Just Jackfruit

As per my last post, we were scheduled to start a pilot computer literacy program for students at the boys’ HS school in Bijawar from April 1 to 15.

The principal of the school has now indicated, however, that he wants to move the whole program back by a week or so, starting April 6. They’re running behind in getting the final examination results out, and they cannot start the program until that work is done. Additionally, the Bijawar Boys’ HS School is a block-level school, which means that the examination papers for all middle and high schools in the block (smaller than a school district, but it’s the same general concept) are graded there. The good news is that the principal is willing to let the program run through the end of April, adding a week to the time we thought we had.

The principal has already spoken to the teachers who we know to have some computer skills – Salar, Divya and Sanjay (all residents of Bijawar) – and they are on board for April. Since Ashish commutes from Bada Malehra (about an hour away) and his contract for the new school year has not yet been renewed, it will be difficult for him to join the program at this time.

It was rightly pointed out to me that this first pilot experience needs to be a relatively smooth one, or we might lose interest and momentum in moving forward. Since it’s not feasible for my family or I to fly to India for two weeks right now, we were actively working with a couple of software engineers from Noida to come down to Bijawar for two weeks to help out in April. Ideally, their role both in and out of the classroom would have been to assist the teachers and troubleshoot problems, though they would of course help the students as needed as well. I was hoping that this sort of hands-on teacher training would have allowed those teachers to carry on this program more independently in the future.

Unfortunately, the people we were talking with will not be able to spend the full two weeks in Bijawar, but they are still very committed to the program. They’ve talked about wanting to take Fridays off work to go down to Bijawar to teach on the weekends. These software engineers have also been talking about the project at work, and it looks like several other people are interested in volunteering their time.  It would be great to harness this interest, but we’ll have to see how to make that possible logistically.

Due to the elections scheduled for later half of April, it is going to be extremely difficult to find lodging for volunteers coming from elsewhere. Bijawar has only one guest house and no hotels. The guest house is fully booked due to the elections.  These volunteers may have to stay in Chhatarpur or Khajuraho and commute to Bijawar. We will also be looking for possible teacher resources in Chhatarpur.

As another follow-up to my last post, the cost of getting a speaker phone, an 8-12 port switch and associated Cat5 cables to hook up all of the computers to the Internet is approximately Rs. 3,500 – 4,000.

The last post detailed the state of our work in Bijawar as of January 12, and this one will focus on the developments since then.

The faculty at the boys’ HS school was unable to start a computer pilot project in February because of the schoolwide preparation for the state board exams that the students in grades 10 and 12 take in March. However, after weeks of talking with the principal, he agreed to teach students from April 1-15 from 9am-12pm, before classes but while the school still has electricity. I’m really excited to see some development on this front!

Although exam results for grades 10 and 12 come straight from the M.P. Board of Secondary Education), the boys’ HS school teachers are available during this time because they’ll be at the school grading exams and preparing marks sheets for their grade 9 and 11 students. The principal has agreed to let some of them – exactly who that will be is yet to be determined – teach computer classes at this time. The new school year technically starts in April (their school year is different from that in the US), but students tend not to show up after exams because about half of the student population comes from smaller villages around Bijawar.

We would have liked to try the program for the whole month of April, but elections in India for the 15th Lok Sabha (the lower house of the Parliament) have been announced to start April 16. Any available government school facilities will therefore be occupied after April 15.

Our recommendation to the principal is to pick for this pilot program two groups of nine motivated students who wouldn’t otherwise have the opportunity to learn computer skills. There are ten computers, but the last is still broken, and the school needs to get it fixed. As a minor note, the principal has agreed to change the faulty fuse that keeps burning out when more than two computers are turned on at a time. This is fantastic, because it’s such a small problem that would prevent any computer classes from being held.

For the last couple of days, we’ve been working on a 13-day curriculum for the teachers to follow. It’s loosely based on the Operation Fikelela Curriculum put together by IkamvaYouth and the Shuttleworth Foundation to teach computer skills to kids in South Africa. Once that’s finalized, I’ll post the PDFs here.

I’m currently trying to figure out the best way for the teachers to document each day’s work and any problems, evaluate the students’ progress, and communicate the necessary information to us. I’d also like the students to briefly evaluate, possibly anonymously, the program at the end of the two weeks, to see where we can improve it.

