Telecentre

Telecentre: A “public place of access to the Internet and other digital technologies that help promote personal and social development” (www.telecentre.org).

Throughout Africa, Asia, and South America, telecentres serve as places for teaching, business development, business services, and internet hubs. Some specifically promote services for women. Some provide services for small-holding farmers. Others serve as clearinghouses for health care information. In every case, a telecentre is about leveraging ICT (information, communication, and technology) for the benefit of the community.

Thanks to a generous grant from Elmbrook Church (Brookfield, WI), Congo Initiative is in the process of researching local needs and telecentre models in preparation for developing a business plan. The goal is to establish an income-generating telecentre that also serves as a business incubator for UCBC graduates. The telecentre “will leverage graduates’ expertise and appropriate information, communication, and technology (ICT) services of UCBC and the Center for Professional Development and Vocational Training to benefit the community.” It will also “facilitate expansion of UCBC’s Economics Department to include entrepeneurship and business development education” (Entrepreneurship and Small Business Development Telecentre: Proposal, November, 2011).

At their core, telecentres serve the community and support community development initiatives. In addition to serving the community, we are looking to develop a telecentre that will provide employment for UCBC graduates or serve as a business incubator specifically for them. The telecentre will also be a vehicle to support some of CI-UCBC's own ICT needs here on campus. This could include supporting robust internet services or provide printing services (a desperate need, as 3 desktop printers are the tired workhorses for a faculty/staff of over 40 and a student body of 450+).

L-R: Wilfred, Victor, Guy

So, for the past 4 months, the team of Wilfred Mushagalusa (UCBC Applied Sciences teacher), Guy Komanda (UCBC Economics teacher), Victor Bangewa (UCBC IT Manager), and me have been reading, researching, and learning together. We’ve relied on information and contacts we’ve made through the Telecentre Foundation. These individuals have been very helpful. For example, Amparo Preethika M. De Asis, Capacity Building Manager of the Telecentre.org Foundation, put us in touch with telecentre experts in Uganda, Kenya, Zambia, and Rwanda. Ampy is in the Philippines. Rita Mijumbi Epodoi, from Uganda, has offered training assistance and advised on telecentres to visit in Uganda. Dean Mulozi, Regional Facilitator of the Southern Africa Telecentre Network (SATNET), has forwarded telecentre management training modules. Dean is in Zambia.  The Community Telecentre Cookbook for Africa: Recipes for Self-Sustainability (UNESCO, 2001) has provided a helpful framework for our work.

It’s great fun to work with Wilfred, Guy, and Victor. Even though each of these men has been on staff at UCBC for a year or less, each one has a deep commitment to CI and UCBC.

If passion had only one face, it would be Victor. Victor began at UCBC as a student 3 years ago. Eager to develop his IT skills, he made the difficult decision to move to Uganda for additional training. He returned to UCBC last year to assume responsibility for the computer network and labs, and gave up the potential to establish a successful business in Goma, the provincial capital 300 kms (and a long day's drive) to the south of Beni. Wilfred turned down a lucrative job offer in Kinshasa to teach at UCBC. As he tells it, it took 3 months of prayer to discern what God would have him do. Guy served as a temporary teacher at UCBC for more than a year before we were able to offer him a permanent position.

L-R: Victor, me, Guy, Wilfred

We are learning together, learning how to work together across our cultural experiences and styles and navigating the challenges of language. I’m the deficient one, of course, with an insufficient French vocabulary. Thankfully, Wilfred and Victor are fluent English speakers and Guy has solid competency in English. Wilfred and Victor have IT knowledge, of course, and some exposure to telecentres. Guy brings business planning and development knowledge. I have been reading about telecentres for a couple of years, but have never visited one. And, of course, Guy, Victor, and Wilfred understand the community context here in Beni.

There are two major activities on the immediate horizon. One is to visit well-established and successful telecentres in Rwanda and Uganda. The opportunity to see telecentres in action and talk to the managers will assist in our planning. The second activity is to have a series of public meetings here in Beni to determine the nature of the telecentre. The meetings are a combination data gathering, marketing, and relationship-building.

