Technology at Maranyundo: Raspberry Pi and Rachel

Raspberry Pi with a RACHEL SD card plugged into a battery

Big changes are coming to Maranyundo!  This little device called the Raspberry Pi has been making waves all over the tech community for the last few years.  It is a credit card sized computer that only costs $35!  All you need is a monitor and keyboard and you are set to go. Maranyundo’s use won’t even require electricity or internet.  It was specifically designed by a nonprofit to be used in the education sector to teach students coding.

Soon enough techies in thedeveloping world started swooping in and making it work for their unique problems.  One such project is called RACHEL standing for Remote Areas Community Hotspots for Education and Learning.  This is a digital library sent through a network to any computer that tries to access the pi.  Here is an online version. It includes resources licensed under creative commons including textbooks developed by the state of California, Khan Academy videos and interactive exercises, much of Wikipedia, .books from Project Gutenburg and much more!

Maranyundo describes itself as a School of Excellence and part of this high standard is to use technology in teaching for the benefit of students.  This is not always so easy because of the unreliable internet and electricity.  But RACHEL-Pi requires no electricity, as it is battery powered (you can still use it on a battery powered laptop, which every teacher has) and supplies its own wireless network that computers connect to as if it were wifi. The Maranyundo Initiative Board visited the school last week and they brought the RACHEL-Pi donated by the Paraclete in Boston through Sister Ann who helped found the school.  She has established an organization called the PiBrary Collective to start distributing this technology throughout Rwanda at schools and health centers.  Lucky for us, Maranyundo was chosen as a test site for the pilot phase of the program!

Marcella presenting about the new technology

There was staff training a few days later.  Marcella and I expected only teachers to come, but Sister Juvenal was so supportive of the technology that she implored even the librarian and secretary to attend. It couldn’t have gone better.  The teachers all brought their computers to follow along with the demonstration.  They were very excited about the information they found and already planning how to use it.  They seemed most interested in the videos and exercises, but I think they will also find the general information bank helpful when the internet is not working.

Assisting staff with specific problems

I also have to point out that even with almost 20 computers connected to the network, the Pi was still faster than the usual internet!  It was really amazing.  

Exploring RACHEL independently!

 If any tech savvy people interested in Maranyundo have any suggestions on how to expand the available content on RACHEL or how to use the Raspberry pi or simply how to better incorporate technology at Maranyundo, I would love to speak with you!  Just use the contact form in the upper right corner of the page.

-Kristin

Brave Mandy

The senior twos are done with their stories that I had shared illustrations from a few weeks ago.  One of the students generously agreed to share her story:

BRAVE MANDY

Once upon a time, there lived a girl called Mandy. She lived in a very beautiful and magical village called Madrilia. Everyone in that village had a name that started with "M" like Marina, Marimar, and Mary. The village had plenty of fruits such as mangoes and melons. This village was a very colourful place. It was purple, pink, and green, yellow, red.

Mandy was the most beautiful girl in the whole village and she was the fastest runner in the village. Every morning, after she had made her bed, swept the floor, and prepared breakfast for her mother and herself, she would go out to the garden. Mandy would sing, dance, and watch the busy bees make honey.  Then she would return home for lunch.

One day, an ugly wizard from an ugly village came to Madrilia. When he arrived, he was amazed by the beautiful land and said, “Wow! This is even more beautiful than I was told. I must steal all these colours and take them to my village." The ugly wizard had an ugly and wicked idea so he went to his home village to get a sleeping potion and a magical net.

The next day, the wizard came back to Madrilia. That night, there was supposed to be a big party with plenty of food so when nobody was watching, the wizard put the sleeping potion in their food.

When it was time to eat, Mandy's mother asked Mandy, "Why are not eating?"

Mandy replied, "Because I ate a lot before the party.” Meanwhile, all the people had eaten the food and had fallen asleep. Even in the morning no one was awake except Mandy, who had not eaten the food.

