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Wednesday, September 8, 2010 |
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Locals help bring technology to Honduras
Published July 28, 2010
The children in a rural area of Honduras will be getting an educational boost.
With the help of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and members of the St. Andrews Episcopal Church mission trips, the youngsters of Santa Rosita will be a part of the One Laptop Per Child program.
Locally, the church has taken on the Owen Project, which helps to raise money for the specialized laptops being created by MIT.
Mark Keddal, of the Owen Project, said MIT has designed a personal computer specifically for the needs of the rural population.
“It was an effort to create a laptop for third-world conditions with incomplete electric supplies where it is usually pretty isolated,” he said. “It is wireless and equipped with 14 educational programs — pretty much anything an American laptop would have. And it gives immediate access to the Web. This way you are empowering the kids themselves to explore.”
It is obvious that Santa Rosita is a community that values education, Keddal said.
“It is a place where the parents have built a school themselves and they only have resources to pay a teacher for K-6 and then after that their education essentially ends,” he said. “That showed us a commitment to education.”
Having these specialized computers in the rural areas will help to boost learning opportunities beyond those important early years, Keddal said.
“This is an opportunity for them to continue their education without having to build another school down there, especially with their limited resources,” he said. “This is also a way for them to continue their education without them having to go to a larger town, which is an hour away. Most kids don’t even think about it.”
Keddal said the laptops can run from two alternative power sources — by hand-crank or solar power.
“They can take them home to an isolated and rural environment with not many resources and still be able to essentially connect to the world with this computer,” he said.
MIT is constantly looking for a ways to better the computers and to make them more efficient, Keddal said.
“We were just up in Cambridge in Boston and they keep tinkering with it to make it better — creating a better battery to last longer, adding more programs,” he said.
Currently each XO model laptop costs $250 and is built to endure the remote and sometimes extreme conditions it will be exposed to, Keddal said.
Next summer, Keddal said he hopes to take 100 computers and about a dozen volunteers to Santa Rosita.
“We have some volunteers that are going to go with my wife (Sally) and I,” he said. “We are working with Texas Lutheran University and some advanced Spanish classes and encouraging students to take this trip as sort of an internship. We are hoping to get more Spanish speakers to go with us because there are not many English speakers down there.”
The team will only have two weeks to give instruction to the teacher and her students on the machines but will continue to follow up throughout the year, Keddal said.
“One Laptop Per Child is going to provide us with technical training,” he said. “We are going to be trained by a group in Austin that wrote the manual for the XO and then we are going to train the teacher and as many of the students as we can. We are hoping to build a relationship and return every summer.”
Keddal hopes the school in Santa Rosita will be an example for others to follow.
“This is going to be a model for expansion into other schools in the area,” he said. “This is the beginning of a good thing.”
The Owen Project was named after Mark and Sally Keddal’s son, whose life was changed after his introductory trip to Honduras, Mark said.
“He was a sophomore and sort of stereotypical and full of himself,” Mark said. “He went for 10 days and when we went to pick him up in San Antonio from the airport, he had given everything away including his heart. He went through quite a moral and personal transformation.”
When their son died at the age of 22, the Keddals wanted a way to “memorialize” everything Owen had inspired in them.
“We wanted to continue his memory and also continue his efforts of the church with special relationships with people in rural Honduras,” Mark said. “It was named after him in recognition of when he went through. He became a lot more aware of the moral claims on people. The project I think offers an opportunity for other people to find that moral clarity.”
For more information on OLPC check out www.laptop.org/en/ .
To make donations to the Owen Project send them to St. Andrew’s Episcopal Church, 201 East Nolte Street.
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