Some of you have been following the progress of the Computer Center I am trying to arrange for my village. It’s been a slow, sometimes aggravating process: the equipment is donated, the transportation is donated, and I am not in a position to tell anyone what to do; it’s all about asking. In my former job as an architect, clients told me what to do and I had to do it. I told contractors what to do, and they had to do it… or I got someone else to do it. Likewise, if I slacked off on my work, my clients would go elsewhere. Nothing personal; it’s just how business works. This same sort of thing was frustrating for my dad when he moved from being a colonel in the air force to being a professor.
Here, though, I am at the whim of everyone who is donating time or supplies. It requires a lot of patience, but when things work out, the payoff is fantastic. Last week, our friend Devin arrived in Guatemala towing two pelican cases crammed full of laptops, networking cables, routers, and flat panel monitors. His family graciously donated more than half of it, and they still have other things ready to go when we can work out transportation. Devin agreed to bring the two ominous-looking cases with him to Guatemala, sight unseen, and was forced to repack them IN THE TICKET LINE at Chicago at 2am to get the weight balanced right. Then, when he arrived at Guatemala airport at 7am, the customs guys flagged him immediately.
“What do you have in the boxes?” they asked.
He explained the computer parts, and the customs agents wanted to charge him an import tax. Luckily, Devin speaks Spanish and is a quick thinker. He told them they were for a Peace Crops aid project. “Where’s you letter?” they asked. Of course, he didn’t have one. “In that case, you will have to leave them here in our care until the letter is ready,” they responded. Devin then concocted an elaborate, well-contrived story about how we needed to take them to the mountains right away, and how disappointed his church would be if they were held up at the airport, etc. Eventually the customs agents caved in, sending him on his way with a stern warning and a stamp in his passport that will get him fined double if he brings any other computers into the country in the next six months.
Devin is going to spend about 10 days with us, so you’ll be hearing more about him in a future post. 🙂
We stayed in Antigua two extra days to pick up the monitors I mentioned in the previous post. Once we had all this gear together in the Peace Corps pickup, the driver took me and my toys back to the Peace Corps headquarters. I unloaded it all into a storage room, to await the last four boxes of computers. I’m not out of the woods yet; transportation is the single toughest hurdle for this project, and I am especially grateful to all those that have helped in this regard. I have two more suckers…err… volunteers lined up to help in a similar manner, when they fly to Guatemala in the next few weeks.
Once everything is here, the villagers are going to pool money together to send a microbus on the long journey from my site to Peace Corps HQ. It’s about 2000q, which is a fair chunk of cash for them. But it’s important that they have to pay for part of the project, to better value what they are getting, and so they don’t get used to the idea of getting anything for free. We’ve had a lot of trouble with that in other places. They village has also promised to pay provide a secure location for the computers, pay for electricity, and provide desks and chairs. These are all things within their reach. Once we’re set up, then we can start getting into training, and the real work begins.