Breaking New Ground
on Phil Bradfield (The Gambia), 28/Apr/2010 10:18, 34 days ago
(Written 27/04/2010 14:00, RED5, Janjanbureh)Although my job description says nothing about doing anything outside of the RED office, it seems a bit churlish not to help out at other places round and about when they need it. This took me to a couple of places yesterday which I’d never visited before: the Governor’s Office and the Armitage School. The Governor’s office is the administrative centre of Region 5, a bit like a local council office in a way. Just a lot more run-down: the ground and building, which doubles as the Governor’s house and is, I think, the only two-storey house on the island, need some serious repair.And then in the evening, I dropped into the Armitage Secondary School. This establishment is, IIRC, the oldest school in the country, and it’s still one of the most prestigious. I’ve certainly met quite a few people in the education sector who were educated there, and they seem to have a lot more money and resources than most schools. They even have a bus which proclaims itself to have been “Donated by His Excellency Prof Alhagi Dr Yaya AJJ Jammeh”. Who’s that, I hear you ask? The President himself, that’s who.So even though I walk past it every day on the way to work, I was really interested to see what it’s like on the inside. Once I’d done what I could with the printer problem that they’d asked me to help with, their IT teacher, Mrs Janneh, offered to show me their computer lab. I was interested to see what it’s like, given that very few schools have any computers, and according to reportsfrom other VSOs, very few of the ones they have actually work. But, this is the ultra-resourced Armitage... what might they have?I walked into a clean, tidy room with about 40 computers arranged around the walls and on a table in the centre. The computers were all covered by swathes of fabric– common practice round here, as it keeps the dust off them – which gave the impression that maybe they’re being looked after. I was really thinking we might be onto a winner here.Alas no. Mrs Janneh informed me that, of the 40 machines in the room, only seven of them work. Of the remaining 33, many are missing components (either broken or allegedly stolen by previous teachers) and all 40 are ancient. Mrs Janneh claimed that some of them date back to 1991; I don’t believe that for a second, but I think ten years is probably a reasonable age estimate for many of them. At least one of them was still running Windows 2000.Apparently the Minister of Education promised them 50(!) new computers when she visited recently. I find thatveryhard to believe, but stranger things have (probably) happened. Of course, there’s no one at the school who even remotely approaches having the skills to maintain them, but there’s not a chance that the Minister even considered that. It’s not taken me long here to work out that forward planning and long term thinking are not strong points of The Gambia’s education system. Also, should an extra 50 PCs really be going to the school that has quite a few already? Armitage isn’t the only school with a computer lab. But hey, better any school than none.I’m sure I’ll be back at Armitage plenty during the year. Mrs Janneh’s very keen to learn, and as an IT teacher she’d be a really good person to help skill up. As far as I can tell from the very little I’ve seen, the IT teaching here basically consists of training in using Word, typing, formatting etc. This is fine as far as it goes, but I’d love to try and broaden the horizons a bit, especially if I can get a few people competent and confident with Google searching. The internet is an incredible resource, but there’s no awareness here of just how much you can do with it. That’sgoing to be hard, getting it into people’s heads that the answer to any question they have is only a few clicks away. If they can read and understand it, of course... the poor (in my opinion) level of English literacy here will make this extra challenging.