It’s been an interesting couple of weeks. I’ve been spinning my wheels a bit at the cafe between fixing the odd laptop (the ones that stump Fred) recovering deleted photos from tourists’ cameras and tweaking out our “fastest in Jinja” Internet. I’m finding a few niches that can be filled to make some money and serve the community here, which right now is mostly missionaries in need.

But a path has formed and the more time I spend on it, the more I’m feeling an urgency and a drive and a certain wind in my sails that tells me there’s a goal I’m meant to pursue. The topic is education.

In our center we teach computer skills. It’s relevant and of course we’ll keep doing it. But there’s more to education than just computer training, and my eyes were opened by Kyle and Simon who I met at our first Jinja Linux User Group meeting. Kyle had his phone, and he launched his phone’s web server, and served this thing called RACHEL. I was stunned at how much content was on his phone. There was an offline copy of Wikipedia, a huge collection of books from Project Gutenberg, Medical books like “Where there is no doctor”, courses from MIT, John’s Hopkins and more. But the most amazing part of this thing was this stuff from “Khan Academy“. I had never heard of Khan or his academy, but I was most impressed with the chalkboard talks that succinctly and almost casually walked through hundreds of topics from basic addition to chemistry to calculus and physics and much more.

The seed was planted and over the next weeks I found myself thinking about RACHEL (the server, not the girl) and how easy it could be to push this out to remote villages all over the country. It would provide a relatively easy way to provide education to places where it had previously been logistically difficult.

Then I met Daniel Stern who worked with Simon and Kyle and had come up with a solution to push RACHEL to the outer reaches using an Edubuntu-based server and thin clients. He even had a cool truck that he could drive out to the villages and do classes in even the most remote areas.

It was cool, but in my mind, it was possible to do a whole lot with a minimal amount of equipment. Daniel was toying with old smartphones as wireless clients (instead of laptops) and had branded this thing called mEducation (mobile education) that in theory could put a solar-powered classroom in a suitcase. I told him about Aleutia which he hadn’t heard of, and suddenly, the vision really started coming together. I urged him to throw me needs and challenges that the community of HFC could help with.

And just like that, I felt crazy about something I hadn’t previously thought of. A solar-powered classroom with a huge virtual library that could fit in a suitcase and cost as little as possible.

I can’t articulate why I’m so crazy about the idea, but I simply am. There are challenges, like security of the devices and whether or not we can educate teachers to keep students on a learning track and how we would do maintenance, but I’m not daunted by those challenges.

If anyone is interested in batting this around, please check this forum link.

We need to throw wireless long distances. We need tiny, durable, low-cost servers. We need to drop power consumption on everything. We need old smart phones. We need more content for the server. We need a lot. Join us.

Thanks!!!

Johnny

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