Thunderstorm

It's Sunday afternoon. A thunderstorm has just washed through Beni. The sounds of the neighborhood have sprung back to life. Motos roar along the roads. Roosters rename the day. Songbirds renew their chirping. From the surrounding compounds I hear the voices of women and children punctuated by the clanging of aluminum pans as they tend to cooking and washing.

I love the thunderstorms here. Swaths of black clouds gather from across the sky, and convene in ever-expanding battalions of black and grey. The clouds are giants of grace and power. The remind me of Tolkien’s Ents.

Then suddenly, the clouds break wide open and spill torrents of water that race across rooftops and roads.

Teaching an English class

“Creation Care and the Common Good” began last week. It’s an English class for UCBC students who have completed the English curriculum. The purpose of the class is to help students “strengthen reading, writing, discourse, and critical thinking” within their disciplines. The course “looks at creation care and the common good from a Judeo-Christian perspective, and in the context of personal experience.” The class is intended to help students improve their English. It is also intended to provoke students’ thinking about the created world and the common good. If students wrestle with their assumptions, ideas, and beliefs about the created world and about the common good and leave the class with some new perspectives, questions, and ideas, then it will have succeeded.

The course objectives and outcomes are ambitious, for a class that meets 4 hours/week for 8 weeks. But there is considerable more focus in the course today then when I first began developing it back in April. And the course will look different next time, if there is a next time.

It’s good to be back in an English class. It’s been a long time. The teaching and facilitating I’ve been doing over the past several years has been in curriculum development, instruction, and assessment—professional development content for teachers here at UCBC. It was time to get back into the classroom, have my own experience as a teacher here at UCBC, and put my own advice and coaching into action.

There are 18 students in the class—good number. They are from the four faculties/disciplines here at UCBC: communications, economics, applied sciences, theology. There is a range of English ability among the students, and, most likely, a range of interest and academic ability. But that will be part of the fun (translate, challenge!).

Our first day focused on the syllabus—purpose, outcomes, evidence, assessment. Rather than talk through each section as a class, students read in pairs, helping each other understand and clarify. One of the questions was, “What do you mean ‘Judeo-Christian’?” This question was a reminder that my own assumptions, vocabulary, and perspectives will be challenged consistently during this time with students.

One of the assignments that the students have over the class is a set of 4 reflections, each based on a personal experience with the created world. Each reflection has two parts: (1) an experience, and (2) a written reflection. For the experience students are to sit alone and quietly in a natural setting to simply observe and experience that environment for 20 minutes. They are to be quiet—no cell phone, no music, no friends. Just sit and experience and observe. They may take notes or sketch, but not analyze or explain. For part 2, the written reflection, students are to take 30 minutes to write their reflections on that experience. They are to do that writing within 48 hours of the experience itself. Each of the 4 experiences is to have a specific focus: water, flora, fauna, night.

The assignment is intended to encourage students to see things from a different, new, or unfamiliar perspective. I’ve introduced the language of “lenses”—that we wear lenses to the world based on our personal experiences, culture, family. And this course is to challenge students to use different lenses to see the created world and consider what it means to serve the “common good.” Another purpose of the assignment is to provide content from which to address metacognitive practices—thinking about thinking. I suspect that students’ reflections will be of different types. I’m expecting some students to describe what they saw in factual terms, others to describe their thoughts during the experience, and others to write about what they did during the time. My hope is that there will be sufficient range of reflection types and foci to talk about metacognition and its role in facilitating our own learning.

We shall see…

By the way...a huge "thank you" to my sister, Ann Shaw. She's my instructional coach and researcher!

We have a cat

We have a cat at Tumaini House. We have a rooster. Each has a brief but specific job description.

            Cat: Catch rats and mice. Keep rodents out of the house.

            Rooster: Submit to the knife. You are dinner.