We’re looking to maybe hold a summer computer camp once school lets out in May, but the viability and details of that plan are heavily depended on how this two-week program in April goes.

We’re also working on a way to get an 8- or 12-port switch and Cat5 cables so that the school can connect all of the computers to the internet simultaneously. Along those lines, I’ve heard some talk about how the school might be exceeding (or is expected to exceed soon) their current broadband plan and therefore incurring additional costs, which is something to watch out for.

The last I’d heard, the girls’ HS school was expected to receive computers in April. I plan on checking in with them soon to see whether that’s still the case, and if so, what their plans are for using them.

Note: What you see here is only the part of my summary that deals with issues and future plans. Click here to see the whole summary, which includes background information and a detailed explanation of the work we did in three weeks.

Issues

Education

One of the major issues with computer literacy in Bijawar is basic English literacy because the quality of English education in these schools is poor. Since the options for computing in Hindi are so limited, the students and other people with whom we’re working have to be able to read and understand at least some English. Context menus and dialogue boxes are intimidating because learning the ways in which Windows prompts users to take certain actions are difficult enough without the additional language barrier. Students and even teachers are additionally unable to generate significant content – letters, CVs, lesson plans, essays – in English, which makes it difficult to establish a connection between the skills they’re learning and their lives. Using the Internet is also a challenge without good English skills. While there are efforts being made to generate content in Hindi, the amount of information in Hindi is a fraction of that available in English.

Learning to type in Hindi, using a Hindi font like Kruti Dev, might help with this issue. The problem is that learning to type in English is currently a necessity for operating a computer and using the Internet. While this can be accomplished through the use of free typing software, there is no software to teach Hindi typing. There are books available for this purpose, but it is an imperfect solution that is largely untested at the high school level. Speculatively, I would venture that it requires significant time and effort to learn to type in Hindi, but it certainly bears further research.

Maintenance

The maintenance of these computers is also a huge problem. When we first arrived, the computers were in terrible shape – slowed down by viruses and bloatware, suffering from incomplete Windows installations, and physically gathering dust. Portable USB drives are becoming more common, especially among those who already have a computer, and these thumb drives are vectors of infection. Although we cleaned the computers up, I have no doubt that once the students and teachers begin to use them, especially while connected to the internet, the hardware and software will inevitable develop problems. Our time spent in Bijawar elucidated the clear need for a knowledgeable part-time IT person to maintain the workstations; without someone to keep them running, the computers will be used until something goes wrong (even if that something is truly minor from our perspective) and then they will be basically abandoned. The issue of who these IT personnel are and how they are funded remains to be seen.

Electricity

The electricity situation in India, and especially in Bijawar, is also major problem because there simply isn’t enough electricity to supply everyone at all times. While we were in Bijawar, the electricity was following a three hours on, three hours off scheme. We had power for about 12 hours a day – from 3 am to 6 am, 9 am to 12 pm, 3 pm to 6pm, and 9 pm to 12 am. Besides making life generally difficult, this scheme means that desktop computers can only be run at certain times, limiting their usefulness. Although desktops are cheaper, more powerful, and more reliable, they don’t make a lot of sense in Bijawar because of this issue. The hours for the boys’ high school, for example, are from 12-4:30 pm, so there’s no electricity to run their ten computers when they’re in session. They do have a separate power supply, but desktop computers drain that pretty quickly, and it cannot handle too much of a load at once.

Physical Resources

In the boys’ HS school, specifically, the computers are being kept in a temporary room, crowded together, with no regard to proper wiring or connectivity. The fuse which they’re using cannot handle the load of ten computers running at the same time and periodically smoldered while we were there. The new computer lab that is half-built is stuck at the moment because the funds haven’t been released at the district level, the details of which are fuzzy to me. The people in charge of building this lab additionally don’t have the knowledge about what kinds of things are important when constructing a computer lab. The concrete slabs on which the computers will rest, for example, are only deep enough for a monitor – there is no space for a keyboard. The government sent them official blueprints, but they were unable to understand the plans and so have ignored them.

The final issue is that there are too many students and too few computers. We’ve found that students learn best, at least initially when they’re learning to handle the mouse and type, with one computer per student. There simply are not enough computers to teach everyone, especially when you take into account school hours and the hours during which electricity is available.

