Teaching the Internet (and two weeks of catching up)

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I've decided to just try and wrap up two weeks into one blog entry. I just continually get behind on this. I'm still alive though.

After my Kenya trip it was back to work. I did a session that day. I continued teaching how to do word. I was now doing sessions at 3 different universities so I was pretty busy. Also we were going out most nights since many of the inters were coming to the end of their stays.
I just got into a normal routine of planning the sessions and lecturing so there wasn't too much to write about until I got to the internet. They are very insistent that I teach people how to use the internet. To me the internet wasn't something that you needed to teach people. It was just a trial and error. I had no idea what to teach and what would confuse the students. Immediately I had to look in a book to find out what I should cover. To many of the students the internet is just an application on the computer that you click on and by magic it appears! I had to go into a bit of detail as to how it works and what exactly it is. Then I discussed browsers and search engines. After that I thought it would be important for everyone to get email addresses.
I told everyone to go to a specific website to register for an email address. I thought that we would be able to do this quickly and end class early. Unfortunately registering for an email address proved to be a nightmare. The internet at the school was horribly slow and would sometimes cut out. Just getting to the "create new account" page was a struggle. When it then came to putting in information it seemed that every category apart from first name and last name was a struggle. In the form they would as for your birthday with the Month____ Day____ and Year____ . Someone raised their hand and told me that he can't remember what day he was born. I was a bit confused and asked "what day do you celebrate every year?". I then looked around the computers and understood why he asked the question. The person to the right of him had written 1990 for the year, October for the month and Saturday for the day. The student on the left wrote 1990, November, Tuesday. I think had to clarify to the class that we needed a number for the date.
We were then able to move to the next section of the form which was creating a user ID. This name made no sense to them and it took forever to try and explain what the user ID is. The students would spend some time to create the perfect and user ID only to find out that it had already been taken. Luckily yahoo gives you suggestions so I would just tell the students to click on the suggestions since they were taking too much time. After that they had to come up with a password, explaining that when it says a minimum of 6 characters. I think had to explain that characters are any letter or number. Many wouldn't be able to create a password because the system wouldn't let them use their names as their password. Then when it says re-enter the password many students had forgotten what they wrote before and would write a different password. Others would think that they should type in another password.
Finally we were past the user ID and password. Now what was left was the security questions. You need to select or create a security question and the answer to it so that if you forget your password you can get it back by answering these questions. No one understood what was going on. They didn't understand why they needed these security questions. Most would type (which takes a while) in the question "what is your name". I don't think they understood that it was supposed to be a question that not everyone would know the answer to. I sat one on one with someone who really didn't get what was going on. No question made sense to him and the only question he could think to ask himself was "What is my name?". Eventually rather that having him do it himself I just sat down and thought okay I'll make the questions for him. The first one I asked was "What is your favorite color?" I figured that would be pretty simple and easy to answer. The response I got was "dark". I said "Dark? So in two years if I were to ask you what is your favorite color your response would be dark?" he responded "yes". I thought okay then dark it is. Now that he had seen an example I asked him to come up with a question and I would type it in for him. It sounded as though he said "Who is her?" I asked again saying " who is what?" and he said "her, H-E-R". I heard correctly. I think typed in "Who is her" when I asked for the response the answer was "dream". (sigh).
Nothing about this procedure was simple. In the end they had to type in the security code (the disfigured letter test). I had to type this in for most people since they couldn't see the letters.
Finally! we would be finished! I would hit "Create" and then the internet would go out and I would get the "page could not be found" message.
After trying and failing to teach the internet I just gave up on the idea. Even the students in my more advanced class who could use word and excel could not understand how to register for an email address. Something that seemed so clear and straight forward can actually be quite complicated. I suppose it's something so ingrained into my head that I can't look back from a beginners perspective.

We were coming up to the last week of our project. At Kyambogo I was talking to Alan about rugby. Alan is the IT person who fixes all of the computers at Kyambogo. He would always walk us from the university to the main road and make sure that we would get a good price on our matatu taxi. He also plays rugby for the Uganda national team and a semi professional team in Rwanda. I had always mentioned that I wanted to go to a game. He told me that he would be leaving that weekend to go to Rwanda to play. He also mentioned if I wanted to I could go with him and we would stay in his friend's house. I didn't think much of it at the time because it was Wednesday and he would have to leave on Thursday (the next day) and I had a session on Thursday and Friday.
When we got back to the hostel susie (other intern) told me that she could cover the sessions if I wanted to go to Rwanda. I still rejected the idea until Racheal convinced me. She was right though, it was a rare opportunity and I needed to take advantage of it. I called up Alan that night and we planned to meet up the next day to buy the tickets for the night bus.
The next day I woke up. Met up with Alan and we went to get our bus tickets. I was a bit nervous going just with him because I was intimidated by the fact that it would be just me and a rugby team. I just thought that that's a fear I need to get over and just sucked it up. I just convinced myself that I would have a good time.
The ticket was bought and there was nothing I could do but pack and get on the night bus to Kigali, Rwanda.

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