Monday, October 6, 2008

Lessons Learned! Oct. 2007, Day 4

So, we learn our lesson from Saturday, right? We change the time from 8am and decide to go for a reasonable 9:00 am on Sunday. Especially after the vicious thunderstorm that boomed and roared for over 3 hours on Saturday night, all we could think was that children living precariously on a hillside in the most temporary of structures would have had a really bad night. So, when we show up a bit late on Sunday morning, we don’t really have very high expectations of anyone being on time.

SURPRISE! Instead of an empty computer room, or even one with the anticipated seven children from the squatter camps, what we have is a room crowded with twenty kids! Whoa. Regroup. Rethink. Act fast. Should we send half of them home? Not a chance. They were there, they were eager, and even though we really expected just 13 kids over the course of the next four days…twenty at once? Hey, go for it.

Micael triple teamed our Net Buddies-in-training on the five computers. He had our intrepid Noah staff , Nomaza and Melidah, as well as our two Net Fundi’s Piet and Christina, zipping from computer screen to computer screen…AND he had no lights. Oh well. Dark room, bright screens? That’s enough light to get by with…and as he said ¾’s of the way through on Monday, it felt “kind of cozy”, once you got used to it.

We found a few children who stood out as bright and shining stars. Winnie memorized her ORIGINAL password (remember the rocket code we handed out to you at the training??) and was logging on for her videoconference without any coaching at all. Siyanbonga and Mtuseni concluded that the American process of bankrolling elections was similar to auctioning our candidates to the highest bidder. Clifford couldn’t believe that a country as rich as ours could have a problem such as homelessness and not have the ability to solve it.

Tuesday is our last day at Refilwe. We will be matching the most recently trained Refilwe kids with our newest trained Net Families from Pittsburgh. What fun! And an added bonus...we now have a scanner at Refilwe! Ask the kids to scan in drawings, pictures and homework. Just hope the scanner doesn't bring the entire electrical system in the computer room to it's knees!

So, until tomorrow…when of course, we will continue to learn more lessons!

Best to the best!

Dana

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