Possible Future Plans and Ideas

We are looking into multiple avenues to continue this project in the future. Our first and most important goal is to follow through on the pilot project with one or two sets of ten students, taught before or after school by some of the teachers who are either already somewhat computer-savvy or with whom we worked over the last three weeks. The logistics and details of this plan have yet to be worked out. I also want to check in with the teachers when they’re preparing their students’ marks sheets in March and April, after board exams, to see whether the templates are being used.

The possibility of opening up the computer lab, under supervision, for students or teachers to use by signing up is also something I’m interested in. This extra, free-form time would give students the opportunity to either practice what they’ve learned in their extracurricular classes or to explore the medium by themselves and would give teachers a chance to enter their marks in Excel or to hone their computer skills. In a similar vein, the option of providing computers elsewhere in Bijawar for the teachers to use in their off time is something to explore.

I’d like to find a way to connect this computer literacy to the students’ other subjects or to their lives. Computer-aided education is an entirely different subject, but it would be interesting if students could use Excel to do some math and science exercises related to their coursework. Producing essays and papers is more difficult, because students would have to be fairly proficient at typing in Hindi first.

There is a teacher training camp held every summer for two weeks, in which master trainers go through the coming year’s curriculum and instruct the teachers on how to teach their students. Some of the teachers with whom we worked suggested that one teacher from each school be trained at this camp so that they can train others when they go back to their school. This avenue is worth investigating further.

We want to find a way of contacting the M.P. Board of Education to understand more thoroughly what their plans are regarding computer literacy in rural areas where they’ve sent computers but have not made any visible effort towards developing a sustainable infrastructure within which to actually teach students. If we have more information about the official plan, we’ll be better able to tailor our work to fit with theirs.

In the distant future, I would be interested in exploring computer literacy at the elementary and middle school levels as well, to expose students to technology as early as possible. I’m unaware of any current government scheme to send computers to these schools, however. Students also only begin learning English in the sixth grade, which is a possible stumbling block. They might be able to use drawing software or play games, which would at least teach them basic mouse and keyboard skills and allow them to become familiar with Windows at an intuitive level.

To combat the electricity problem, I’m going to look into public and private schemes to implement alternative energy sources, especially solar power, to run computers.

I’ll be posting a summary of my experiences in India this winter soon. It’s taking longer than I expected to write everything up. Meanwhile, apropos of nothing, I spent an hour tonight procrastinating on schoolwork and ended up calculating the percentages by race and gender of people in the United States and comparing them to the percentages by race and gender of members of the US Congress.

You would think that this data would be available already calculated somewhere on the Internet, but no dice.

At the US Census website, I found the Annual Estimates of the Population by Sex, Race, and Hispanic Origin for the United States: April 1, 2000 to July 1, 2007 (and here’s the Excel spreadsheet).

I also found a document entitled Membership of the 111th Congress: A Profile (and here’s the PDF) through the Congressional Research Service (CRS). This report was generated on December 31, 2008, so it was missing information from the Congressional races whose results have been announced in the month since then. Here, I found a few updated stats.

I combined these numbers to come up with my spreadsheet (Excel).

Results:

In the total population, whites make up 66.0%, Hispanics are 15.1%, Blacks are 12.8%, APIA (Asian and Pacific Islander American) are 5.1%, and AIAN (American Indians and Alaskan Natives) are 1.2%. In Congress, whites make up 85.8%, Hispanics are 5.8%, Blacks are 7.5%, APIA are 1.7%, and AIAN are 0.2%.

Men are 49% of the total population, while women are 51%. In Congress, men are 82% and women are 18%.

These numbers show the disparity between the population of the United States and their representation in Congress. The real story is of course complicated by the racial makeup of individual states and districts, which would be a more correct comparison to make with the racial makeup of Congress. Additionally, “APIA” encompasses many different racial and ethnic groups, many of which tend to be even more underrepresented in government. As a rough tool, though, I think this is pretty good.

Methodology and Limitations:

The total population numbers broken down by race will not add up to the total population estimated in July 2007 because of the way in which the Census numbers are reported and how they must be manipulated in order for us to compare them with the Congress demographic information.

