July 14: Kristen Landreneau and Margeaux Marks, along with the rest of the SJA computer team, left Nelspruit Wednesday after re-establishing the burglarized computer lab. They’re traveling in South Africa for a couple of days before heading home.
Photo provided by St. Joseph's Academy - St. Joseph Academy crew worked all night to put lab back together after thieves took computers and cable.
July 12: Despite yesterday’s bad news, everything has worked out in the end. The theft only made us grow stronger in our cause. We stayed up all
night repairing computers to be delivered this morning. Pizza and Coke
fueled us through the night and we were able to finish before sunrise.
In a way, we were thankful that this happened because it brought us
closer as a team and awakened anyone who doubted us. It feels good to
know that whoever thought they could take away all our hard work
obviously didn’t know who they were dealing with and that nothing
could discourage us from our cause.
The school where the St. Joseph’s team set up a computer lab was burglarized over the weekend after thieves apparently saw a television story about the Baton Rouge group’s work. See The Advocate and http://theadvocate.com/home/345150-79/st.-josephs-academy-south-africa for details.
July 9: We’re at Penryn College in Nelspruit, South Africa, about a four-hour drive east of Johannesburg. They teach ages Pre-K through 12 here. The township school where we’re working is about 250 kilometers, about a 20 minute drive, from where we’re based.
We travel in vans and cars. The roads are much like our roads in Baton Rouge until you reach the poverty stricken area where the school is located where it becomes a dirt-like road. Our computer lab at the college is about a two-minute walk from our dorm.
The township school is a very small school, and the lab there is located near the front entrance to the school. We took many photos today. When we are able to download them onto a computer, we will get them to you. I do not have time to write about the absolutely unbelievable and amazing experience we had today, but I will do it as soon as I can adequately describe what happened.
July 8: TV reporters were here earlier getting footage of us working with our students. These students have made so much progress. I say “students” because we are teaching them, but a better word for these people would be “friends.”
From these friends, we have learned things that cannot be taught in a classroom. We were talking to a girl earlier who said the only thing she knew about computers before she came was how to turn one on and off. Now, she considers herself “a computer pro.”
There are so many stories like this one, and it is one of the most rewarding jobs to be able to educate these people so that they can share what they learn with their students and peers. It is so cool to watch the people that we teach help to teach their friends around them. It shows that once you teach one person, the knowledge spreads like wildfire.
Advocate file photo - Some of the St. Joseph's Academy computer missionaries to South Africa, from left, Hannah Gassie, Kristen Landreneau, Margeaux Marks, Catherine Schlesinger, Robin Herrington and Katie Bonnecaze visit Cape Point.
July 7: Some of our students have to wake up at 3 a.m. to walk or catch a ride to get here. In America, we take for granted that we can just get in a car and go anywhere we want. These people are lucky if they can afford a bus ride to school for a week, and they do it with a smile on their faces. It has changed my outlook on a lot of things. It has taught me to appreciate the opportunities that I have in the United States.
July 7: We have all been having a wonderful time sharing our knowledge of computers with the people here, but the Networking team brought us the most exciting news of the day!
Members of the Networking team began our initiative at Edwaleni Primary School, a collaborative effort with Penreach, Fujitsu Computer Corporation, Kruger Mpumalanga International Airport and St. Joseph’s Academy. Our team is setting up a Fujitsu computer lab at Edwaleni Primary School this week. Edwaleni is a township school in the Penreach program, and the lab will be complete with a network, server and, of course, Fujitsu computers. The team is working hard to finish the lab in just two days.
The Networking team spent the morning at the school taking pictures and getting an idea of what needs to be done. In the afternoon, they met with an electrician and retrieved equipment from Edwaleni on which they will spend most of the night working diligently. The school is expected to have electricity by tomorrow morning, and the team will spend all day setting up the computer lab. By the time the local newspaper arrives on Friday, Edwaleni’s lab will be complete and ready to promote computer education among the students of South Africa.
