal is that the schools can provide sufficient food for all students to eat at school. Many of the students walk miles home to eat utilizing valuable energy and taking up significant time to travel there and back. Ideally they could spend that additional time on their studies, with food in their bellies.
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4 comments:
Dear Shawn,
I do appreciate your blogging this trip and am finding the information to be very useful. How wonderful for you to be part of such a great project!
n our Global Perspective on E-Learning, a book that we are reading for class, it states over and over again that people in Africa have mixed feeling towards using technology because of the real needs of the people for food (their poverty) and the fear that technology will further widen the gap between those who have and those who don't. What do you think? What has been your experience thus far? Also, has it been easier to use technology than you thought it would be before you left or harder? I think you have been able to blog this fairly well, so I am wondering if you encountered less problems than you anticipated.
Sister Debbie
Hi all, thanks for your comments.
What the role technology is in such a poverty ridden society is a bit difficult to say exactly. Clearly the issues surrounding health, hunger, sanitation and clean water are of most importance. However, as interventions improve these situations and people are able to move beyond subsistence agriculture to cash crop agriculture, I believe they become ready to incorporate low-cost, lightweight (ie., text over cellular) technologies to further improve their life and occupation (be it farming, politics, education, etc). As a next step, formal relevant training to possibly enter a new occupation that draws on ICT skills will further improve their livelihood.
As Prof Sachs outlines in his book "The End of Poverty", getting out of poverty can be seen as a progression involving many different interventions. Once those basic needs are met, or begin to show the signs of improvement, the progression should grow to take advantage of modern technologies to help the society build a viable market economy and grow toward self-sufficency.
If these technologies have a role in the developed world, it follows that the developing world stands to benefit from them as well.
-shawn
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