The US Census considers “Hispanic” to be an ethnicity, so people who mark themselves as Hispanic also have a separate racial identity, while the CRS reports “Hispanic” as a race (or, rather, it doesn’t differentiate between race and ethnicity). The Census also separates “Asian” and “NHPI” (Native Hawaiian or Pacific Islander) into different categories. The CRS groups these together. To provide for multiracial persons, the Census allows people to check more than one race, but the CRS does not report members of Congress as multiracial. Therefore, the numbers that I took from the Census report follow these racial definitions (the values that I used are marked in pink on the second page of the spreadsheet itself):

“White” = not Hispanic; white alone
"Hispanic" = total Hispanic population
“Black” = not Hispanic; alone or in combination with other races
“APIA” (Asian and Pacific Islander American) = not Hispanic; Asian + NHPI; alone or in combination with other races
“AIAN” (American Indian and Alaskan Native) = not Hispanic; alone or in combination with other races

I calculated the number of whites in Congress by subtracting members of the other racial groups from the total membership.

Gender was more straightforward. I similarly calculated the number of men in Congress by subtracting the women from the total Congressional membership.

It should be noted that transgender and genderqueer people are basically left out of the Census process altogether. There are also no openly transgender or genderqueer members of Congress.

Here’s the spreadsheet again in Scribd:

Population Versus Congress (Race and Gender)

This is the really cute little boy whose family rents out the upstairs part of my grandmother’s house.

Onto the actual news. Today was a much-needed counterpoint to yesterday’s frustrations. We accomplished all the nitpicky little details that were left to finish in the morning to get the computers in the boys’ high school ready for use – place a desktop background on the password-less “admin” account, warning users to log in under the limited “school” account; print and tape up basic instructions on how to turn on the computer, start and save a program, and turn off the computer; and create an HTML shortcut of important websites. We checked the broadband speed, and it seems that we’re getting about 256 kbps, so there might just have been a lot of broadband traffic yesterday afternoon which drove our speed down.

We also had a final meeting with the principal, who agreed to try a pilot project with class 9 and 11 students! He was initially resistant to the idea because grades 10 and 12 cannot take their attention away from their pre-board exams, which happen in a couple of weeks.

In the winter, the students have school outside. Most of the kids walk or bike to school (first picture). Ashish is teaching physics in the background of the second picture while Prabha teaches Sanskrit in the foreground. These pictures were taken from the roof of the building while we waited for a teacher to unlock the half-finished computer lab that’s being built as a second floor. The lab is currently being built with little attention to what the requirements of a computer lab actually are, since no one involved has any such experience. From our three weeks here, we’ve learned a number of pertinent things, including the need for a robust fuse that can withstand the load of ten desktops, a printer, and a scanner. The concrete slab on which they plan to situate the computers is also not deep enough to accommodate the size of a monitor and a keyboard, so they’ll probably need to add a few inches to it. It would also be good for them to make sure they have enough power outlets, power strips, and phone jacks to plug in all of their computers and peripherals. Once the lab is finished, we might think about setting up a local area network with a file and print server so that they can access and print their files from any computer.

We also visited the girls’ high school, although we didn’t accomplish much there over the last three weeks. Hopefully we’ll be able to work with them to better effect once they receive the computers they’re expecting in April.

I’ll be writing and posting a summary of what we’ve done so far and what the next steps could potentially be in a few days, once I have a chance to debrief and recover from this trip.

We got broadband in Bijawar yesterday! The boys’ high school was the first broadband connection that BSNL installed in Bijawar, which was super exciting. Since the computers don’t have WiFi, the school can only use broadband on two computers at a time (without a switch, anyway, which they don’t have), but we made sure that they can be any two computers at a time, providing that the wire reaches far enough. The BSNL people were really helpful, since they normally just set up one computer. The speed is supposed to be 256 kbps, but we’re only getting about half of that, so if we don’t see the proper speed tomorrow, we’ll have to check up on it.

The last two days have been crazy busy with long hours at the boys’ high school, trying to get their computers up and running. We’ve been trying to get there by 10, so that we can work for two hours on all of the computers before the electricity goes out at noon. Although the school has a UPS (uninterruptable power supply) that can supply some power, it cannot handle more than one or two computers at a time and runs out of charge fairly quickly. After noon, we work on the computers separately, and when the power comes back on at three, we again turn them all on again. Yesterday we actually managed to blow and burn through the fuse by turning on all the computers at the same time, so they’re going to have to look into installing proper wiring when they reach that stage in building their permanent computer lab.

