These Little Lights of Mine

I nervously glanced around the room, my headmaster and about five other teachers had crowded into the newly refurbished computer lab. Everything was installed. Finally. Solar panels, batteries, charge controller, inverter. The entire lab had been rewired with new plugs and a change over switch (to take the wiring back to a generator if the need arises) and the light were installed in the beautifully crafted ceiling overhead. I focused back on the eager faces and summoned the courage to finally do what I have been working so hard for the past year to be able to do. I turned on a computer.

And there was silence. Beautiful silence. I never envisioned I would be so happy to hear absolutely nothing. But this nothing meant the absence of the deafening hum of the generator and the smell of spent gasoline coming pouring in the windows. We had power and it was silent, and clean and replenishable for free.

The silence lasted all of 30 seconds. As the Windows '98 (yes, I am not kidding) screen came on the room erupted into shouts and cheers of santa yalla (Wolof for "thanks be to God"), bilai wulai tuali (Arabic and means essentially, "Oh my God, I swear it's true") and "We have the power!" I turned to look at the beaming face of my headmaster, thankful I had not blown up anything this time. (I had previously blown up a monitor and inadvertally a charge controller. Althuogh I still maintain that that one was not my fault.) He slapped me on the back and said "Well done, well done. When can you start class?" which for a Gambian is very high praise. The moment was short, no more than 5 minutes at the most. The teachers filtered out, back to their duties of emparting knowledge and beating in discipline, still exclaiming the wonderful things toubabs can do. I watched them go, to tired to try to explain that toubabs certainly could not do everything.

And then I was alone, me and the machines. I stared around the room at the cheerful yellow walls, new secure windows and glowing computer screens. I had spent the better part of my service working towards this day. Pouring over manuels trying to teach myself things I had always just blindly accepted, listening intently to far smarter people then I explain the intracacies of solar electricity, writing grant proposals, praying that someone would fund us, revising budget projections, freaking out over the dropping dollar, thanking God when a private funder seemed to fall right in our laps, never ending meetings with the village PTA and school development committee to ensure they understood the project and were committed to helping, haggling with endless numbers of shop owners with my headmaster to get quality goods at a fair price, hiring and then arguing with a constultant, monitoring the installation, cleaning over 100 pieces of computer equipment to find just eight complete computers that actually function....all leading up to this one little action. Pressing a button and hearing nothing but silence.

It was a great day and a great feeling. I still can't believe that the solar power system is here, it's ours and it's working. I go in everyday with a small knot in my stomach, fearful that something will have gone wrong or something has been whisked away in the night. Each day I am relieved to find that lab just as I left it and each day I start to trust myself and this huge leap I have taken a little more.

We still have a long road ahead of us until this computer lab is fully functioning. The metal cages need to be built to prevent theft, we need to meet with the village and PTA a couple more times to update them on progress and maintenance requirments. Currently, four computer are working perfectly with four more likely to be fixable in the near future. This is just a consequence of having to piece together parts to computers (most of which are quiet old), get them switched from German to English language and the challence of getting them all synchronized when only three have a CD-ROM and only one has a flash drive. I will never again complain about computers in America. All of this puzzle like work is definilty slow going but we are getting there. The German NGO that donated the computers is luckily in coutnry for another month and their computer specialist has been helping me out a lot with installing proper software so that's been a great help.

The end result of all this trial and error piecing together is that one corner of out lab is quicking turning into a tech nerds "island of misfit toys." Eventually I will have to figure out what to do with all this useless equipment. I hear from the PC grapevine that almost all labs in this country (and I'm sure elsewhere) have a similiar problem - old, broken equipment that has no purpose but also nowhere to go. It is great for people to send computers that they no longer use to developing countries - it is 100% needed. We just have to be sure to only send equipment that is in working condition and will be for the forseeable future. I get the impression that all this tech junk is a problem the world over - hopefully there will be a solution to this soon if their isn't already.

While I wait for that fantastic teach-junk-recycling revolution to happen, I will be here in village concentrating on getting the eight computers the solar power system was designed to support up and running and then getting down to teaching the student and teachers of my school some basic computer skills and how to take care of the lab and solar equipment.

Task#1: Getting the students to stop calling the monitor a telly.