If a journey of a thousand miles begins
with a single step, as the old saying goes, then the journey to wire the
world to the Internet begins with a single town. In recent months, two
groups of Penn students—connected, to varying degrees, with the School
of Engineering and Applied Science—have taken that first step, building
technology centers in the West African city of Bamako, Mali, and the Indian
city of Pune. To do so, they braved cultural divides, sweltering heat,
intestinal parasites—and, in some cases, malaria.
“It’s
something really small, when so much needs to be done,” says Lia Fantuzzo,
a senior English major in charge of coordinating the Bamako2000 team’s
training curriculum. “But so little has been done that it’s a step.”
Rohan
Amin, a junior in SEAS who served as student leader for the Pune project,
notes that the idea was to “build a global learning community through
technology.” Since Internet technology is, in a sense, bringing the planet’s
vast outreaches to Penn’s front door, these projects could be seen as
logical outgrowths of Penn’s burgeoning international presence and heightened
emphasis on community-service projects.
They
also are probably just the first steps. As Amin says: “The idea is too
good to stay in one place.”
Bamako, Mali
About
once a day, without warning, the electricity in Bamako goes off, and computers
and Internet connectivity come to a crashing halt. “I thought I was a
patient person,” says Fantuzzo, “but when you’re in the middle of teaching
someone to use a mouse and they’re just getting used to it, and then the
electricity goes off, it’s very frustrating.” But she quickly notes that
Malians deal with that problem on a daily basis, and that some schools
don’t have electricity at all. And while power-outages were just one of
the sobering obstacles the Penn team had to overcome, “enthusiasm for
our program was huge.”
The
original idea for the Bamako2000 project was sparked by Neysan Rassekh
W’99 G’99, whose parents—members of the Baha’i faith—left their successful
business in the United States some 20 years ago in order to “help others
out and serve people” in West Africa. For Neysan, the project was a way
to give something back to Mali, his adopted country. He came up with the
idea of installing the Internet in poor countries while he was majoring
in multinational management and transportation at Wharton and simultaneously
earning a master’s degree in sociology.
Rassekh
conceived the project as a “two-phase thing.” Phase One involved installing
the computers, connecting them to the Internet, and training people to
use it and do research on it.
“We
were targeting teachers and professors, from kindergarten through the
university level, so that they could use the Internet to enhance their
curriculums,” he explains, noting that textbooks usually take 15 to 20
years to make their way to the school systems in poor countries like Mali,
by which time their contents are often dated—and irrelevant to the lives
of Malians.
Phase
Two was to “provide community enhancement” in areas such as health care,
and to help local radio and television stations receive educational content
through the Internet.
Rassekh
turned to Joseph Sun, director of academic affairs at SEAS and a senior
fellow in Community House, who in turn contacted Dr. Sohrab Rabii, professor
of electrical engineering, and Rabii’s wife, economist Susan Hunt. All
were game, and when Rassekh graduated from Penn in May 1999, his parents,
Don and Chahine, met with Rabii and Sun and agreed to have their non-governmental
organization, the Victory Foundation, serve as a partner in the project.
During
an exploratory visit to Mali in January, Rabii struck up a relationship
with the Ecole National d’Ingenieur of Mali, and when the team arrived
in May, they set up a five-station lab capable of accommodating 10 students
at a time. They also set up a computer lab in the building that housed
the Rassekh family’s Jeep-Chrysler dealership and the Victory Foundation’s
classroom, with about 20 PCs and five laptops “all networked together.”
“The
interesting thing about this computer lab is that every aspect of it was
handled by Penn students,” says Rabii. “This includes setting up the hardware,
the software, networking, wireless connection to the Internet and training
the Malians.” Brian Sullivan, now a graduate student in SEAS, was in charge
of coordinating the technology team’s efforts—“our resident technical
genius,” in the words of Susan Hunt.
The
Bamako2000 project appealed to Sullivan because it seemed an “impossible
cultural, logistical and technological challenge,” he writes on the Bamako2000
Web site. “It was an opportunity to have an impact through the technology
I had a passion for, working with people from around the world.”
Each
week, a different group of teachers would come for training, though as
Fantuzzo notes: “One day we would have 30 excited teachers; some days
we would have none. We learned flexibility.” Some were fairly computer-savvy;
others had never used a mouse before. The Penn students taught them the
nuances of Excel, Microsoft Word and other programs.
“Three
languages were spoken: technology, logistics and French,” says Fantuzzo,
who is fluent in French and logistics. “We didn’t have too many people
whose languages overlapped.” In Mali, the digital divide is “exacerbated
a million times,” she notes. “Only a select handful” are computer-literate,
“and they kind of like that.”