We reformatted the one computer that was having issues with an incomplete Windows installation. We also installed AVG, Adobe Reader, and some free typing software on all the computers. Since the computers aren’t networked, we labeled five computers as “Class 9 Work,” “Class 10 Work,” “Class 11 Work,” “Class 12 Work,” and “Administrative Work” to ensure that any marks sheets and roll sheets that are filled out in Excel can always be found on the same computer (i.e., so that teachers don’t forget which computer they were working on and get confused about where their work is saved). We’ve also made instructions for beginners on how to turn on the computer, open and save files, and turn off the computer that we’re going to paste on each CPU.

Although today was Sunday, the principal gave us the keys to the computer lab so that we could go in and work if we needed to. We tried to go around 3pm, but we found the gate (to which we don’t have the key) locked.

We spent the rest of the day finalizing three templates for them to use in their grading and administrative work: one for the class 9 marks sheets, one for their nominal roll (used to tell the government which students will be taking which board exams and how much they have to pay), and one for their admission roll (basically a list of everyone being admitted into every grade). For the marks sheets, we even used this macro to automatically name the worksheet tabs with the roll number of the student, which will be filled by hand by the teacher using the template. I’m a little worried that all this hand-holding is going to be simultaneously too dumbed-down (what with it’s ‘foolproof’ locked Excel cells so that inexperienced computer users can’t accidentally overwrite formula cells but that also prevent anyone from changing anything, even if the school’s requirements change) and too complicated (for example, figuring out a way to save and print the files in an intuitive, efficient, reproducible way is even more difficult when the people involved don’t have any conception of the Windows file structure). This combination might basically result in no one using the templates we’ve slaved over. The ideal would have been for the teachers to spend a week actually using the templates while we helped them iron out any bugs or user issues.

I’ve been really frustrated for the last few days, now that our time here is winding down, with how little we’ve actually accomplished, despite the fact that I explicitly didn’t come into this process with any concrete goals. Three weeks really isn’t enough time to help enact meaningful change, but it just seems like all of our focus lately has been on getting the boys’ high school computers in a state where they can be used by the students and teachers. This time spent has elucidated the clear need for a knowledgeable part-time IT person to maintain the workstations; without someone to keep them running, the computers will be used until something goes wrong (even if that something is truly minor from our perspective) and then they will be basically abandoned. I’m also worried that the school won’t even get this far and that no one (besides the administrative assistants who produce things like the payroll, which is required by the government to be submitted electronically) will use the computers at all.

We’re trying to work on convincing the principal to allow students and teachers to use the computer lab in the mornings from 11-12, but he seems mainly concerned with, again, things which are absolutely mandated by the government, like the payroll. The cynic in me wants to say that the only reason he’s been so enthusiastic about our efforts to get his computers working is because he’ll no longer have to pay a sizable amount every month for one of his administrative assistants to go to Chhatarpur and have someone with an internet connection to fill out the form online, but I know this is an uncharitable analysis of the situation. Hopefully we’ll be able to find an angle that will inspire him to allow the students (for whose benefit this whole school exists!) and teachers access to the wealth of resources the school now possesses.

I wish we could have worked with the teachers to formulate a concrete plan to teach students computer skills, which they could have presented to their principal. I’m uncomfortable lobbying him ourselves, since I wasn’t really looking to plan anything or start a program myself, but we’re sort of out of time and options if we want the computers to be used after we leave. The information we’ve gathered indicates that a pilot project with 30 students and a dedicated teacher (who might be able to be funded by an external grant if there’s no money in the school budget for this position) from 11-12 am every day would be the most feasible.

Another source of frustration for me has been how little we’ve accomplished at the girls’ high school. In retrospect, I suppose this was inevitable, since there’s only one computer in the principal’s office, and the little work we were doing there wouldn’t have produced a sustainable plan until April.

Yesterday and today, we haven’t worked with the women teachers in the evenings because two of them are taking are taking the PSC (Public Service Commission) examination in Chhatarpur and one of them hasn’t been showing up lately because it’s gotten so cold in the evenings. (Seriously. I was wearing five layers yesterday. It’s not that much colder in absolute temperature than California, but the lack of indoor heating provides no respite from the cold anywhere.) Tomorrow we’ll be meeting with them again to wrap up our time here and encourage them to continue their education, as well as start programs at their respective schools to begin educating their students. Actually, Menka came by today (with her sister, who I’d asked to do henna on my hands) and mentioned that she wanted to talk with the principal of the boys’ high school to see if he would allow her and other elementary- and middle-school teachers to use the computer lab at 10 am, before they’re required to be at school. This is the kind of plan I’m thrilled to see being undertaken, because it indicates the sustainability of the meager work we’ve managed to do here.

