Johanna Hanink, University of Michigan at Ann Harbor

“A World Links Story”

A principal at a senior secondary school in The Gambia told the regional coordinator for World Links in West Africa that before he knew what it was about, he and his colleagues had joked that World Links was a program which commuted unwanted hardware from the United States and dumped it into the laps of unwitting African schools.

I have been to these World Links schools. I have met the teachers, I have interviewed their students. I have also seen the pain of Oumar Cherif Diop, the World Links West Africa coordinator, in retelling the words of that principal in The Gambia. The words which that principal once spoke could not be more misinformed, could not be more misguided, and could not be further from the truth – I know, because I have seen it. I am an American college student who had never traveled overseas outside of Western Europe before I spent a summer in Senegal and The Gambia, collecting the impressions and feelings and friendships that tell the true World Links story. The World Links story is a story of an organization, but is more the story of the teachers and the students so unspeakably moved and deeply affected by what that organization has brought to them and, more importantly, has helped them bring to themselves.

There is no way for me to tell this story without placing myself in it. This is not a story which can be recounted as the amalgamation of chronological events or statistics, or as an impersonal grouping of anecdotes arranged and tacked between a mechanical and academic introduction and conclusion. The World Links story is a story inseparable from emotion – the kind of visceral emotion that you feel in your stomach or which changes the temperature of your blood – and the story of people. The story of World Links is an intensely personal story that I want to, have to, share, both to make sense of what I have seen for myself, and to fulfill an intense desire to tell other people, people who are like the person I was before I came to Africa for the summer, what is happening in classrooms in Kaolack and Dakar, in Saint Louis, Senegal and Farafenni, The Gambia.

Farafenni, The Gambia, is a town near the country’s northern border with Senegal. In mid May, during the first workshop that World Links gave at the school, the temperature reached 115 degrees Fahrenheit during the day. At that time the town had been without city power for a month, and as we would walk through the market area at nighttime, the stands would be eerily illuminated by the soft glow of candles and hurricane lamps. Occasionally a group of five to ten people would be crowded around a 12” black and white television run on a humming generator, watching reruns of long cancelled American sitcoms.

Farafenni Senior Secondary School, where the teacher training took place, is typical of many of the schools in this area in that it looks like it hasn’t quite decided if it wants to be inside or outside. The classrooms are arranged into groups of longer buildings, but the entrance to every classroom is from the outside and the windows into these classrooms are without glass or screens. The computer lab is in the building which also houses the principal’s office, and itself is a small room with twelve running computers, eight of which are now networked and have internet access.

Elizabeth Okey, the teacher responsible for the workshop, had been to a World Links teacher training session in Banjul and afterward decided that she wanted to hold one in her own school in order to train every teacher in basic computer skills. Miss Okey is truly what World Links calls a “champion” teacher. She is innovative, she is motivated and she is dedicated. She is also as tireless and generous as she is committed to her lab and the students and teachers that she hopes will use it. And, in the Senegambian tradition, she will not rest until she has made sure that everyone’s stomach is full.

 So it was after breakfast that the workshop began at ten o’clock on a Friday morning, and I wasn’t sure how the computer lab was going to hold all of the teachers that were spilling into it. They sat, mostly three to a computer, and buzzed with an enthusiasm that was almost tangible. Many of the teachers had never touched a computer before. “I had always been afraid that I would break it if I touched it,” an English teacher told me that afternoon. “This is incredible.” The workshop began with an introduction to Windows: the toolbar, the desktop, the icons. I went into that workshop knowing that some people had never used a computer before. What I didn’t know was that this would mean showing a 40 year old math teacher or a 60 year old teacher of Islamic studies how to double click. I remember the Islamic studies teacher’s hand shaking with nerves as I showed him how to move the arrow to an icon and open the icon by pressing the left button of the mouse twice: “No, you have to do it more quickly than that…no, still faster…oops, don’t move the mouse while you’re clicking…voila!” And he beamed.

Friday morning began two days of intense work in Microsoft and Excel, but I knew what was helping to keep everyone so enthusiastic. Saturday afternoon, Kevin, a Peace Corps education volunteer, gave a presentation about the internet. The packed classroom sat rapt as he explained the ins and outs of satellites and internet service providers, URLs and search engines. That afternoon I had the chance to see more than twenty teachers, most of them middle aged or older, surf the internet for the first time. Never before has technology, an ordinary technology that I and so many other people take so much for granted, been paired with so much excitement and passion, with those kinds of whispered exclamations and nervous laughs. And it was all brought on by the simple navigation of the website, which they had accomplished by opening the internet icon with their own double click, and typing words into a search engine with their own hands. 

I am tongue tied by my own aporeia as to how to describe the radiance of the teacher’s faces as they shook the World links’ Regional Coordinator’s hand in the shade of a tree outside the school on Saturday evening, and as he presented them with pieces of paper certifying that they had completed the training. During this closing ceremony, the principal spoke. “Before, I used to be suspicious when Mrs. Okey would knock on my door and bother me about the computer lab. Now I think that it is I who will be bothering her. My door is now always open to all of you.” Later, an English teacher who had been so thrilled at the poetry she now had access to using the internet, rose to give a vote of thanks. “Before this workshop, we were like tabula rasa – blank slates. Now we have begun to fill ourselves with new knowledge. Thank you.”

