Friday, February 4, 2010

Today was our most successful and most frustrating day in Kwala all at once. I’ll start with the bad. We continue to battle the Fundi, the carpenter who is supposed to be installing the secure door on the computer lab. When we arrived a week ago, the computer room was near completion, requiring only bars and mosquito netting on the windows, the building of a door, and the installation of the solar panels on the roof. Today, Friday, a week later, the only thing that’s been completed is the windows. Every day the fundi is rumored to be coming. Generally the morning passes and there is no sign of the Fundi. Come mid-day, it is too hot for the Fundi to work and it is next assumed that he will come in the mid to late afternoon when it cools down a bit. This has in fact occurred a few times, with the Fundi arriving to install the door, which then broke when it was opened the next day (the frame was too narrow for the metal grating of the door). The fundi then returned two days later and the same thing happened (narrow door frame, poor quality concrete, entire installation crumbled upon trying to open it). At core, we have an incompetent fundi. People are incompetent and unreliable everywhere. What has amazed team Smallbean thus far is the undying patience that folks around here have for this fellow. Every day a teacher or the headmaster set off for the village to search for the fundi. He is rarely found. The response is generally, oh, the fundi will be here tomorrow. Yeah right.

Team Smallbean is growing increasingly restless. We have been teaching our Citizen Archivist Class in the NTC library, which works fine except for the fact that it requires transporting all of the computers and other documentary equipment back and forth from the library to the teacher’s house where we are staying. This is an organizational challenge on a good day and outright danger to the computers on a bad day now that it has started raining in Kwala the last two days. Last night we were marooned in the library for approximately 90 minutes after class as we waited for the torrential rains to stop. They did not. Eventually Omari was able to make umbrellas appear from somewhere and we shuttled the electronics back and forth to the house. Not a fabulous solution and all for want of a decent fundi.

And now the good news!!!! Today we held the scavenger hunt in the village with our Citizen Archivist Project class and it was absolutely amazing. We created a list of 18 tasks that the kids had to accomplish, including: take a picture of a mother with her child and ask the mother the following questions: 1) what is your name; 2) what is your tribe; 3) when were you born? 4) how old is your child? We had the kids take a picture of the local water tower in town and ask someone if they knew when the water tower was built. We even asked them to take a picture of a fundi, hoping that the kids would be able to locate our missing carpenter even if the combined power of the adults at Kwala Secondary School was unable to overcome his shear incompetence. We waited for everyone to arrive and then released them at 4:15, with strict instructions to be back at 5:30. It was more like 6:00 by the time the kids breathlessly filed back into the classroom, cameras and digital recorders in hand. We worked with them to upload the pictures and audio files onto the computers, absolutely amazed at the type of material they’d been able to collect. The kids are embracing the Citizen Archivist Project and so amazingly talented. I’ve managed to include a few pictures with this blog post, so I hope you can get a sense of what I’m talking about. The spontaneity that they are able to achieve even while poking around a place and a population of people new to much of this technology is amazing. Furthermore, the speed with which they are grasping the nuances of computers, cameras and digital recorders is really really impressive.

It is hard to believe but we only have four days of classes left with the kids. Next week we will begin work on their final project, which involves choosing one of the subjects that they located in the scavenger hunt today and doing a more in depth interview with them. Next week we’ll also have the internet in class and be able to show the kids that the stories they’re collecting in Kwala are being shared with people around the world and with other students doing very similar work in other locations. We head for Dar es Salaam early tomorrow morning. My first week in Kwala has been both amazing and frustrating. The kids are wonderful. The adults are wonderfully polite and gracious hosts. However, there is a very strange disconnect between the wonderful potential and talent of the kids and the strange I’ll call it a malaise that makes getting things as simple as building a secure door in a week’s time all but impossible.