The ICT program of Peace Corps Tanzania is coming to an end, post is no longer recruiting volunteers to teach ICT in secondary schools. I do agree with the reasoning behind this, that being that in the current situation (all posts want volunteers with computer skills, there aren't a lot of people with computer skills volunteering, so no post can get very many) with very few ICT volunteers as is and post not wanting to spend a lot of time or money training and supporting possibly three incoming volunteers per year, the program should be disbanded. Being a volunteer that the post doesn't really want to support due to lack of numbers is a somewhat frustrating experience.
That all being said, I'm sad. I and several other ICT volunteers have been putting time and effort into improving the ICT program on our own. We wrote a manual for use by incoming ICT folk containing our teaching recommendations and lab practices, things that work and don't, essentially all of the things we wish we'd gotten in training but had to figure out on our own. We developed a website for use by volunteers in country, on the grounds that we needed one and the job of the computer professional is to create infrastructure that makes peoples' lives a little easier. On the same vein, we have developed a repository of useful teaching resources, largely maintained on our personal hard drives, that we pass out to people and that we don't want to get lost because stuff that volunteers create and pass around are often lost due to the high turnover.
We can, and will, attempt to find nerdy incoming volunteers to take over for us once we finish our service and leave, because we honestly believe what we do is good and useful, not to mention that the Tanzanian government is honestly trying hard to create a reasonable program of computer education (the speech by some government official at my swearing-in ceremony spoke long and eloquently about how excited they were for ICT volunteers from Peace Corps) and we don't want to see it die.
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