Volunteer Stories - Sean
 |
|
I knew that I was going to spend some time in the area helping the different communities, but wasn't exactly sure how I was going to use my computer skills in the forests of Guyana. Alice Taylor brought that thought to a reality within 30 minutes of meeting her. * * * * * |
My vacation started as an eco-tour through Foster Parrots to visit some of the villages in Guyana, until I stayed at Caiman House in Yupukari, and then it materialized into a working vacation. After touring the schools and seeing what the people of Yupukari have done and learned through the help of Alice and her family, I knew I was in the right place. I was asked to stay and help with many computer projects in the Rupununi region, but only had time on this visit to stay in Yupukari.
Young village children flocked into and around her house to use the laptop computers with satellite Internet, and it scared me to think that they have all of this nature surrounding them, yet they are all Internet junkies like me and my friends back in the United States. To my surprise, these kids were on educational software and racing each other with typing tutors and sharing educational web sites with each other.
This was what I was looking for, as my job back home is a Technology Coordinator at a Regional High School, and my toughest challenge is keeping teenagers off the junk of the internet and wasting time. Young eager minds willing to see both sides of the world. After telling Alice that I was a computer technician, she immediately made arrangements for me to extend my vacation for a week and to put me up as long as I fixed up all of her computers. This was a task that I gladly accepted.
During the week, I cleaned the smallest amount of spyware I have ever seen on a group of computers, mostly because casual browsing is not as normal as learning around here. My days at Caiman House were spent taking apart old computers and cleaning the internals as the village children, and some adults, watched with amazement that someone was taking apart the computer, and knew what they were doing. The children were very interested in what the insides of a computer looked like, why I smelled electronically fried equipment, and rolled over laughing when I would get a shock from a bad wire. We talked about life in each of our respective hemispheres, and learned about each other and technology at the same time.
I made a lot of friends in the village of Yupukari, and most of them were not adults. These kids are sponges and want to learn anything that you can teach them, especially technology. Comparisons of Boston, Massachusetts with Yupukari and Lethem were hot topic with the 20-somethings. They wanted to know what happened to all my forests, and looked startled when we compared how the Boston Common compared in size to anything in Guyana.
Some of the men that were working on the new 2-floor guest house would come up to me and point their son out in the sea of workers either pounding nails, carrying palm fronds, planing wood that was freshly carved out, or running electrical wires and tell me that they wanted me to train them in what I do.
I learned that although the Amerindian people live in the remotest part of the world that I have traveled to, they yearn for technology and connection to the rest of the world. They don't want to break down their culture and be gadget carrying workers, they want to show their culture to the rest of the world and promote the great conservation efforts and the pristine nature that they have in their country, and they know technology is the vehicle that will drive that message. I will always feel at home in the Rupununi and especially in Yupukari thanks to the extremely kind efforts of Caiman House. Thank you.
Sean Seely
sseely@gmail.com
Data, Information, and Technology Director
Blue Hills Regional Technical High School
Canton, MA USA