On Friday we had an early breakfast at the hotel restaurant and took a truck/cab to the small nearby village, Saucitlán de Morelos, to check out their lab. It was a bumpy off-road excursion down a winding mountain road. I was sitting up front in the truck – I imagine it was bumpier in the back for Thomas, Javier, and Gabriel!
We visited our first school, 18 de Marzo, on Wednesday. When we arrived the students were watching a movie on a projector! The teacher quickly rushed the kids out to the school yard to let us start working and to tell us about the current state of the lab.
This post will be in English! Read about the beginning of my adventure here and here.
As I mentioned in the last post, Kids On Computers bought 22 new desktop computers, monitors, keyboards/mice, plus 2 projectors through our local volunteer, Hermes. The dealer doesn’t deliver to the village we’ll be working out of, so we had to figure out a way to transport them from Oaxaca to Huajuapan!
The original plan was for 5 volunteers to jump in a combi with computers on our laps. This plan didn’t make a lot of sense to me, especially since we might need to rent seats for the computers. We finally settled on a better plan and Hermes’ company rented an entire combi/van to transport the computers and the volunteers.
Si se lo perdiste, escribí un blog de mi viaje a Oaxaca y mi primero día en la cuidad.
En lunes, desayunamos con Hermes y otro programador que trabaja con él. Entonces exploré algunos sitios en Alcala, una pasarela pedestre desde el zócalo (un parque en el centro de la cuidad es como las plazas de armas en Suramérica) a la iglesia. Hay muchos tiendas, museos, gallerías, etc.
Visité el Museo de Arte Contemporáneo y disfruté la exposición de Sonoplastia. Fue un poco extraño mezcla entre sonidos y arte, pero me gustó muchas exposiciones. Tengo un video aquí.
Estoy siendo voluntario durante 3 semanas con Kids On Computers (KOC), una organización sin fines de lucro de los Estados Unidos, que instalan laboratorios de computadoras en todo el mundo.
Quería tomar un momentito para pensar en que quiero hacer con mi carrera y el mejor camino para hacer esto es conectar con mis valores más fuertes. Es muy importante para mi cerrar la brecha digital en los Estados Unidos así como el resto del mundo. Esta oportunidad es perfecta para practicar eso.
If you’re in town a bit early for Strange Loop, join us tomorrow for a relaxed photo tour downtown.
Here’s my general plan:
Twitter will be the best way to track our progress if you wanted to join on the fly.
I’ll be attending Android Dev Con and the Grace Hopper Conference this year and taking these 5 conference survival items with me (click on the pics for more info):
Packing light is not a foreign concept to us – we’ve been dabbling in backpacking for years. However, most of that travel was only for weekend trips – nothing on the scale of our honeymoon!
We went through several iterations on the final list. We were concerned both that we wouldn’t bring enough and that we were brining too much. So far we’ve been happy what we brought – very little hasn’t been used yet (sewing kit, umbrellas, whistle, pack towels, squishy bowls) and I don’t feel that I’m missing out (… well a corkscrew and a European phone would be nice).
Check out the video and our final packing list, which was based heavily on Rick Steve’s list.