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September 25, 2008

The young students of a missionary school in Pakistan have become very enthusiastic Ubuntu users thanks to the cooperation between their school administrator and an Italian Linux user group.

And this is despite the fact that the electricity at their school gets cutoff quite a bit, and that sometimes they can't use a computer more than 60 minutes at a time.

Father Aldino Amato is an Italian missionary who has been working for the past twenty-five years in the schools of the Rosary Christian Hospital, a nonprofit charitable institution in the village of Rehmpur, near the city of Okara in the Pakistani province of Punjab.

Two years ago, a friend suggested Amato publish in an Italian missionary newletter a request for all the things his schools needed but couldn't find easily in Pakistan. The first item on that list was computers. A newsletter reader pointed Amato to Golem (Gruppo Operativo Linux Empoli), an Italian Linux user group (LUG) founded in 2000 in Empoli, Italy.

Golem is particularly active in the trashware sector. It collects and repairs thrown-away computers and gives them away, after installing Linux, to schools, nonprofit organizations and other users. Four years ago, Golem sent a few PCs to a school in Somalia and, later, others to schools in Benin and Cameroon.

When Amato discovered this, he immediately wrote to Golem "I have more than 2,000 students from kindergarden to senior high and only one computer! I'd need at least 50 more, since Pakistani school regulations state that computer training should be at least 40 minutes every day. Can you help me? I'd really like to help my students learn new technologies."

Golem member Maurizio Pertici accepted. Three months later, the LUG managed to put together and ship to Rehmpur 43 computers complete with mouse, keyboard, and monitor, plus one eight-port hub, one modem, and four speakers.

With the exception of a few machines where a hardware issue prevented it, Golem installed Edubuntu on them all.

Technical and logistics conditions are deeply different in Rehmpur. For instance, electricity is only available at alternate hours, and even during those hours, quality and capacity of the grid are low enough that short blackouts are common.

Amato can download email only about one time a week, and as we worked on this article, a couple of his answers to my messages ended with "I can't answer more questions now because electricity will stop in a few minutes."

The photo of his student had to come by normal mail because, even if he had had a scanner or digital camera, it would have taken too much time to send it as an attachment! That's just how deprived from resources Pakistan is.

Several characteristics of so-called "free" and open source software held in great esteem in western countries are pretty worthless in most of the rest of the world, when they don't almost become problems. Year-long uptimes don't matter when a PC can't be powered on, in the best case, for more than 60 minutes in a row, nor does security.

Using computers only for very short periods and being almost always offline is also an excellent antivirus technique! Easy and automatic software update procedures via yum or apt-get lose all their appeal if the power goes off...

Overall, simply just putting the machines together didn't end the task either.

Every PC shipped to Rehmpur had a unique hardware configuration, being a collage of recycled pieces, and there would be nobody in the field with enough Linux knowledge to fix even the slightest issue, so the Golem members tested thoroughly every set of computer, mouse, keyboard and monitor to ensure that they were working properly before shipping it.

They also preconfigured the users and network interfaces in such a way to reduce to the absolute minimum the technical work necessary once installed in Pakistan.

This summer, a year and a half after the arrival of the computers, Amato confirmed to us that it still looks almost like a miracle... The only hardware problem the students have is getting used to Italian keyboards, since they use the English alphabet. The first feedback from Padre Amato to Pertici was "well the computers are doing great! My students are jumping out of their skin for the joy of being able to use so many computers almost every day."

Today, even the children of the first five grades answer without hesitation when you ask them how a computer works and love to use all the educational software for their age included in Edubuntu. Amato has been able to hire a technician to teach computer education to ninth and tenth graders and maintain the school's software and the hardware.

Additionally, more computers should arrive from Italy this fall. Padre Amato is hoping that it will be possible to set up at least some of them for about forty blind students, ideally with something similar to the Open Book system.

What makes Father Amato the happiest is feeling the self-confidence and sense of empowerment that access to the computers offers all his students. In Pakistan, the word "English" isn't used only to specify a nationality or a language. Due to the history of Pakistan, "English" may also be used to mean "superlative, of such a high quality that only the elites can afford it."

Sadly, many European and especially North American schools take computer labs for granted, as they do electricity for that matter. However, in countries such as Pakistan, the impact of a computer lab is bigger and much deeper. Computers are nice tools for helping students get a good education and eventually a good job, but that's not the main reason why Amato is so grateful to Golem for its help.

He says most students in developing countries see computers only on TV, billboards, or magazine pictures. Thanks to this lab, the schools of Rosary Christian Hospital have joined the ranks of what people in the province call advanced or so-called "pilot" schools.

When parents come from distant villages to pick up their children and they find them sitting in front of a computer, Amato says they're simply amazed and sometimes whisper to themselves "this really IS an English School after all."

Jobs like these are never finished, however. After the success in Padre Amato's schools, all the other priests in the area have repeatedly asked him to help find computers for their schools, hospitals and other local charitable institutions.

Source: Web Services.

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