[note] May 08, 2009

I’d like to begin with a classic story.

“A volunteer comes to work in a rural community and decides to set up a project after a thorough research to dig a well and install an electrical pump. The project is largely supported by the community, goes smoothly and people in the community are happy to have the easy access to water supply. The volunteer, being satisfied with the outcome, finishes the service and happily goes back to his/her country. A few years later, he/she decides to come visit the community only to learn that the pump has been broken a few months after the start of its operation and left out to be rusty ever since because there is no one in the community who knows how to fix or maintain it.”

Whether this story is real or fictional, a story like this is often talked about among the volunteers to illustrate the point that consequences of seemingly good intentions are not always positive and that any projects need to be carefully structured to avoid any undesirable outcomes.

Although most of the volunteers I know are not involved in digging up wells, morality behind the story is still applicable today if “rural community” and “a well with an electrical pump” in the story are replaced with, for example, “a school” and “computers” respectively.

This could potentially be the case at my school. (I cannot conclude as of now yet though.) Two weeks ago we received ten brand-new desk-top computers from a major telecommunication company in Tanzania. We had a large ceremony attended by several important guests. The guests and the members of the school administration all praised the generous donation in their speeches and that it will certainly be helpful to development of the school and lives of both teachers and the students. The guests also announced that they will be working on installing the internet connection and told us that we could soon expect to do our researches with computers.

While I understand the importance of having easy access to computers and the internet, (I even think that they should be included in the basic human rights considering how web-based our society is today.) given the situation at my school and how the computers are donated, I cannot help but to think that consequence of the donation could be analogous to that of the digging-up-the-well story.

1. The number of computers.

We have more than 40 students in each class. If the purpose of the donation was to teach computers to the students, we need at least 20 computers so that there is one computer for a pair of students. We don’t have “computer skills” as a subject at secondary schools in Tanzania anyways.

2. Need for computer lessons.

Still, we could use the computers to research for student projects or lesson plans, but most of the students and teachers are not familiar with the machine at all and by “not-familiar” I mean that most of them have never touched it, do not know how delicate it is or what the viruses are (Except yours and your friends’, any computers you use in Tanzania should be considered to be infected with hundreds of viruses).

On top of that, web-literacy must be taught if the computers are used for research purpose. One of the guests at the ceremony pointed out in his speech that we didn’t need books if we had computers because everything’s already on the internet. As we all know, this is extremely a dangerous idea since not every information on the web is valid or reliable.

There should be a professional who could come and teach them these things in regular basis.

I could at least unpack the computers, set them up and organize sessions to teach some basic computer skills but in order to do so, I will have to deal with politics and bureaucracy. In schools and hospitals in this country, one way to signify authority to which a particular individual is entitled is to assign him/her to administer particular resources such as books and computers or a laboratory or storage room. My school is not an exception so you can imagine the difficulty of a young, relatively new foreign volunteer to initiate the process. (I will try to work it out during my service though.)

3. No Internet?

It has been announced at the ceremony that the internet will soon be installed. Some colleagues said that they are expecting have the internet hooked up in “a couple of months” which translates to some undefined time in the future. The school cannot afford the internet either, so the administration or the ministry of education needs to find another sponsor who could install it for free of charge. So there is a possibility that they might not even be able to use the computers for research for a very long time or worse, indefinitely.

We also need to put things in perspective.

Even if we have all these issues to think about, having some computers at school may still help in some ways. As I said, nowadays anyone should have access to computers. But the fact is there are so many other things that need to be purchased and to be taken care of at the school.

For example chemical reagents and lab equipments. We need not only to do experiments and visualize what we teach but also for the students to practice experiments for practical sections of the life-depending national exam which counts for 50% of their grade. (Due to the lack of reagents and apparatuses, the only experiments students conduct in most of the secondary schools are the practices for their practical exams and in my school we can’t even do these practices at this point.)

Back in January, I and other teachers wrote and submitted a letter to the school administration asking for purchase of essential reagents and apparatuses with estimated costs. The letter apparently has been forwarded to the ministry of education but we haven’t heard anything back since then.

The bottom line is that we cannot just donate things and expect a happy ending without doing extensive research to find out what a recipient really need.If they wanted to donate computers and see a positive outcome, they would have needed to increase the number of computers, installed the internet, renovated a part of the school to adequately set up the computers and had someone to teach the basics. Doing all of these would cost a lot more money than just giving away the machines, but I think these are the least that needs to be done or else those computers will be packed in boxes, sit in the principal’s room and won't see the light of the day for a very long time or ever.