Ellie's 2nd Day at FOH

Hi! This is Ellie, and I must first ask you to excuse any typos, I'm on an XO laptop! This laptop, as wonderful as it is, has a very small and very tough keyboard. Today, I worked through the morning at the Lubuto library by myself. Henry was indisposed for the first part of the day, and I went without him.

With all the computers hooked up to a power strip, I went through the basic lesson with 10 kids. We talked about computer basics and succeeded in networking in order to share a "Write" document. The kids could write in the same document from different computers; not necessarily productive, but still entertaining. After covering a few basic activities (Record, TamTam Mini, Speak, and Maze), the kids started to utilize the laptops according to their own interests.

One kid took out his guitar, and with the built in microphone, recorded himself playing a 2 minute song. Another explored the laptop more than I even had, and discovered 3 full length "sample songs" that could be played and accompanied by a visualizer. Another adapted himself to the sole computer with a different and outdated operating system, learning how to navigate his unique OLPC completely on his own.

Henry and I grabbed our flash-drives (at one point so did one of the kids, but we recovered it shortly) and uploaded a few of the hundreds of snapshots the kids took of themselves. When we're not blogging from an XO, we'll be sure to put them up here for you to see; they're priceless.

When everything calmed down after lunch, I took out my film camera to take a few pictures around Fountain of Hope. This was of more excitement than I could have predicted; I got every young boy asking for his picture to be taken and posing. Most would lead me over to parked car and lean on the bumper with crossed arms, ready for a picture. Everyone wanted to use the camera or have a picture taken with just them. This caused a few fights, a lot of yelling between the boys, a bit of shoving others out of their picture, and the camera had to go away. I promised to bring it back tomorrow, if they promised to provide a more peaceful photoshoot.

So far the kids are making remarkable progress with the computer, and its clear to see that by the end of two weeks we won't be needed, no matter how much we'd love to stick around (which is a lot, by the way.)

~Ellie