IT Resource Centre still growing......

Hello folks!
Do apologise for the lack of updates, but in a way not much has changed of late.
Busy busy with the centre. So much so that I’ve let the computers for schools side of things slip behind I think, but I have since realised that, and have been casting an eye on them, although they are all closing now for 3 weeks with Easter.

In the centre we now have two people working.
Jim the guy I set the place up with is under the role of Resources manager. He has been out moving around the area meeting with lots of schools, community based organisations (CBOs) and NGOs. We’re advising people and groups of our existence, and what we can do together. Our main aim is to gather and then present information on all development activities, and also to assist development using the computers and equipment we have. With the data we are collecting we are putting all info into a website style catalogue for easy browsing in-house, scanning what hardcopy documents we are given. This is a huge task and is involving me doing web design, which isn’t my area at all, but I’m working it out. If anyone knows of an easy way or software that is basic user friendly to collate info please tell, as this will be an ongoing task.

Kathryn is our other employee, she has been taken on to look after the day to day running of the centre, she is also one of our trainers who is currently teaching Introduction to Computers and MS Word. We have a couple of students at the moment.

This is our money earner at the moment, unfortunately it isn’t totally covering our monthly costs yet, but this is kindly being supplemented from home (the fund-raised money ran out on completion of building and opening unfortunately).

Currently we have people coming in and using the computers to write proposals and read from Encarta Encyclopaedia. Proposals are a huge thing here, and not many new or growing groups have access to computers to do this vital work for their community development plans. We’ve been assisting these guys by giving them free access to our computers to produce these documents, and also leading them a hand when needed, as Jim is very conversant in this field, they then only pay a small amount for printing any pages (lower than commercial businesses in town).
This is one of our community assisting programs. We are also starting to work with the district’s development committee. They funnily enough in their 2002-2008 Malindi Development Plan had planned to build an IT resource centre for all the government departments to use. We only discovered this 2 weeks ago, laughed and then went to find them, to tell them we had done that very thing. Restraints apparently had been lack of funding etc for their own one.

It’s very hard to describe the way people are here, without seeing and experiencing it first hand yourself, but basically lots of things are talked about (maybe) but nothing is ever actually done. Now this might sound like things at home, but here it’s a whole new level, it’s not like someone forgot because they were too busy, too busy isn’t a phase that can be used around here. People just don’t bother. It’s very strange, and VERY disheartening. You really feel that you have to pull people along; so working with the government on this particular project is going to be a very interesting adventure!
We’re hoping to train all the government departments in using computers. Machines have been appearing in offices (usually donations) but people don’t know how to use them, and there seems to be no plan to fix this.
A missionary friend involved in agriculture, needed a report from the agriculture department to proceed with some work, having waited a long time for the report to appear, he discovers it hasn’t been written as no one knows how to use the computers in their office which the report must be written on. This is not an isolated case!!!

Crazy!!

One just has to laugh it off.

So we have set ourselves the target of sorting this if needs be.
It’s really interesting getting to know the town this way, and my two visitors coming over the next while shall have any interesting insight into all of it!!! Lots of sitting in corridors full of filing cabinets waiting to see officials.
And they thought they were coming for safari!!!

So pressing on and creating new concepts as we go.



Lindsay over-and-out