On the first day of work, the focus, we started meeting and knowing the group of neighborhood children (eight boys and a girl, to be precise) then we have followed during All installation work, and which form the audience will be chosen from which the trainers and managers of the center.
The formal presentations are not exactly my forte, in Congo, then, the moments are able to reach formal levels of bombast from nineteenth-century academy. And so, when it was my turn and I had submit to the boys our role in the project and explain our presence, I tried to be as forthright and pragmatic as possible, even at the risk of appearing a little 'cranky.
I tried to tell him something first of the Italian part of the project, as it was pulled forward with the energy and free time of students and voluntary workers, how many people and organizations are committed beyond the three of us we came down here , effort and sacrifice it took to get this far with those ten scatolozzi, scattered in different bags. Maybe not the greatest of courtesy enter in this way, but I think we carry a duty of witness that is more important than courtesy.
The computer center is not a magnanimous gift of some mundele who could afford it, are a contribution to development made by boys and girls who are struggling, study and work like them, albeit in completely different contexts and conditions. This point may seem trivial from Italy, but here it is not at all. Kingasani The boys have never been in Europe, very few exceptions, and they have something very smoky, a bit 'like the idea of \u200b\u200bthe Congo who may have seen Italy without having ever really. Here it often happens that a guy who gave you just met ask if you will give him the camera or the phone: it does this without any malice or evil, simply because he has no idea how valuable those objects for a European if he has to work to buy it, or whether he buys a day. They know that we have the opportunities that are a few orders of magnitude more of them, so they are also difficult to assess.
Being constantly treated like a walking piggy bank, first as a person who is an approach that inevitably creates distance and separation, two different levels with two different levels of dignity: it is something very dangerous in an environment of cooperation from tiring of living for those who you are. I have tried from the outset, as was from my possible, to avoid such situations, to testify that we are on both sides of the same boat, let the kids feel that the center is their before ours, we have equal dignity and equal responsibility so we hear.
Certainly it would be hypocritical and unfair to think our presence alone vanish with the legacies of decades of colonialism, a mundele here, as well as a walking piggy bank, is also a tale of unintended and often unconscious, a piece of history of a bad story. And we must come to terms with this. The looks of distrust, at times of challenge, which happen to get walking down the street are understandable in light of the history of Europeans in this country: we must take, and try to correct a little bit at a time, bringing a witness of a different Europe, and looking at our house to make even the Europe of today different from what it is.
To set a cooperation project, however, it is important that the people we work with you overcome these barriers, and establish personal relationships, trust and shared responsibility. We hope to have succeeded.
Judging by the attitude and the seriousness with which all the boys have faced the commitment these days I believe that if only we made a good start.
We started with the install and check all the hardware, and then continued with the installation of operating systems. On all the PCs we have made both Windows and Ubuntu, trying to spread free software and all its meanings are not only technical and at the same time, however, make the center attractive and usable immediately in a country where no one yet has ever heard of Linux.
We alternate on the computer to hack the long lectures on the board, summarizes in a few afternoons several months at a university. And at every stage we were always accompanied by a constant background music, and quite peculiar, blending the rhythms of Congolese music played by the neighborhood bar, the singing of the choir that was evidence in the church, and the cries of the children of the parcels next to ours. An impeccable sound summary of the spirit of the neighborhood.
also breaks current which have happened on average every two days, are always accompanied by a funny background sounds: a cry "eeehhh" choir of all children in the neighborhood, who celebrate the event (whether it goes away, and when he returns). They help us unconsciously, in their style, and to inform when we have to attack the router to the battery, and when we can pull it off.
The day before yesterday we finally completed the task of installing, connecting the cable that connects the classroom to the Internet: Ethernet connection to one hundred and forty feet underground, on two sections connected by a small switch that acts as a bridge to the other side of the road, where we have the wireless antenna that connects to the provider of Kinshasa.
After half a day spent pulling cables and check crimping, the ping response that was printed on the screen m'è seemed more beautiful than a poem.
Now the room is ready, you just have to clean up, end the training, and then we completed our part, and you only have to open the center and get it to work and live ... less is done!
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