Something that I forgot to mention in yesterday’s entry was that we ran around like crazy for a couple of hours, trying to set up the process of bringing broadband to the boys’ high school. We managed to get the principal to cut the phone company a check for the required amount, and we turned in the necessary forms, but we’ll see tomorrow if our efforts will actually pay off and result in Internet access.

The schools were all closed today for Muharram, so we didn’t go anywhere. We had wanted to work with the computers at the boys’ high school, but people felt it wasn’t safe for women to be wandering around an otherwise isolated area of the village while large groups of young men would be marching in processions past us. This concern reflected the classic attitude that women bear the responsibility for ensuring that men do not harass or assault them, which of course strikes me as unfair victim-blaming. What made it worse was the implication that Muslim men somehow can’t be trusted not to assault any Hindu women who they come across. At some level, I might be able to understand the general sense that large groups of men in this country have a history of violence towards women (although don’t get me wrong – it still rankles), but the addition of religion into the mix made this attitude completely unbearable. The constant sniping at anyone who is Muslim has been bothering me from the day we came here. I understand the tense history of Hindu-Muslim relations in this country, but it still frustrates me at a fundamental level to hear otherwise mostly reasonable people speak with disgust about Muslims as a group.

Although I wanted to do the work that we came here to do, I think it would have been foolish to openly disregard the advice of people who live here, even if I believe much of what they were saying amounts to little more than fearmongering. We decided not to take an unnecessary chance (typing that still feels like a copout), so we didn’t go to the boys’ high school.

Instead, we worked on the report card and grading sheet templates for the various pieces of paperwork that all of the teachers and administrators spend hours and hours filling out by hand. Above is one example – these sheets report each student in the school and their grades in every subject, which they use to calculate class rank. If we automate this sort of thing in Excel, the tedious data entry will become much faster.

In the evening, after working with the women teachers on Excel and the Internet, we talked for a couple of hours about our plans for the next four days.

The feeling that we’ve been unfocused for the last few days came to a head last night, and during the subsequent six-hour discussion that stretched until 4am, we realized that our nightly routine of debriefing (about what we’d accomplished that day, any new issues that had developed, and what our plan for the next day was) had fallen by the wayside. As a result, we hadn’t had a concrete plan when we went into the schools or when we worked with the teachers, resulting in frustration, so I’m glad that we resumed this debriefing and analyzing process.

(As an aside, I really wish you could find chikoo in the US. Mmmm.)

We went to the boys’ high school in the morning yesterday, to work on setting up their computers while there was still electricity to run all of the computers at the same time. The boys’ high school is a middle school before noon. When we got there, the boys were doing yoga out in the front of their school (the photos were taken by my cousin Samradhi).

They were all so curious about what we were doing in a room full of computers that had probably never been opened in front of them before.

In the afternoon, we visited the girls’ high school again to work with three male teachers. In the evening, we started on the Internet with the four women teachers and continued to work on Excel with them.

Today, we did much the same. Instead of going to the girls’ high school in the afternoon, we went to Chhatarpur to pick up some supplies that we needed. In particular, we were missing one VGA-USB cable for an HP ScanJet, which we didn’t find.

Kalpana came by for the first time in three or four days this morning. Because we’re not working with the high school girls anymore, we finally had time to introduce her to Excel.

We’d spent the last couple of days making a foolproof Excel template to replace the individual student report cards (called marks sheets here) at the boys’ high school. The teachers spend months calculating percentages and filling out these report cards by hand, so we’ll be saving them a lot of time if we manage to computerize the process. The school might even be willing to spend the money to print each individual report card (right now, the blank report cards come from the government) if we save their teachers enough time.

We then spent three hours at the boys’ high school with Ashish and Salar setting up all of their ten computers. Only two had been used on a regular basis. We also discovered that they have ten sets of speakers, a Canon laser printer, an HP Scanjet, and a dot-matrix printer. Only some of the speakers and the laser printer were even removed from their boxes. Everything was covered with a thick layer of dust (which, in all fairness, builds up quickly in India).

