Koudougou Computer Camp

Pictures of the weekend are here!

As my final secondary project in Tcheriba, I decided to do something a little challenging and out of the normal. After talking to my school headmaster and Vincent, a PCV friend who teaches IT in Koudougou, I invited 16 of our best 8th grade students to a weekend computer camp at the high school in Koudougou. I was a little nervous about bringing so many students so far from home, but I was confident that we had chosen the best students and that after three years in Burkina, I would have the skills and resources to make the trip a success. And what a trip it was!

To set the stage: Of the 16 students, at least 12 had never been outside the immediate vicinity of our village: no paved roads, no bus rides, no running water, no electricity, no large markets, no rows upon rows of boutiques. They had never seen the river about 30km away, and ours was the biggest school they had ever seen. When we asked them what a computer is, the answers ranged from "something like a TV" to "a calculator that folds up". What I'm trying to say is that the excitement level was beyond belief. The morning we left the first kid showed up at my house over an hour early worried that we were already late for the bus. The boys had all shaved their heads, and the girls were in their best clothes. Several of the students from surrounding villages left their bikes in my house. I knew it would be an interesting weekend when one of them asked me to show him how my gas stovetop worked.

Once we got to the bus station, however, the complications began to arise. Quickly. The night before, a large lorry had been traveling on our road. His load was so large that he collapsed the tiny bridge over the creek about 20km from us. Consequence: no transportion that day. None. OK, plan B: the bus station chef in village would call the bus company to see if they were taking another route that would still run them past us. Problem: two of the three cell phone companies in Burkina had failed to renew their government operation licenses by midnight the previous day. As of Friday morning (our travel day) all phones on those services, including all the mobile numbers of all transport workers on all four of the transport companies on our road, were inoperable. So we couldn't talk to anyone. Plan C: Call someone with a bush taxi in Boromo and have them come up to get us. Nope: that guy was traveling. Plan D: I ended up calling Vincent in Koudougou and sending him to find us a bush taxi in Koudougou. Despite being deathly ill, Vincent made it into town, negotiated us a bush taxi, and saw the driver off. Score! Two hours and a plate of meat for 17 people later, the bush taxi showed up in Tcheriba. Half an hour later, after arguing over the already clearly agreed upon price, we were off. No windows on one side, three tries to get the door to stay shut, and lots of dust. But we were off. Images of my Mom shoveling the driveway at 5am after an all-night snow storm the day we were supposed to leave for Orlando flashed through my head. We WOULD make it to Koudougou.

From that point on, however, the trip was wonderful. We got to Koudougou in time for dinner and a quick tour of the market. We had two classrooms for sleeping at school (I was nextdoor in the computer lab), and we stayed up the rest of the evening playing cards and lounging around. Really not doing much. Everyone was pretty tired after a day of waiting by the side of the road for transport. Saturday morning was spent in the classroom. We talked about what exactly a computer is, what it can do, how people use them. We also discussed how people tell a computer what to do: via the mouse and keyboard. All this stuff was completely new to them. It took me a bit to get used to the fact that I had to explain EVERYTHING, but luckily Vincent's IT experience made for a productive and informative class.

The students were dying to use the computers, though, so Saturday afternoon was the much-anticipated moment. First thing: learning to move the mouse by drawing pictures in MS Paint. We started with squiggles and lines, and progressed to complicated shapes like circles. Several kids actually emitted squeals of excitement when they learned how to fill in shapes with colors. We also had a contest to see who could draw the best Burkinabe flag. Several were quite good, though there were many interesting interpretations of the tricky gold star in the middle of the flag. After they got the mouse down, we did some basic typing lessons with BlocNote. No one quite got to the point of typing 100 words a minute with their eyes closed, but they at least all figured out how to write in capital letters. Saturday night was dinner in town and movies on the computers at schoo- another new experience! (Though I couldn't get them to branch out from their Jackie Chan, kung-fu genre movie preferences.)

We had a similar schedule on Sunday, though this time we were ONLINE! The tough thing about teaching the internet was getting them to understand that they could find absolutely ANYTHING online. And once they got their heads around that idea, they had a little trouble coming up with useful things to look for. I vaguely remember that feeling from the first time I tried to figure out the internet: I remember thinking, "OK, so what's the point? I don't need information about everything in the world." I came up with some questions- kind of a scavenger hunt, and that seemed to work much better. Sunday afternoon we taught them how to use e-mail. I had given all the students my e-mail address, so they were eager to be able to keep in touch with me next year. (Nevermind that there's no internet in Tcheriba.)

Sunday evening I invited everyone out for Cokes and Fantas at a nearby restaurant. I can't even begin to explain how high their moods were. They were absolutely on cloud nine. Joking about learning how to drink out of glass glasses (a rarity in village), how they should wait for the drinks to warm up, telling a few city students that we were from "down the road, in the little corner of America where Barack Obama grew up". It was just fantastic. Sunday night we sat up watching more bad kung-fu movies until the wee hours of the morning. And Monday we went back home (they had repaired the bridge by felling a few trees to drive over so there was transport now).

Fantastic trip, and an excellent way to end my service.