The Joy of Sharing Knowledge

For three Saturdays now I’ve been going to a place called Paradise Heights. At first glance you couldn’t think of anything paradisaical about the place. Built at the foot of the infamous Smokey Mountain, Paradise Heights looks like nothing but a series of unfinished buildings rising above mountains of trash.

That's me showing a workshop participant how to use the mouse by playing a GCompris game.

Gawad Kalinga volunteers have not only built homes for the poor in Paradise Heights, they have also organized the community for a series of trainings. One of these trainings is a computer literacy program for adult women. I volunteered to be one of the facilitators of the said program.

The age range of the 17 computer workshop participants is from 23 to 55. Their organizer told me that most of them are former garbage scavengers. On the first day of the workshop, the participants made it clear to me that they’ve never held a mouse nor a keyboard before. So we spent the first Saturday playing GCompris – a collection of free and opensource games engineered to teach users how to utilize the mouse and keyboard.

As expected, they found it hard to keep the mouse pointer steady and hit the mark. But four hours of practice, patience and perseverance paid. I was happy to see them making double right-clicks at the end of our first session. So that they wouldn’t forget the assigned keys for each finger, the participants traced their hands on paper and wrote the corresponding keys on top of each illustrated finger.

A workshop participant practicing her newly-acquired skill. Take note of the drawing as her guide. Click the image for bigger size.

During my second session with them I taught them how to use OpenOffice.org Writer, a free and opensource word processor. I started by explaining to them the basics of word processing and then asked them to type “The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.” After four hours they were able to encode paragraphs and effect basic formatting such as bold, italics and underline all by themselves.

In response to popular request, I taught them how to navigate the world wide web during our third session. Something as everyday as websites for people reading this blog appears so out-of-this-world to the Paradise Heights women. I made an effort to slowly explain to them how to visit websites, how to search for virtually anything using google and yahoo, how to play educational games, and how to watch videos and listen to music online. I also taught them how to open an email account and send/reply/forward electronic messages. By now, almost each participant has an email account.

The participants helping each other to create their very first email accounts. Notice the smile and the excitement on their faces. Click the image for bigger size.

You can only imagine the joy I experience as their facilitator. Women who used to pick rubbish from dumps are now empowered individuals who navigate the internet and eventually, I hope, encode their stories and make their voices heard all over the world through online media.

The three Saturdays I spent with them taught me that it is never too late to learn anything new. It has also taught me that a garbage dump can become a “paradise” when residents envision and believe it to be so. Through their desire to be computer literate and their willingness to practice what they’ve learned from the training, I can say that in time they will take their “paradise” to new heights.