Click here to see the full-sized video on Vimeo.

Soon after my return to Toronto, I met up with Ravi to debrief him on the ins and outs of the trip and we came to some fundamental conclusions about the direction of this project in the future.  One of the main points I stress to anyone who will listen is that literacy and numeracy need to be the main focus of any programs we run down at Stepney, and anywhere in Jamaica, in fact.

The Jamaican government has instituted a standardized test across the island to measure literacy among students in grade 3, and unfortunately the results are not great.  This year, island-wide, it was reported that the illiteracy rate among grade 3 students was as high as 70%.  At Stepney, were they’ve made literacy a priority and have been dedicating resources and doing fundraising to support to their literacy program, they have increased their school’s literacy rate to about 50%.  This is a great improvement over previous years, I’m told, but it’s still in dire need of improvement.

The key here, in terms of this project, is that we can leverage the enthusiasm the students have for using and learning about technology and computers to engage them into improving their literacy and numeracy skills.  The future focus of all projects launched at Stepney should have literacy as their guiding principle.  Instead of seeing the numbers above as daunting statistics, we can look upon them as a starting point and a way to establish clear metrics about the success of our involvement with the school in Nine Mile.

I will return with more photos and videos and, hopefully, more insights into the project and its future.

Until then.

Well, somehow the six weeks have flown by and I’m leaving Jamaica tomorrow morning. This has been an incredible experience that I won’t soon forget. I must first apologize for my lack of posts recently but I haven’t been connected to the Internet for any significant period of time for the last three weeks! Don’t let that fool you into thinking that not much has been going on, because I’ve been very busy working with the students at the school and making sure things are in a good state for me to leave.

Since my last post, a lot wonderful progress was made. I assembled my crew of five students at Stepney and took them through an intensive training program on how to shoot a documentary. We discussed what a documentary is and why anyone would want to make one, going from general ideas to specific thoughts on what our work should focus on. We also discussed the different phases of production and the different jobs that need to be done to get everything together smoothly and professionally. My crew, who dubbed themselves Five Wise Kids, started off pretty shy, but they were soon throwing ideas out and making decisions on their own, choosing camera angles and setups and arranging interviews without needing much guidance from me.

By the end of the week, on their suggestion and initiative, we drove up to the Bob Marley Mausoleum in Nine Mile, where they interviewed anyone who was willing and able. I cannot express how amazingly professional these guys (with addition of two girls from the school) conducted themselves and the footage of the interviews is the proof. They managed to get three solid interviews without disrupting any tours or personnel at the site, and they did it within the time provided. I can’t explain how impressed I was and I have a few pictures of them in action that show how focused they were on getting the job done right.

Besides this project, I continued my effort to teach staff and students computer basics and the skills they would need to be self-sufficient after I left. For the students this involved taking pictures and recording video with the built-in camera on each laptop, and learning how to use iMovie to rearrange clips into a final film. I also showed them games like Solitaire, FreeCell and Chess to solidify mouse techniques and keyboard commands in a fun way. I taught the staff how to copy CDs and DVDs, how to copy files to an external drive, and how to use PowerPoint.

Stepney is trying very hard to implement and improve their literacy program, literacy being a very big challenge among children in Jamaica. I realized that this project could easily and effectively work in conjunction with their efforts to promote literacy and numeracy (a term they use frequently in schools here, but I find a little unusual) to the students at the school, through the use of literacy-based software. Almost all of the kids are very enthusiastic about using the computers so we could definitely use that to our advantage to teach them basic reading and writing skills.

On their part, they held a Fun Day at the school on June 24th to raise money for their literacy program that was a packed house and even had as a special guest Romaine Virgo, a Stepney alumni that recently won the latest run of Rising Star, a Jamaican take on American Idol. I was enjoying my one week vacation on the beach with my friend Gordon, who took the opportunity of me being down here to visit Jamaica for the first time, so we drove down to Nine Mile to take pictures and record video of the event. In fact, the Five Wise Kids were in attendance and so I gave them the equipment and again they did an amazing job filming the event from different angles without causing any disruption.

