a day in the computer lab

June 23, 2008
We went to Munali boys and girls school to set up computers in the girls lab. Then Lucy, Margo, Laura, Quinne, Katrin, Mindy, Nick, and I went to the primary school birdland to help teach grade 2 how to work with computers for about 2 hours. The little kids are cute and they are really interested in lions. Sometimes it was really hard to understand what they were saying because there English is broken but they were really excited to see the different pictures of animals. After we finished working with the Birdland students we went to go eat lunch at Munali. We ate Nshima which is basically corn meal that looks like grits and it came with chicken or beef and a relish. After we ate my group and I went to the girl’s computer lab to teach the high school students how to type. I first started out with 6 students to help until Quinne asked me to work with Michael because he is def and she doesn’t know sign language very well so I took over. It was actually really interesting working with a def student because I got a chance to see how smart and nice he is without him talking. Since he was getting the hang of the typing super fast I decided to just work with him and go ahead of the lesson because he was getting bored with the pace that the rest of the class was at. It really made me feel good to see Michael happy when he was understanding the typing lesson, and it was also fun because Emanuel one of the def teachers came in to help me with the sentences that I was writing on a piece of paper for Michael. Emanuel would tell me how to sign the sentences to Michael so he could understand a little better which was extremely interesting because I was learning something new that I was interested in as well as Michael. So by the end of the trip I hope to have learned quite a bit of sign language.