Last year a small group of us planted a seed and deployed a 100 laptops to a small tribe in North Pokot, Kenya. There has been great news sent to us from our NGO, Pastor Edward from City Harvest Ministries. The Kenyan government wants to invest in more laptops to bring to the Kenyan community. 
The first deployment will be 500 laptops for Summer 2011- we will keep deploying until we hit a grand total of 7 million laptops. The Texas team will be meeting with the Prime Minister of Education, he will be flying in from Kenya to Texas. Currently, we are negotiating the deployment process with One Laptop Per Child and constructing an Action plan to carry out this project.
“Never doubt that a small group of committed people can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.” Margaret Mead
-Sophia
Pastor Edward expressed a positive to every negative and we started to see that because of all those adversities, the students in Pokot needed us the most. He said Pokot, being ten hours away and so remote, would not see technology for another twenty years if ever. We decided at that point that it was not about going to the easiest place but going somewhere where we would make the greatest impact.
Pastor Edward told us that before our arrival, the MP had never showed any support for that particular region. While we were there, he visited us twice, expressed his gratitude and said he would help the area. We also gathered the community on two separate occassions and spoke to them about the importance of education and they all promised to put at least one more child through school. I specifically asked them to allow their daughters to go to school and explained that if it were not for my education; I would not be there helping their community.
At first, they were reluctant to open up so we told them to ask us about our backgrounds. They were amazed at how much we had in common with them and after that they became more talkative and started asking questions pertaining to our chosen topic of the day. It was amazing to see every single one of them raise their hand when we asked who wanted to go to college.
Right now SNV is working on a way to introduce e learning to schools’ curriculums. The key is really to train and teach teachers that e learning is essential in a world where technology is rapidly moving forward. They will find students who are more eager to learn like we did in Pokot. SNV offered us their support and promised to take all the teachers in Pokot to the city and have them properly trained on the XO’s. We also have City Harvest Ministries’ support and they will periodically send people to make sure the guidelines we established are being implemented.
We had so much support coming from different places and we will always think of the people in Pokot as family. They took us in from the moment we arrived and saying goodbye was so hard for all of us. We will miss the children singing, teaching and sitting by the fire talking about our different cultures. I learned that we are more alike than different.
The older teachers are still having problems with clicking and dragging items on the laptops while the younger teachers have already started teaching their students different programs on the XO’s. We were able to saturate the entire 2nd, 3rd, 4th, 5th, and the 6th graders at Asilong Primary school. We gave them their assigned laptops and divided them into two groups. We have the 2nd and 3rd graders together and the 4th, 5th, and 6th graders together. 
When teaching the younger group we found out that it was rather difficult because we had to go through each program and each step over and over and over again. They couldn’t even type their own story using “write” so instead we started out with them just typing out the alphabet. The older group however, was able to grasp the concepts of the programs. They are doing very well with each of the assignments we have given them.
Our goal for this next week is to let the children take full responsibility of their laptops. They will be able to sign them out and take them home, charge their laptops at the school using the Charging Schedule, and to start an after school program where the children can decide what they want to learn.
Besides our priorities we have been able to dance with the tribe, sit in the back of a chicken truck, fix up the children using our first aid kits, climb Mount Sequot, see a chicken get slaughtered, and eat 2 small meals a day. Leila, Sharon (our NGO Representative) and I have started a Girl’s club. We meet everyday and talk to the women about hygiene, equality, and education. We want them to know that women can have a future besides being a wife. They tell us they want to wear pants but they are scared to be beaten. They also tell us what they want to be when they grow up. We want them to have a safe place where they can express their concerns, fears, and hopes.
>There are no toilets, just an outhouse. There is no electricity so you must get everything done before the sun sets. Cory slaughtered a goat and we were able to feed the whole community. The women here are treated like property. They are circumsized and have their bottom teeth pulled out. They fetch the water, cook, clean, tend the children, plant, water the plants- basically any chore you can think of. The men sit on their “special chairs” made out of wood under the shade. They sunbathe naked and have many wives. They are very lazy and it makes me sick to my stomach. If a woman gets caught sitting on the “chair” they are beaten and must sacrifice one of their goats.
They made their own memorize game by matching a swahili word with an english one
Some of the children actually live near the school in these little houses (like a dormitory.) They sleep on the floor without pillows and blankets. When they wake up they eat porridge and head out to school around 8am and get out at 3pm. There are 8 teachers total, including the head master. They are very excited to learn about the XO’s, most of them have never seen a computer before. Each teacher has at least 2 to 3 subjects that they teach. They have science, social studies, mathematics, swahili, english, and religion. Most of the teachers do not have teaching certificates- just a diploma from high school. The kids are very happy to see us. They always stare and say “Karam” which means good in Pokot or they say “how are you, how are you.” 
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