Upon my return to the school this week, I attended the Graduation or School Leaving Ceremony (not all of the kids are actually graduating, in the strict sense of the word, but the ceremony is a big deal in the community, often more important than actually ensuring that the kids go to school, unfortunately). I took pictures and recorded the event and got to enjoy seeing everyone dressed up for the big event.

Since then I worked with the crew to get a few more interviews at the school, as well as working on establishing a charter for proper use of the computers and designating two students as representatives for the computers, to work with the teachers to ensure that the computers are well taken care of and there is equal access to everyone. I also did my best to get them to work on setting up one or two days a week where interested students could come to use the computers for an hour or so, not instruction based, just on their own. Hopefully when I follow up I’ll hear more about this from them.

All in all, I would say that this initial leg of the project was a success in introducing the computers and identifying the needs and constraints of establishing a computer presence at Stepney. Personally, the experience has been phenomenal and it will definitely have an impact on my life going forward.

Check back soon to see more photos, plus some video clips from my time here in Jamaica, and, if that weren’t enough, more reflections on my journey and where things will go from here!

I have to give unending thanks to all of those who have helped me during my time in Jamaica, I will be forever grateful! Thanks, as well, to everyone who’s been keeping up with the blog and the photos, and I promise a lot more to come in the coming days and weeks!

Until then, much respect.

After two weeks at Stepney and three weeks in Jamaica, this initial part of Project Nine Mile has reached the halfway point. The past week was spent providing a lot more training to staff and students on the computers, their uses and the possibilities they can open up. We also assembled the two crews of students that will be creating their own small documentaries that will be incorporated into the larger documentary about the trip ultimately. We’re a bit behind schedule because of a field trip that saw most of them head to Kingston on Friday, but this week we will hopefully put those projects into overdrive.

The theme we’re going to focus on with those documentary projects is the impact of the introduction of technology on their community and what that means for them. There were a lot of ideas I’ve had about the focus of their work but this makes the most sense, given the context of Project Nine Mile. That being said, we still have at least one brainstorming session remaining so anything can happen, it’s their project.

The students are certainly excited about the computers and the possibilities and I’m bombarded with requests for time on the computers throughout the day. Unfortunately, with only two computers right now and a lot of skills to teach they can’t always be accommodated. I use simple games like Solitaire to teach mouse skills (single click, double-click, right click, drag-and-drop), and we type up class lists to practice typing on the keyboard, making sure to learn how to save a file and find it again later. On the Mac, we play with the Photo Booth application, which allows them to take pictures of themselves and organize them in iPhoto, as well as figuring out how to use GarageBand to create our own music using provided loops and the keyboard instruments. We’ve even had a couple of chances to learn how to rip CDs and play them back and watch DVDs.

In my spare time I managed to go to both the Bob Marley Mausoleum in Nine Mile and the Bob Marley Museum in Kingston, both very impressive and inspirational tributes to the reggae legend. I met some cool people at both and hope to revisit both of them before I leave Jamaica. I also had the chance to go to Dunn’s River Falls on Saturday with some of the staff of Stepney, and it was as beautiful as they say and more. Climbed up the falls and swam in the sea and was generally thankful for my good fortune to be able to enjoy these opportunities. You can see my pictures in the Photos section above.

Heading back to Nine Mile tomorrow to continue working with my crews to get the documentaries underway and to continue teaching skills to staff and students over the week, as time permits.

Leave comments and let me know what you all think of the project so far and hit me with any suggestions you might have for stuff I should do with the students or as a tourist, while I’m still in Jamaica!

Respect. Until next time…

I’m back in Kingston and fully rested after my first full week at Stepney. Things have been progressing very well, so far, and the week was productive in setting up a schedule for hands-on training with the new computers, some initial introductions to computer basics, and immersing myself with the staff and students at the school. I have posted many more photos in the Photos section of both Kingston and the school in Nine Mile.