Since launching a 1:1 laptop program in 1997, St. Joseph’s Academy has integrated technology throughout the curriculum. Faculty and students have embraced the mission of the school and the Sisters of St. Joseph to be global citizens and to heed our call to service.
In the early years, we shared our expertise locally in a number of ways: from working to establish computer labs in underserved elementary schools in the Baton Rouge community to helping organizations such as Mary Bird Perkins Cancer Center with online auctions to enhance their fundraising efforts. We then expanded our outreach to impoverished parts of the world, becoming a founding member of the Cordoba Education Initiative. Since 2005, teams of SJA students, graduates and technology staff members have worked with the Baton Rouge Area Foundation, Capital Area Corporate Recycling Council and the Fundación Fondo Córdoba in Mexico to provide access to technology and computer training in schools and orphanages.
In 2010, we embarked upon the first technology mission trip to Nicaragua, working to train residents of Cuidad Sandino to use technology to produce sustainable growth and social justice.
We excitedly embark upon our first service mission trip to South Africa, where we will work with disadvantaged schools in rural South African townships, setting up help desks modeled after our student-run Warranty Repair Center at SJA, teaching hardware and software and setting up network infrastructures.
We brought with us laptop and tablet computers, video cameras, projectors and digital cameras for the South African schools to keep.
We finally arrived at Penryn College. The college is in the hills overlooking the city of Nelspruit and the Crocodile River Valley east of Johannesburg. We ate dinner with a few of the people we will be working with this week so they were able to give us an idea about what their schools needed. We were up bright and early this morning, ready to get to work! We’ve set up different groups based on what each person wants to learn. My group is made up of 12 teachers (of all grades/subjects).
Margeaux Marks: It’s Tuesday, July 5. Today was the first official day of our workshop at Penryn College in Nelspruit, South Africa. We were up bright and early to meet the people we’d be teaching, the selected
principals, teachers, computer technicians, and students from 10 of the surrounding township schools.
From there we split into groups based on what each person wanted to learn, such as basic computer skills, networking and teaching tools. The first half of the day was very slow working with teachers who have no computer experience, showing them simply how to turn on a computer and how to log on. During lunch, our whole crew met to discuss what was going on in each group. In most cases, our group members were either very familiar with basic computer functions, or they were completely “computer illiterate,” as they like to call it.
Once I got back to my small group, we had four new members, each around 17, who had been selected by their school administrators to attend the workshop. Having just learned a few simple phrases in the local language, Siswati, during our lunch break, I entertained the girls with my poor pronunciation skills.
I liked them right away, and I spent the rest of the afternoon working to figure out what they wanted to learn by the end of the week. Even having little experience with computers, they impressed me with how quickly they picked up on things, most times never asking for help and figuring out what to do by themselves.
The difference between these girls and their administrators/teachers is their fearlessness in testing out new machines without any instruction. The adults were uneasy about trying buttons to see which would turn on a computer, while their students were past the log in screen and already playing around with games or looking through the program shortcuts on the desktop.
It was very easy to brainstorm with them about what types of things they want to learn this week, starting with setting up their own email addresses, Facebook pages, and Skype accounts. After seeing that basic computer skills were a breeze for them, I asked them to tell me about some of their hobbies, in hopes that I could put together a list of programs/websites to show them this week.
I want to show them how the World Wide Web caters to any of
their interests. One girl, Tshepile, said she loves to dance, so I
plan to show her sites like YouTube that have instructional videos or dance routines from around the world.
Thobile likes photography, so I told her about free photo editing sites like Picnik. The whole day flew by and got me so eager to prepare cool things to show them this week. Lucky for my group and me, they are staying in dorms here at Penryn College, too.
I’ll stay up all night tonight putting together the most crucial things I want to show them this week, as well as making a list of things they’ll be able to try out on their own time once the workshop is over and they are back at home or their school.
Even though today was only the first day, I’m already eager to
communicate with them after we;ve left South Africa using their new social networking skills.
That’s all for now. Check again for updates on how things go Day 2.
