So, I feel a bit silly even doing this, and many of you know that one of the things I really dislike talking about, let alone "asking" for, is money. That most evil of evils, the root, yet makes the world go 'round with all of its greed and dreams and stuff. Anyway, the exciting part of this blog is that my school, especially the headmaster (principal), has become excited about the computer lab project and especially making it a decent size and with good computers. Our vision is to put in a lab of EIGHT Inveneo computers! I've done a good budget on the project and this is going to cost about $4834 dollars.
Now, ideally I should write a grant to get this money, but from looking into grants, I've found that the lowest community contribution1 is 20%. Usually, Peace Corps volunteers shimmy around this a bit by having "in kind" contributions where the community does a bunch of work for free and that's included to cover a large part of the contribution. The problem is, that's difficult to do when nearly all of the costs are monetary for buying the computer equipment. The other option was to get fewer, or lower quality computers that would just crap out in a couple years anyway. So, I've offered to try and raise money informally among family and friends and ask instead for a 10% community contribution2. In addition to this, I've been saving from my own Peace Corps stipend3 for about 5 months and have saved $520 towards the project.
Anyway, the point of all this is that I want to gauge interest in donations from home. To do this I've put an anonymous vote on the right side of this blog. Please note that this is in no way a commitment to contribute, but rather to give me an idea of whether this method would work. I appreciate all truthful responses, and send lots of love to everyone.
Jones out.
Footnotes
1 - This is the amount of "money" put forward by the community to pay for the project. The grant puts up the rest of the money.
2 - Of course, in addition to this, most grants ask a lot of questions about plans for sustainability, which I also plan on developing with the community. I've begun training a few teachers to be computer administrators and know some things about managing programs and viruses (although we shouldn't have many problems with the latter due to our reliance on Linux-based OSs). The next thing I want to get started soon is some type of committee to get things moving and spread the word.
3 - This would probably be considered pretty meager by US standards. To give you an idea, but not the actual amount, if the poverty level were set at $5000 dollars income per year I would fall a healthy margin below that. However, it's still about triple what teachers here get, who are doing quite a bit better than the average Ugandan. At times it has seemed ironic that I'm a volunteer and making so much more above the average of the people. I've run out of money before (partly due to banking errors) and had to live for a week on about a dollar and left-over food, which is probably a more realistic experience. So, to feel a little better about myself I've been using good amounts of this money to improve the resource room, or in saving towards this project, or buying materials for the savings groups.
Posts
Good luck in your efforts to build your lab & and I'm glad you chose Inveneo computers - I know you'll find them most appropriate for rural communities. You can source them in Uganda through one of our local partners.
ReplyDeleteOf course, I am a bit biased.
Good call on the Linux. As a secondary project my wife and I tried to keep some of the government's Windows computers in our district capital functioning, but we were thwarted time and again by the huge numbers of viruses that infected every floppy the workers ever wrote to. It's no exaggeration to say that a worker would enter the government statistics for the month, print out the spreadsheet, then have the entire file wiped out by viruses as it was saved to disk. (And we couldn't easily download an antivirus, given that we were 500km from an Internet connection.) Linux would have been a great alternative.
ReplyDeleteThe other thing you might find on your project is that power quality fluctuates greatly. Though a UPS on each machine would probably be way too expensive, at least put surge protectors on your power cords. They'll keep you from having to replace too many power supplies.
Anyway, great luck on your project.
David Frossard, RPCV
Zambia 2003-2005
Philippines 1985-1987
props jones, for stepping out with such a bold idea. despite being unemployed currently, i think i could find a way to contribute enough to the cause. we'll talk soon to determine specifics!
ReplyDeleteabraços,
Jay
Reply to David (couldn't find your email address)
ReplyDeleteYeah, I think Linux is a good solution to viruses. They're rampant here in Uganda too. As far as power fluctuation I've found out that because Inveneo are so low power (22 Watts versus a normal computer ~170 Watts) that I can put multiple (I think all 8) on the same UPS. That's the idea anyhow.