The school is a small campus, comprised of three buildings, two of them from the original construction and one of them, the Cantine & Library, built in 2000, with the help of the Bob Marley Foundation. The school is very rock and roll. With just under 400 students between grades 1 and 9, and only 15 staff, the kids seem to have an innate sense that even though there are authority figures around, there’s power in numbers. At all times of the day you can find students of all ages running around outside of class, and they’ll never tell you where they’re really supposed to be.

The staff and students have been extremely hospitable and friendly, embracing me and the computer program wholeheartedly, often expressing their gratitude and hoping for ongoing support in the future. Mrs. Mac and Ms. Montague have been looking out for me very vigilantly, and we’re constantly joking that when I return home I’m going to be nice and chubby, thanks to the wonderful combination of large portions and my love of Jamaican food. They pick the yams right out of the ground in front of the school and you can’t really argue with that.

The first week was spent getting oriented, learning the schedule and procedures, and explaining what it is I’m trying to accomplish during my time at the school. Jamaicans have an expression, “soon come”, that can be very dangerous to a North American with an agenda. It basically seems to imply that things happen when they happen, given over to the vagaries of the sense and importance of time, and there’s no sense in rushing or worrying about it. Frankly, that fits in very well with my normal day to day lifestyle, but not when I have a limited time to get things accomplished! With some persistence on my part and some acquiescence on theirs, we’re managing to get things done in a timely fashion.

I have already started teaching basic skills to staff and students and now have a timetable of when people will come to me for lessons. This week I’m hoping to assemble a small group of the older students to get them engaged in making the documentary about their school and their lives in Nine Mile. I’ve been talking to a lot of people and learning a lot more about the culture here in Jamaica and it’s hard to limit the scope of the documentary as I learn more, but this project with the students should keep me anchored and provide a lot of fun and interesting moments.

I’m heading back up to the Nine Mile this afternoon, but I’ll try to write a bunch of stuff while I’m there and post them all when I return. I’m also hoping to get some of my video footage prepped to post on the web sometime in the near future, but for now you can content yourselves with the photos I’ve posted so far.

Until next week!

Here are some related links:

• A Jamaican ICT4D initiative wins the top award at the Stockholm Challenge in Sweden [taken from B.art's blog]
• ICT4D Jamaica
• Vision 2030 Jamaica: National Development Plan - ICT Sector Plan

Finally, I had done some preliminary research about ICT in August 2007 and I discovered that Jamaica’s ICT platform was ranked #45 in the world at the time. To put things into perspective, the emerging IT giant, India, was ranked #44. Furthermore, looking only at the western hemisphere, Jamaica was ranked 5th behind the USA, Canada - both in the top 20 - Chile at #31 and Barbados at #40. This could imply that Jamaica is quite ready to accommodate more ICT4D projects such as Project Nine Mile.

Being that I’ll be in Nine Mile all week, my Internet access will be limited or non-existent until I figure out how to hook it up at the school. With that in mind, I’ve linked the Photos link at the top of the page directly to my Flickr account so you can see the shots I’ve taken so far.

Back soon with more!

Now that Mina has a rental car, we should be heading to the parish of St. Ann tomorrow morning to get him acquainted with his soon-to-be new home for the next month or so. As far as Kingston goes, he has been to New Kingston (for Fashion Block), Hellshire beach (where he had the infamous fish and festival), Bembe (although he didn’t get a proper introduction due to rain), and various restaurants around town. The constant rainy weather was definitely a factor preventing us from showing him more places during the week. So far, he’s been doing well for a first-timer to Jamaica. I thought he would have have needed more time to adjust to the Jamaican atmosphere and temperament, but he seemed to have proven me wrong. I’m glad about that and have no doubt he will get along well with the citizens of Nine Mile.

As far as the project goes, in my capacity as Local Program Coordinator I hope to secure more funding soon. I’ve already had friends pledge portions of their paychecks to the cause, but we are yet to be blessed with a partner in corporate Jamaica. I remain positive and hopeful for the future of the Stepney All Age students.