Here's what a couple buddies in Alexandria and I are trying to do this summer.
Student-led teams will:
Travel to one of the 53 African countries of their choosing for 9-10 weeks
Participate in a 10-day orientation in Kigali, Rwanda at OLPC’s office
Receive up to $10,000 (USD) per team to cover operating costs
Deploy 100 XO laptops, including hardware and support
Collaborate with up to 100 other teams as part of a life-long global network empowering a generation of children
Send one representative to MIT/OLPC’s all-expense paid summit from Oct 10th-12th 2009
Below is a rough draft of our proposal... if you have any suggestions or advice, I am not opposed to listening...
OLPCorps: Middlebury College Egypt
Our team has teamed up with the Rotaract Club of Alexandria , Middlebury School in Alexandria and eduWeavers to establish an OLPCorps project in the village of Oreen in the governorate of Beheira, which is located an hour and a half away from Alexandria by car. The project's target start date will be June 28th, immediately after the school year ends in Oreen, and it will last nine weeks until August 27th.
In order to create an environment for complete cultural immersion, Matthew and David will live in the village of Oreen next door to Ahmed. After living in Egypt for nine months, Matthew and David are highly proficient in Egyptian colloquial Arabic, and Ahmed is a native speaker who is also nearly fluent in English. Many of the residents of Oreen have never met a foreigner before, let alone one they can question in their own tongue, so the simple contact between us and the village will be an amazing cultural exchange and opportunity to extend the benefits of our project throughout the community.
The Middlebury School in Alexandria will receive the 250 kg package and provide us with a storage place until the laptops are completely distributed. Monica will handle all the technical aspects of set-up. The principal of the elementary school, Abdal Mohesen Atallah, told us we can use the elementary school. Matthew and David have visited the village, and Ahmed has talked with many of his neighbors within Oreen, and he has gotten very positive responses on the idea of a OLPCorps project there.
The four of us will be teaching full-time -- Sunday through Thursday from 9:00 AM to 4:00 PM at the local elementary school -- along with several members of Rotaract who will rotate teaching to ensure that we always have a minimum staff of five teachers every day. This will allow us to cap each class at 10 children in order to give the students individualized attention. Our lessons will revolve around the computers and consist of three subjects: basic computer skills, basic and computer specific English, and the internet. Our aim is to teach the basics of computers and provide our students with a key to open up the world around them. In addition, we will create a blog to document our daily activities and publish the student's creative works to reveal that the children can also share their experiences with the outside world. The local teachers are very excited about our project, and we plan on working closely with them to exchange ideas on how they can integrate computer based learning into their curriculum.
After we complete our summer work, Rotaract will continue working with the children of Oreen by overseeing the project through bi-weekly visits to Oreen where Rotaract members will give follow-up computer workshops and assist in communication between the school of Oreen and its future "sister school" in the United States. Through our partnership with eduWeavers, we hope to find a sister school for the students to participate in cultural exchanges, which will not only add another aspect of utility to the computers, but also contribute to the continuity of our program. Furthermore, the Middlebury School in Alexandria wants to make Oreen its "sister" village, which would mean students studying abroad from Middlebury would participate in monthly cultural exchanges in Oreen and have the opportunity to join Rotaract for its bi-weekly follow-up sessions. Furthermore, this is Ahmed's village, so, our team has a personal stake in this project's success. Ahmed returns to his village every two weeks to spend the weekend with his family, and he will personally be around in the long-run to ensure that the summer's success multiplies in the coming years.
Through our OLPCorps project, we hope that by giving children a window to the outside world at a young age, we can help them grow up with the idea that their culture is one of many and anything is possible if they put their mind to it.