As usual she woke up and went to the garden but there were no bees around to play or dance with because they had all fallen into a deep sleep. As she sat in the colourful garden, she did not see the ugly wizard.

The ugly wizard came with his magical net and said the magical words, “ALL COLOURS, COME TO ME!" and all the colours flew into his magical net but Mandy also flew in with the colours. She screamed but no one heard her; even the wizard did not hear her. The wizard reached his village and opened the magical net full of colours and ran around the village three times. His ugly village, full of witches and wizards, was now as beautiful as Madrilia had been. Mandy fell out of the net and hid in a tree.

When everyone woke up, they found that Madrilia had become an ugly village with no colours at all. All the people and bees went out to search for Mandy but could not find her.

Then the queen bee said, "Go and search every place you know until you find Mandy.” At last the bees found Mandy sitting in a tree alone.

One bee asked, "Mandy, why are you here and why is Madrilia colourless?”

Then Mandy said, “An ugly wizard stole our colours.”

Another bee asked, "Why don't you get the colours back?"

"But when?” asked Mandy.

“At night when everyone is asleep,” said the first bee. So at night, when everyone was asleep, Mandy went to the ugly wizard's hut and stole the magical net.

She went outside and whispered the magical words, “ALL COLOURS, COME TO ME!" and all the colours flew into the magical net. Mandy ran as fast as she had ever run, back to her village. She ran around her village three times and it became just as beautiful and colourful as before. Everyone sang, danced and was proud of Mandy. They said that they should have a party in Mandy's honor for saving the village.

And yes, Mandy, a small child, had saved her whole village.

-By Raina, senior two 2014

Maranyundo Students sing together

A few weeks ago, some students were spending their Friday evening singing to prepare for a religious service they would be attending and performing at the next day. Listen in!

In Memorium- Twenty years after the genocide

The Maranyundo Senior Three students took part in a memorial ceremony to commemorate the genocide that was specially formatted for children.  Schools from all over Nyamata attended to learn more about the events surrounding this dark part of the Rwanda’s history.  Because the genocide occurred in 1994, no current students were alive at the time and the government has taken it upon itself to educate the upcoming generation.

It started with a walk in remembrance, with Maranyundo students wearing somber grey shirts.

Then all the students sat down and listened to an expert tell the story of their heritage with a child friendly approach.

That was followed by open questions.  The questions reflected the innocence of children who cannot quite correlate the horrific events with their own experiences of home.

“How could the killers tell Hutus and Tutsis apart? [they are extremely similar and it is not always possible to visually differentiate them]” 

“Were the foreigners at fault also put into prison?”

“How do we know this won’t happen again?”

“If you say there is no difference between Hutus and Tutsis and we are all the same, then why do you talk about it during this ceremony?”

“Did Hutus also die?”

“Why do Hutus and Tutsis look different?”

The questions were answered by a few different experts.

Following that, there were performances by a few different schools and the ceremony ended with a composition presented by Maranyundo.

Laundry

I would like to start out by saying that Rwandans are obsessive about keeping things clean.  For example, people always take their shoes off when going on any rug in a person’s home.  Every weekend we spend cleaning the concrete floors by pouring buckets of soapy water onto them.  

Rwandans care very much about the cleanliness of their shoes

Westerners have the stereotype of not caring very much about their appearance and I definitely contribute to that.  I’m pretty sure they wonder what my mother did wrong to let me become so unconcerned with my appearance.  I tend to think something is clean if there is no visible dirt and it smells nice.  Although, you can often see the dust on my shoes; a Rwandan would never let that happen.   For the first time in my life, I’ve tried to care but it is difficult when my day is filled with chalkboards and dirt roads.

So my Rwandan roommate took pretty seriously the job of teaching me laundry.  And I’m pretty sure she found me a disappointing, unmotivated student.  There are no washing machines here so all of the laundry takes place in this little area next to the house.

1   Fill a little bucket up with water (I’m fortunate enough to have running water, not all are so lucky and must fetch it from the nearest source).