It’s clear that the problem here is not a lack of physical resources in schools, although the program hasn’t reach elementary and middle schools yet, especially in even more rural areas. The government hasn’t sanctioned money for computer teachers or IT personnel to use and maintain the equipment, so no one touches it.

We uninstalled of the random bloatware that came packaged with XP (MSN and Wipro’s Genius Console, among others), as well as the other sketchy software that the end-users had installed on some of them. We installed Office 2003 and Firefox. We also set up one admin account and one limited-user account on each computer, both without passwords (because whoever knows the passwords is bound to forget them or leave the school without telling anyone else), giving Ashish and Salar strict instructions not to let anyone log into the admin account unless they know exactly what they’re doing. Hopefully, this will minimize the malware and extraneous software installed on the machines.

One computer and one monitor don’t work, for separate but equally frustrating and opaque reasons. Another computer seems to have an incomplete XP installation, because it’s missing some fundamental XP programs like MS Paint. It’s also having some problems with the administrator account.

Tomorrow we’re going to try to install some antivirus and antispyware software, although I don’t know how we’re going to download the installers through this 115 Kbps internet connection that drops every 10 minutes. We also want to install the printer and scanner drivers on all the computers.

The principal also wants us to create Excel templates for some other administrative work the teachers are required to do. We’ll try to make them to their specifications, but allowing people with little computer experience to do tedious computerized data entry is always a problem. They know how to do one thing, and if they mess something up, they don’t have the ability or knowledge to fix the problem. Also, organizing their students’ report cards is going to be a problem; if they have a separate Excel file for each student, the files have to be very well named and organized if they want to be able to find anything twice. Teaching that sort of structural organization isn’t easy, especially with only a week.

We had a meeting today with Neha, Divya, Neeta, Menka, and Sonali to discuss our project at a higher, more village-wide level. We’ve been working with the teachers for a week now, and we’d like them to be more involved in the planning process. They know Bijawar, their schools, and their students better than we do, and in order for any change to be sustainable, they have to be invested in and responsible for the work. The ideal, for me, would be to step back at some undetermined point in the near future and have an institution that works entirely on its own, led by the people here.

The main point that came out of this two-hour discussion was that training teachers in computers must become compulsory, which will be necessarily accompanied by computer education becoming a part of the government school curriculum. The women believe that this effort will become fully actualized within the next few years.

There is a teacher training camp held every summer for two weeks, in which master trainers go through the coming year’s curriculum and instruct the teachers on how to teach their students. It was suggested that one teacher from each school be trained through a similar government effort so that they can train others when they go back to their school.

The ‘too many students, too few computers’ problem was also discussed. The suggestions were mainly along the lines of instituting an hour or two before the official start of school in which teachers can work with interested students. Again, this problem will be better solved if and when the government mandates computer education, because the needed time can then be taken out of the school day.

The current generation of students, according to these women, is heavily into the computer ‘craze,’ both because it’s trendy and because they see that computer skills are an integral part of participating in an increasingly globalized world. This new generation is also more interested in solving India’s problems and concerned about its problems than the previous one. They’re more united in asking for their rights and forming mass movements to exact change. In the nearby city of Chhatarpur, entire blocks of people refused to vote to register their distaste for some political process. I’m not sure whether this is a phenomenon specific to a generation or whether it is a function of the idealism that accompanies youth of any generation. It might be some of both.

The women also want to see the establishment of a computer center in order to provide computer access to people (especially teachers) who don’t have (and can’t afford to buy) one for themselves. At Menka’s school, some of the teachers are thinking about pooling their money to purchase a laptop for the group with which they can begin teaching students.

The biggest obstacles they see themselves facing in continuing to develop their computer skills are time and money, as well as the social pressures exacted on young, unmarried women. For example, it’s dark by 7:00 pm, which is when they come by every night to work with us. It’s frowned upon here for women to be walking around after dark, but they’ve made that commitment to come anyway because they want to learn. Many of the women are escorted by their husbands, fathers, or older male children on the way here and back, or they travel in groups.

One woman talked about how she doesn’t feel right asking her parents for thousands of rupees to get her PGDCA (some sort of degree in computer education) because they are expected to spend hundreds of thousands of rupees on the weddings of she and her four sisters.

I’m really glad we had this meeting, because it helped bring everyone up to speed on the research we’ve done and figure out how the motivated teachers are thinking, what their needs are, and how we can help them. That was, after all, the original plan.