So you go from Europe to Africa thinking about living in the great savannah wilderness with some remote villages around. And you find yourself in the middle of high grass and trees, everything green, just a village house here and there, surrounded by mountains at a few hours distance. But you are working with computers all day. That’s how our volunteer story in Zambia starts. Mkushi College of Education was started by DAPP to provide teachers for rural areas. Zambia has one of the youngest and fastest growing populations in the world - half of its entire people are 17 years young or younger – and it needs an ever growing number of schools and teachers, especially in its rural areas. The College of Education is placed 10 km away from Mkushi on a red dust road cutting through the high grass called by the locals “bush”. The local people are mostly farmers so corn fields replaced the bush here and there. As your car bumps across a river you see more trees and bush, corn fields, a few houses, directions signs for three churches and one school. Plus the sign board for Mkushi College of Education.
Here it used to be a Farmer’s Club project which was renovated and expanded into a campus, the middle-of-the-bush-in-Zambia version. 44 young men and women study here for three years before receiving a Primary Teaching Diploma from the Ministry of Education. Then they go to be teachers in rural areas. As part of the facilities we found two classrooms equipped with a total of 42 computers. So our first task was to “fix them”.It turned out that only 24 are working, the rest being damaged by power fluctuations, the worst enemy of electronics in Zambia. We labeled all computers with ID numbers, and set up the working ones. Almost all were filled with viruses on both partitions and boot sectors. So we had to clean the boot sectors, reinstall operating systems, software, and learning materials. The last software we set up is DeepFreeze, a utility used by internet cafés to make their computers immune to viruses, spyware, system errors, tampering with system settings, deleting system files,
2 etc. So the computers were ready to welcome our inexperienced students who couldn’t wait to download an .mp3.exe file from some shady website. We also set up the network, updated the server software, installed the latest version of DMM on the server and created user profiles for each students to access their DMM materials. Two weeks later the computer network was bulletproof and running with minimal maintenance needs. We also set up a thorough documentation about the software and hardware state of each computer, the network and server configuration and a walk through for common maintenance actions. We update this documentation as we go. This ensures that future volunteers will need only a few hours reading our documentation to know everything about the computer system here, instead of wasting days investigating each computer and particular aspect. This will help with continuity from one generation of volunteers to another. We are also providing maintenance for the staff’s laptops. Almost every day someone needs help with something, from small things like getting a music player to crashed systems. Most of the times systems are badly messed up. While many people here are comfortable operating a computer, very few know how to reinstall a Windows, for example. Getting back to our students, after setting up the network we started computer classes. First we gave the students a questionnaire about their computer experience. On this base we divided them in two groups: almost half of the students never used a computer before [Group 1], while the other half had a beginner/intermediate experience level [Group 2]. The problem is that we only have 24 working computers, while there are 44 students.
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