Our man in Senegal - 1st blog report from the front line!

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Hello! My name is Richard White, and I hope that for the next 8 months you’ll be joining me here as I keep you updated on the latest developments from the Diapalante IT Centre in Senegal. Why Senegal, who exactly are you, and why should I be keeping you company, I hear you ask, quite reasonably.

Well, thankfully I have answers to all of those questions.

Through a wonderful charity called Project Trust, I (along with my trusty project partner, Conor) have been given the opportunity to spend my gap year running an educational IT Centre on behalf of Diapalante in the Senegalese town of Kaolack. In their typically generous fashion, Perspicuity has agreed to virtually renovate our IT system here with shiny new Microsoft Office 365, placing us firmly in the cloud!

I first arrived in Senegal on the 16th September, and was instantly greeted with everything that this part of the world is about; strong colours, strong personalities, and even stronger smells. After a weekend in the capital, Dakar, I moved to my permanent home for the year, Kaolack! Kaolack is a dirty, dusty and baking place, but behind its initial appearance I’ve found it to actually contain a lot of hidden wonder. The locals are, quite simply put, the friendliest and most enthusiastic bunch of people I’ve ever met, and they’ve made my time here a real pleasure so far.

We had hoped to open the IT Centre in October, but due to extensive flooding we were made to wait. We eventually managed to start setting it up in November, and by the end of the month we were under way, beginning teaching on our IT and English courses.

Our IT set-up is basic. We currently have 16 kindly donated and renovated laptops with internet access through our router. The features of the computers vary wildly, which made for some challenging decisions when deciding how best to group the computers with battery life (frequent power cuts make this important!) and where exactly to put the computers with wireless capability. The members of the centre use them for a variety of different things; some just to stay in contact with friends and family over Facebook and Skype; some to do research for school work, and apparently last year there were even some budding musicians using them to record their songs.

The maintenance has proved to be a challenge so far, especially because we have been so busy planning and teaching lessons. It’s important to be very vigilant when a large number of members are using the computers, as they love downloading a whole plethora of pictures and files onto the computers, some undoubtedly containing viruses, and otherwise just slowing the computers down. We’ve had a few physical malfunctions as well so far, and I’m currently trying to find time to look at a couple of laptops which have decided to stop working in the last few days. For reference, I’m no ‘expert’ in computers by any means, but I’m hoping that by the end of the year I’ll at least be on my way there!

We hope to start setting up Office 365 over the next few days with support from Perspicuity’s team in the UK, which we’re very excited about! I look forward to giving you more updates as we get under way, and again I’d like to give my thanks to Perspicuity for all the help they’re giving us.

Richard