Visiting Bondo, Kenya with UNESCO and Minister
I was in Kenya last week, visiting Bondo's new UNESCO Community Multimedia Center (CMC) with UNESCO ICT advisor for East Africa. At the beginning of last week, when we visited Nairobi office, Hezekiel, advisor, told us that Minister of Foreign Affairs, Rafael Tuju, will also be with us. Minister?! Well, he was born in Bondo, and he runs many different community programs there. Bondo is located near Kisumu, where it is very close to border of Uganda, and Lake Victoria is there. This Western Kenya is known also as the area severly infected by HIV. In fact, one of schools we visited, when Minister asked a class of students how many of them are orphans, about 1/3 of class raised hands. From such situations, many widows who don't have hands to build hats to live, some lives are deteriorating. In such area, UNESCO built new CMC.
Our friend from MIT who is a Kenyan actually was born in Kisumu. He got scholorship to go to school in Nairobi, then to MIT. He is now back in Kenya started his own IT venture. With ICT, it is possible to touch many lives, and for those who are willing enought to take time to find resources, there are resources if they can access to Internet. Also to be able to have connections beyond your small community, and finding out that there are many other people out there, who commnets on your creations with pictograms in Pangaea, imagine how amazing this experiences are for them. Google Earth shows locations of children who send you messages live on the other side of earth.
Pangaea is challenging to create Universal Playground. It is a place for children to meet, communicate, and get to know each other through their creations of drawing, animations, cartoons, photos, music....
We also run an activity in Nairobi last Friday. Jane put a notice to Radio for participants, and there were many who wanted to participated contacted, and we only were able to take 15 new participants and asked 20 more to wait for another opportunity. But children from different schools came and enjoyed to start program by drawing their own house and room on PangaeaNet. I look forward to visit Nairobi again in 4 months. At that time, we will start Bondo activity.
Posted by: yumi | 8. General