2 Then I pour the little bucket of water into a bigger one with soap until the big bucket is full. There are two types of soap.  Powder soap is mixed with the water to create all the visible sudsing.    

 3 In the bucket you can see the bar soap that is scrubbed into clothes for an extra onslaught against the dirt. This soap is extremely effective at removing all dirt and oil, including that in the outer layer of my skin.  It is so effective that the water tends to turn the color of my clothes, especially with jeans, so I know it's effective enough to fade them.  I tend to wash one time only and then move to the rinsing step, but once while laundering in the presence of Rwandans, they took over and proceeded to repeat the cycle another two times.  Not kidding

4 Once everything has been cleaned to the washer’s satisfaction, the smaller bucket is again filled and used to rinse the clothes before they are put into the line. 

5 I am a big fan of using clotheslines, but there are a few drawbacks.  The line is made of wire, rather than rope.  Metal +water=rust.  So only parts of the first few lines are usable.  I still haven’t been able to figure out why we use wire.  Another drawback of no dryers is that clothes can get pretty stretched out.  And in a wet climate, it often rains before clothes are completely dry.

As inconvenient as this may seem, I can’t find a reason to complain and I never dread doing laundry.  It gives me time to completely focus on something so simple, yet satisfying.

Story Illustrations

There is a competition in Rwanda for secondary level students to write a children’s story in English to be used in Rwandan primary schools, since the government has an initiative to turn around the lack of reading culture.  I enjoyed reading their first drafts with stories involving everything from school bullying to evil stepmothers to magic.  The Senior Two students had an assignment to create a story for this competition and some of them went above and beyond for their first draft with illustrations!  See the drawings below, courtesy of the lovely Senior Two B class.

The time came and the wedding happened

After a long time, King David died and Losslot became a strong kind. He still had his wife Ashley. He was kind and his people loved him and the kingdom became very strong.

Map

He reached a place with rocks on each side. He tied his horse to a tree and went to the gate in the rock…

In that kingdom, there lived people who were so funny because of how they were created. Some has a cone-like head, others had big noses, etc. But they were all short.

After ten years, King Peter came back to see Princess Ashley so that she could be his wife. He sent soldiers to come and take her. They came as normal citizens an checked where she was. They kidnapped her from the garden where she was, to take to the king…

This is a story about a boy called Sano but his friends and family called him “Gatwe.” He had a dog called “Toto.” Gatwe was stubborn in his childhood. Once his father found him in the cow’s house where he was trying to jump over a cow.

Victory for Maranyundo!

Basketball is HUGE in Rwanda.  It is undoubtedly the most popular sport among the girls at Maranyundo. Every evening after classes end at 4:30 the students get free time until 6:00 for sport and most of them head to the basketball court.  

Ready to play!

I think it would be extremely challenging to dribble on this court, but the girls didn’t mention it

Coach

There is a three week holiday every April and the week before the break begins the students are done with exams and have little academic work left to do for the rest of the term.  Rwanda has such a young population that the government dictates staggered start and end dates for schools in each province so the all traffic is not at a gridlock as students travel to and from school.  

Because the students had few obligations, the secretary of Maranyundo (and my roommate) called up a friend from Fawe Girls School just outside the capital and arranged for a friendly basketball game between the two schools.  The school has a team but there is no formal season or schedule, with all games being coordinated through informal contact such as this. So the last Tuesday of the term, our team was excitedly heading to Fawe Girls School to play the game.

  

Victory for Maranyundo!  The final score was 13-12.  The girls from both schools knew each other and were very excited to see their friends. After the game they got about an hour to socialize and the coaches from both schools agreed the next game would be at Maranyundo.

Back at Maranyundo

 On our way back to school we stopped at a little shop for some food and the girls tumbled out to buy cookies and chocolate to their heart’s content. Sweets are a very special treat in Rwanda and they were ecstatic.

Very happy winners!