Imagine this…you live in a tiny town high in the mountains of Guatemala. The wind whips dense clouds across your path as you walk the dirt road to school every morning, obscuring your vision and soaking through your sweater. Your town is so far removed from the rest of the country that the town leaders have found only one brave soul to teach at your school of 100 students. In an attempt to make up for this, the government provides educational content in the form of DVDs and VHS tapes that you watch on an old television set. School is largely an exercise in sitting still and willing yourself to pay attention to a droning screen.
In towns like Chitay Las Rosas, Quetzaltenango, this is reality. But in Chitay the situation is even worse: none of the government’s promised learning materials have arrived, so they’ve been struggling to get by with an outrageous teacher-to-student ratio and no additional resources.
Until now, that is!
Thanks to the innovation of our Computer Program staff, we will now be able to reach extremely remote schools like Chitay Las Rosas by offering a new type of computer center: mobile laptop carts.
Previously, in order for a community to bring a CoEd computer center to their school, that community had to build or renovate a classroom where desktop computers could be installed and kept dry and secure. This requires the local community to take ownership of the computer center at their school and greatly improves the success of the program. But extremely remote and under-resourced schools like Chitay are often unable to provide a physical space for a computer center, so our staff came up with the new mobile laptop model to help them out.
students in a traditional, bricks-and-mortar CoEd computer center
Just imagine it. Bringing laptops to Chitay is like…bringing laptops to a frontier school during pioneer days: absolutely mind-bending and life-altering for the students who will use them.
So congratulations, CoEd supporters. You are bending minds and altering lives by providing access to technology in unheard of places—like tiny towns high in the mountains where the wind whips dense clouds across your path. The clouds are clearing, thanks to you.
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