Stories like this are not just happening at Farafenni Senior Secondary school, they are happening in every World Links school that I visited. In all of these schools, computers and the knowledge that they represent mean a thousand times more than they do in any school which I have seen in the United States. “Via the internet we can be geniuses,” a girl from Kaolack told me.

Every computer lab is named after someone: the names Sam Carlson, executive director of World Links,  Cheikh Kante, World Links’ Director of business development, Cheikh Tidiane Gadio, the Senegalese minister of foreign affairs and former World Links regional coordinator,  Oumar Cherif Diop, West Africa regional coordinator for World Links, and Samba Guisse, the Senegalese country coordinator for World Links, all are inscribed on a plaque over the door to some computer lab in Senegal. Perhaps it is in these plaques that the real difference is most evident: every computer lab is named, every name is given with a ceremony.

On July 6 the computer lab at the secondary school in Bambey was named in honor of Cherif Diop. The Senegalese news station showed up to tape the ceremony. It is that important.

In Senegal I traveled to twelve schools in six days, interviewing students and teachers about what World Links and computer training has done for them. I asked the same questions over and over in my broken and frustrating French. Depuis quand vous utiliser l’Internet? Avez vous une addresse d’e-mail? Pourquoi vous aimez utiliser l’ordinateurs et l’Internet? From every group of students I got nearly the same answer: they’d been using the internet for one or two years and had had email addresses for as long as that, they liked to use the computers because it gave them opportunities to communicate with people around the world, prepared them to be competitive in the job market, and allowed them to access all sort of new information. After I had visited a few schools I came to realize that what wasn’t so important was the questions that I was asking or the answers that I was getting. I learned to pay attention to what was happening on in the periphery, to watch out of the corner of my eye what was going on in the computer lab while I was interviewing a student or a teacher and to listen more carefully to what those students and teachers said in casual conversation after the interview was over.

At L’École Mariama Ba, a World Links school on Gorèe Island in Senegal, a teacher showed me how he had created a website to help his students prepare for the Senegalese national exams. He explained that it is not only students at Mariama Ba that can benefit from this website, but students from all over Senegal who can study for the exams using the resources it provides.

At Lycee Thierno Saidou Nourou Tall School in Dakar, the principal, Idrissa Dieng, showed me “Principés de la Vie,” a publication that had been produced through digital collaboration between schools throughout the world, and was a compilation of students’ writing on the “Laws of life,” – their beliefs about love and morality, duty and friendship. At Martin Luther King, a technical middle school also in Dakar, I watched three twelve year old girls eagerly huddled around a computer, using the internet to find information about the Lions, the Senegalese soccer team which made it to the quarterfinals in this year’s World Cup and in doing so brought together the entire nation. They giggled and whispered and pointed at pictures of El-Hadj Diouf, the hands-down national heartthrob of the moment.

At Kaolack, a boy explained to me how by using the internet, he was able to find an international poetry competition that he would have otherwise never heard of. His poem wound up taking first place.  At Bambey, Ousmane Diouf, one of the members of the World Links Elite Corps transform the 486’s into powerful school management and teaching tools.

It is World Links computers and training that made these situations possible. On Gorèe Island it enabled a teacher to connect with his own students and to reach out to students throughout the country. At Lycee Thierno Saidou Nourou Tall in Dakar, World Links connected Senegalese students with students from North and South America, the Middle East, Europe and Asia. At Martin Luther King, World Links connected three very excited little girls with their national culture. In Kaolack, World Links connected a boy with himself through his own poetry. Because he won that competition on the internet, he has been inspired to continue his work.

It is the World Links “humanware” which makes helps to make it possible for the World Links hardware to go so far.  Oumar Cherif Diop and Samba Guisse collaborated with Cheikh Anta Diop University of Dakar to bring a delegation of thirty-five Senegalese students to the University of the Gambia for a weekend of academic workshops, cultural exchange and dialogue. The people behind World Links are so much more than pairs of hands used to give computers. They are a group of people committed to embracing and fulfilling the mission that World Links has to create a global network of a new generation of scholars. They are committed to overcoming the most challenging of constraints and to using information technology as a vehicle to achieve the goals of understanding, learning and friendship, to building a generation without bounds, rather than to seeing the technological knowledge they provide as an end in itself.

The Senegalese students came to The Gambia on the Friday that Senegal played its historic match and won its historic victory over France in the World Cup. The students missed the game because they were on the bus. When they arrived, not one person harbored any resentment – only limitless joy at what Senegal had achieved. The program which they were beginning that weekend meant that much to them that it was worth missing the most important soccer game that Senegal had ever seen, possibly one of the greatest national events ever.

After days full of lectures at the university and tie-dying workshops in Bakau, we spent the nights together talking. Saturday night after dinner we had a conversation about gender and culture which students from the University of The Gambia joined. The conversation was intense (the material we addressed demanded controversy), but after an hour and a half of disagreeing, we sat in a circle and listened to one of the Senegalese students play the kore as others read and recited poetry, and then we joined him in singing a song whose chorus repeats, “We are all the same, we are all the same.” The night was absolutely surreal; the friendships forged that weekend will last forever – and it was World Links which set the

Nights like the night I spent with the Senegalese students are the real story of World Links. World Links is not about how many computers a school has and out of those how many are connected to the internet. World Links is about using technology, and making use of whatever resources are available to overcome all challenges and shatter the obstacles that may hold people apart from each other. World Links on paper is about collaboration and training and innovation and development, but in practice is also about love, respect, understanding and the human relationships that should exceed any idealist’s dreams of the doors that technology can open.