Teachers

Hey everybody, it’s Henry.

When we arrived today, there was a tense atmosphere at Fountain of Hope among the adults. Before we’d arrived, there had been an unfortunate incident that Vasco and Kenny were now, preoccupied with, and, save for one brief encounter; we did not see them for the rest of the day.

We were greeted with a fresh group full of excited faces; again, we found that no one in the group spoke any English. Luckily, though, even though Kenny and Vasco were not available, we still had help: Stephen, a 12th grader from FoH, and Milo, a student from the University of Zambia.

Ellie and I began our lesson with the basics (turning on the laptops, using the touchpad, using applications, etc.), and Milo and Stephen translated for us. Eventually, though, when the kids got bored of just us talking and ventured off into their own private adventures, Ellie and I found ourselves almost useless, as Milo and Stephen stepped up and became the teachers. They were great: communicative, knowledgeable, and familiar, they were very good at teaching the kids how to use the laptops. Occasionally they would not know how to answer a child’s question, in which case they would ask us; after we’d answer them, they would either translate the answer, or, even better, demonstrate it for and show the kids. They are going to be huge proponents of the future success of the XO laptops at Fountain of Hope, and we are very impressed by them and grateful to them for their help.

Our major problem today was the one we’d expected to encounter the least in total; the one which we had decided to make a rule for the kids using the XO’s after Loveness Zyambo discovered that her laptop did not have the application “Browse”. Kids in this new group were frequently selecting “Erase” on the drop-down menu for applications on the home screen. Ellie and I found ourselves panting after we spent the morning running back and forth across the Center, crying, “No, press ‘Keep’! ‘KEEP’!!!” (“Keep” being the more favorable option on a prompt which asked the children, “Are you sure you want to erase ‘XYZ’?”) Ellie and I later theorized that our earlier emphasis on closing out of applications when they were done with them using the drop-down menu (to the extent that it was the only way they knew to return to the home screen) had caused them to resort to the lower-most option whenever confronted with a drop-down menu from any situation. Tomorrow we hope we can correct this, while maintaining the kids’ devotion to using only one application at a time.

Here are some pictures of some of the future XO teachers:

Until next time,

~Henry