Monday was a very exciting day for the people of our village. Our computers arrived! We’ve been collecting them in a storeroom at the PC headquarters for the last few months as they trickled into Guatemala. When Basilio (my boss) decided to visit our site, he offered to bring them with him, saving the village the substantial expense of renting a microbus for the journey.
Emily and I made the long trip to Atigua to make sure it all went smoothly. I’m glad we did; there was a lot of confusion at PC/HQ about where the computers were, which boxes were to go, when they should depart. When we met up with Basilio to load the computers into his vehicle, I got the bad news that one of the cars had already left. It became immediately apparent that all those boxes weren’t going to fit into one jeep, so I had to do some damage control. Luckily, when I packed them back in December, I separated components into boxes so that if only a few made it, we could still put together complete systems. In the end, we loaded the jeep with four CPUs, four monitors, and two pelican cases filled with laptops, cables, networking gear, and various perhipherals. That’s enough to get a functional computer center running. The rest of the equipment will come a few months later when Basilio makes his next scheduled trip to our site.
Emily called our village when we were close to Santa Eualia, so they could send a local microbus out to meet us and transfer the computers. We arrived just after nightfall, and were suprised to find that a TON of elders came along for the ride. They took us and our Peace Corps companions out to dinner to celebrate this momentous occasion. In true Guatemalan fashion, many speeches were made and many thanks were given. Here we listen to Don Tomax, the COCODE (head of municipal developement). I must say, I was moved and touched by some of the things they said, and the fact that these nice old men came all the way out to meet us on a night that I THOUGHT was just basically a moving party.
We then piled us and the computers into a microbus with all the seats removed and headed home. A short trip later, we arrived in town to the typical greeting of fireworks and excited people. Some of the jovenes (youngsters) that are interested in helping me run the center carried the boxes from the microbus to the room we’re going to use in the Health Center.
As you can see, some of the cartons are in pretty sorry shape after moving by car, then airplane, then van, then pickup, then handtruck, then jeep. It will be interesting to see how many computers survived. The stuff in the pelican cases fared better, and I opened one of them to show the villagers what some of the gear looks like. After that, most people went home to sleep, but a few of the leaders hung around for an impromptu meeting. It happened in Q’anjob’al, but with a little help from Lucas I was able to get the gist of what was going on. They were discussing how to handle the participation problem: some of the villagers don’t think the project is worthwhile or don’t “get it”, yet the town as a whole has to raise money to get a separate power meter and wire the room for extra outlets. You see, they put this off until they actually saw hard evidence that the computers would really arrive. That lack of faith is understandable, after all they’ve been through with their government’s disinterest in their wellbeing and the civil war in the recent past. It doesn’t offend me at all. I left, confident they’d figure it out and glad that THAT end of the work is their problem, not mine.
Next week: damage assessment, and figuring out how to make Ubuntu work for me and my village.