Today's work and a sobering experience

Today, Luke and I spent most of the day training the staff on Microsoft Word and computer typing skills. Tom (a board member from the US) said to me before I left, ‘You have no idea how much you know about computers until you work with the staff here.’ He was correct. We covered just some of the basic skills needed to navigate successfully through Word in order to create a complete document (i.e. copy, paste, print, spell check, margins, spacing, etc.). To cover what many Americans would deem ‘basic’ material, took us about an hour and half. But keep in mind; many of them have just used a computer for the first time in the last few months or since starting to work here.

We then moved on to typing practice…we found a test online to gauge how many words per minute a person can type, which was helpful (the worst was 1 wpm and best around 20). I think they also had fun working with the program. And the results were as we had suspected, that their typing skills are pretty dismal, but again, when you don’t grow up with computers, how can you expect anything better. I did not find this discouraging at all; I am hoping that by the time we leave, they are able to show us some good improvement. We spent the next 3 hours working on just typing, learning the home-row (jkl;asdf). I had developed some lessons to get them slowly into using their right and left hands, just with those 8 keys. As the day went on, they improved, but perhaps the most encouraging aspect of all of this is that they are very eager to learn. The staff here understands the importance of having computer and typing skills and work really hard at trying to improve. Again, by the end of the day, we could see signs of good improvement.

One more thing worth noting before ending this entry is that I went to visit a home is the slums for the first time the other day. I was prepared as I had seen pictures before, and have seen the rooms from a distance, but nothing can really allow a person to understand that lifestyle unless you spend some time in a slum-home. Essentially, it’s just a small room (which is the entire home) made of tin with all a person’s belongings crammed into it. The number of people living in these tiny rooms vary, but the smallest number I witnessed was 4 and the greatest 12…that’s a lot of people to be living/sleeping in one spot. Again, my experiences here continue to shed light on the great needs that exist in this place.