“The
first week we spent there, we all learned the hard way about how things
work in the fourth poorest country in the world,” recalls Barry John-Chuan,
a junior electrical-engineering and computer-science major and a native
of the African nation of Mauritius. “The administration at the airport
for the release of the computers, the installation of the antenna for
the wireless connection, the repairs of the different air conditioners,
light bulbs, mosquito nets, doors in our rooms and much more taught us
how patience is a virtue.”
The
Malian people, he notes, “do not understand the concept of ‘time is money,’
and it was a real culture shock for us students and professors from Penn
used to living life in the fast lane to experience.”
They
also had to deal with the phenomenon that came to be known as “Malian
Time,” in which anything scheduled for a given time would not begin until
much later.
For
Rabii, the biggest technical challenge was the “lack of infrastructure
and expertise, particularly in terms of the Internet providers with whom
we had to interact.” While the unreliable electricity was not as much
of a problem as the team had expected, he adds, it “will certainly be
a problem if one wants to expand the program beyond the major cities.”
In
a land where temperatures sometimes reached 120 degrees, and seldom dipped
below 100 during the day, “you kind of lose it sometimes,” acknowledges
Fantuzzo. “Some students fainted. It was definitely taxing.” In addition,
a number of students came down with either malaria or something that mimicked
its symptoms, while others were stricken with parasites of one form or
another. (All have since recovered.) Next year, she says: “We want nursing
students. If nothing else, they’d have the authority to say, ‘Lie down.’”
Most
of the students rolled with the punches, though Susan Hunt notes that
a “loud minority” complained incessantly about the “inconveniences you
would have thought bright Penn students could anticipate in the world’s
fourth poorest country.”
In
Rabii’s opinion, Bamako2000 will have a “lasting effect, in terms of the
hardware we left behind, the training we provided, and the good will we
created. For us, to quote Humphrey Bogart in Casablanca (also in
Africa): ‘This is the beginning of a beautiful friendship.’ We hope to
be back next year.”
Pune, India
There
is a certain Internet logic to the fact that the project to build a technology
center in the Indian city of Pune was carried out under the banner of
Puente, the Spanish word for “bridge.” And, in fact, Puente did
get its start and its name last year by installing a computer lab in the
Escuela Fiscal Zoila Ugarte de Landivar—a public elementary school in
Quito, Ecuador—as well as one at that school’s “sister school” in Philadelphia,
the University City New School. (Another school in North Philadelphia
was scheduled to be wired by the Puente team this summer.)
Among
the students who traveled to Quito last year was Rohan Amin, a native
of India. “While I was in Quito, I spoke to a few friends, and we thought
we wanted to do this again,” he recalls. “We decided that the easiest
country would be India. We’re all Indian; we have family connections;
and we knew it would be easy to find a viable location.”
Actually,
not all were Indian; Stephanie Kirsch, a senior in chemical engineering
who worked on the community-development team, had never set foot in the
sub-continent. She notes that while India is “extremely advanced in the
computer industry, there is a huge disparity between the rich and poor,
and we felt it was the perfect place to try to reach those people who
cannot afford computer training.”
After
returning to Penn last fall, they did some research and settled on the
western Indian city of Pune, which a Puenteletter describes as
“one of India’s fastest growing hubs for community development and education.”
This incarnation of the project was named Pune-Penn Bandhan—bandhan
meaning “tie” or “partnership” in Hindi—and the project will be coordinated
with the Penn-In-India program, now held at the University of Pune.
They
also found a site for their lab, the Oswal Bandhu Samaj Community Center,
and a partner: NIIT, an information training company, which is providing
the services of a staff member in Pune for a year.
“The
idea was to build a technology center that would serve lower-income residents
of Pune, one that would allow them to get high-quality training for almost
one-tenth of the cost” of a normal training center, says Amin. “We’re
able to offer classes for next to nothing, and we can afford to train
people in a lab for cheap.” They’re also offering career counseling and
job-placement training. “One of our strongest beliefs is that we’re all
able to play the role of teacher and learner,” Amin adds.
Though
they did have a team of faculty advisors, the project “was completely
student driven,” notes Amin. “All the leadership, drive, the goals and
the mission comes from students.”
As
in Mali, the cultural divide was often as daunting as the digital one.
“We went into Pune with a Western style of working,” acknowledges Amin.
“They work very differently. It’s very hard for us to apply Western-style
management. We had to adjust to their culture because it’s their place.”
The
future of Puente, he says, involves “expanding the model,” which might
lead to a partnership with another university.
“This
was only one small city in India,” he explains. “The impact is big to
the city itself, but I look forward to expanding the program to make a
bigger impact. The impact can be [measured in] continents, not just countries.”
