On Monday morning, I got up early. It was unusually warm for me, I have just left the Italian winter, with its rainy days. But telling the truth, I have to admit that I was very excited.
I didn’t know anything about the people we were going to meet, and my head was full of commonplaces. I would have never thought that the young girls immediately asked for a Facebook account …
Let’s start form the beginning … that morning, we met just a woman. The class was scheduled for the afternoon, but all the village knew we were there. The lady wanted to learn writing her name, using a pen, not a computer.
Finally, in the afternoon we met our first group of ‘students’, mainly composed by women. And two men. At the beginning there were few words, many smiles, and a sort of suspicion. It was difficult to understand their expectations, it was difficult to realize ours. For most of them was their first ‘digital’ experience, and even the keyboard was largely unknown …
Our first class flew by, in a mix of multiple languages … Italian, French, Serer, English for some technical words …
But the real surprise was on Tuesday morning: when we arrived we found a group of young girls waiting for us. Same as all teen agers, they wanted a computer class to create a Facebook account. In a while, I realized that we are so full of commonplace, that we can’t face reality. Yes, we were in a small dusty village, but connections make information very fast, and Africa is running fast.
So that, at the end of our second day, we had two fabulous different groups of students
Bloggingaroundtheworld 