huntermurray.com

The Legacy of Dashed Hopes

I have only this week come to realise something that has been staring me in the face since we arrived in the Gambia last September. A Head Teacher from a local Lower Basic School brought me a good looking Lenovo laptop. He was very proud of it and had invested in a voltage regulator to make sure it did not fry when the frequent surges for which Basse is renowned hit. The voltage regulator itself cost him almost half a month’s wages so it was a big investment. The problem however was the laptop. Thirty seconds after turning it on it turned itself off. It has to be a hardware fault because this happens from the windows desktop, in the bios, in safe mode, at the logon screen and in dos. It does not stay on long enough to do any fault finding, it needs to be sent back to the manufacturers to find out why this problem occurs. For the Head Teacher this would be prohibitively expensive and consequently the joy of receiving the laptop has died, the investment in the voltage regulator now a white elephant was wasted.
As I told the Head this bad news he declared, “But it came from a church.” which indeed it had. Brockhole Church sent this from the UK to him in the Gambia as do dozens of other schools, churches and charities. They send computers which have past their sell by date, computers that no longer work, computers with windows 3.1, W98 and even PCs with no operating systems to the Gambia believing, I guess, that they are doing these schools and people a favour, after all it is not cheap costs to send anything abroad.
What they forget however is that half of the schools they send computers to have no electricity, none have trained technicians and none can afford to purchase operating systems. Consequently hundreds of now useless computers sit in corners of Gambian classrooms collecting dust as an eternal reminder to Gambian teachers that my friends in Europe sent me computers that don’t work. Meanwhile the schools the churches and the charities back home pat themselves on the back thinking they have done an African school some good.
Whilst hope springs eternal and the very sight of someone who appears computer literate raises the possibility that maybe the school can now get these computers working in most cases it requires a miracle and consequently resentment grows where hope had once been planted.
I urge Churches, Schools and even Charities never to send anything to the Gambia or Africa unless it works and you know it has no faults. I would also be interested to find a group of IT techies willing to give up holiday time to visit places like the Gambia with CDs full of drivers, hard drives, graphics cards, keyboards, ram, operating systems, antivirus etc so that somebody might finally be able to get some of these computers working and replace frustration and disappointment with appreciation and joy.