Dinner dares to enter the house

The rooster has been with us for about 5 days. He was a gift to Susan and Tim, current members of the household who served as missionaries here in Beni in 1980s. The rooster has managed to settle into life at Tumaini House. He circles the compound and checks out the bugs. He prefers roosting on the porch furniture at night to being shut into the outside storage shed—a 4’ square concrete closet that clangs shut with an iron door. I don’t blame him. He asserts his independence by marching into the house, but is quickly swooshed away when any of us discovers him. He’ll be welcome in the house tonight, though. In a pot. 

Hope she's up to the job!

The cat was a $5 purchase at the market on Friday. Yes, cats come for a price—about the same cost as a 1-lb wheel of cheese or 2 litres of gasoline. She’s really a kitten, probably weighs ¼ lb, and about as long as a pencil. We’ve named her Frieda—a strong-sounding, northern European name that we hope will inspire her to feistiness and fight.

I admit, I had been holding off getting a cat. Veterinary care here is limited. Only the fittest that can survive without human intervention make it in this part of the world. Unfortunately, rats are among the fittest. The current renting rodents have survived our attempts to trap them. So, after a hilarious skirmish between 4 adult humans and one 6” rat in my bedroom the other evening, I was glad to welcome a cat into the house. 

We do not lose heart

Most days I use Forward Movement's Forward Day by Day as a guide to my morning reading, prayer, and meditation time. Today I read the "wrong" day. Instead of reading Thursday, May 3, I read Tuesday, May 1. Must be this travel stuff (I'm currently in transit from US to DRC, with a day stay in Uganda). Wrong day. Right readings.

The Eucharistic reading for May 1 was 2 Corinthians, 4:1-6. Verse 1 spoke to me, "Since it is by God's mercy that we are engaged in this ministry, we do not lose heart."

I needed that verse this morning. Tomorrow I travel overland to Beni, DRC, to rejoin my Congolese colleagues in the on-the-ground work with Congo Initiative and Université Chrétienne Bilingue du Congo. Over the last few weeks that I've been home in the US, I've allowed fear and self-doubt to shape my expectations for these next three months. There is no denying it. The work of CI and UCBC is hard work. The vision, mission, and goals are audacious. The needs are overwhelming. The resources, at least by human standards, are meager. And my abilities are a broken umbrella in a sandstorm of possibilities. It is easy to lose heart.

"Since it is by God's mercy that we are engaged in this ministry, we do not lose heart."

Then, during breakfast this morning, Chelsie Frank and I caught up. We talked about the time each of us had at home in April, and our hopes, goals, fears, anxieties, anticipations about being back in Beni. We acknowledged that among the many challenges is the tension between personality and reality (well, we didn't use those words). When one has a personality that sees a challenge, problem, or opportunity as an invitation to do something,  it is hard to live in a situation where challenges are far greater than any one person can do. But one of Congo's gifts is that she reminds me that I am insufficient, but that God is sufficient ("My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness." 2 Cor. 12:9).

I was also reminded of a lesson I learned more than 20 years ago: When I acknowledge my weaknesses, I know the greatest strength. That strength is not mine. It is not my muscle, my intellect, my financial resources. It is the strength of a Higher Power manifested through other people, through situations, through creation. That's a lesson that I've reviewed and renewed many times over the years. It's a lesson that I've relearned in Congo

David Kasali often says that "God is using Congo." People may go to Congo to "serve," and "to do." But in reality, it is Congo that serves, teaches, molds, and shapes. It is certainly true for me. Congo teaches me. It reminds me that it doesn't matter that I am weak. I am insufficient. But God is sufficient. It is by God's mercy that I am privileged to be part of the work that is Congo Initiative. That is enough encouragement so that I "do not lose heart."

PS: While writing this, I had a Skype message from Joel Asiimwe, recent UCBC graduate: "We're eagerly waiting to see you back in your second home, the land of the blessed, Congo."

No, I do not lose heart.