On January begin the preliminary activities for the 5th project of OsES, in the sphere of the program Linux aids People, named “Linux for Kagaene“.
The project “Linux for Kagaene“, began on August of 2008, when Don Giovanni Battista Mbaabu, the parish priest of St. John The Baptist Church of Kagaene, visited the neighbouring mission of St. Massimo and saw how the new computer room worked (OsES realized it in cooperation with the Association Binario per l’Africa).
Once he came back to his mission, Don Giovanni wrote us a letter congratulating us on such initiative and asking in his turn our intervention.
Kagaene is a lonely village in the east of Kenia, in the region of Meru, and it is quite difficult to find geographic information about it.
The mission of St. John is particularly poor and isolated, but anyway, it offers a catholic church, a school and a dispensary to the local population.
This film is one of the few documents of the mission in our possession.
Some of the pictures here below, were given to us from the friends of the Association “Binario per l’Africa” that visited the mission the last summer.
The intervention of OsES aims to solve, first of all, a set of technical and logistic problems. With the help of Padre Giovanni it will be important to locate a suitable premises for the computer room. After this, it is necessary to realize the works for the renovation and arrangements of the wiring and network, to find the furniture and the office equipments.
Once the premises are arranged, we can proceed with the installation of notebooks. The donation of OsES will be completed with a searchlight and with a small stabilizer unit which is necessary to protect the notebooks against the changes of tension due to the precarious power supply, while the PC’s batteries will serve excellently as “continuity unit” and will allow the machines to work also during the hours in which there will be no power supply.
We will send them some notebooks which are particularly fit for their utilization in extreme conditions, the Toughbook Notebooks.
OsES will try to find such sets, used but in perfect conditions, through donors or distributors of used PC.
The Toughtbook is a portable computer projected for extreme uses, it is resistant to falls of 90 centimetres, to vibrations and to infiltrations of water and dust.
Its keyboard and monitor are resistant to water and to dust, necessary conditions for resisting to the climate of Kagaene which alternates seasons of torrential rains to long periods of drought.
As is our custom, we will send 5 computers, one will act as teaching position and will be able to control the others through the iTalc application.
The equipments will be reinstalled by OsES with the operating system Linux Ubuntu and with all the applications of Office Automation, didactic and multimedia (photo retouching, video and E-learning), necessary methods for giving to the future users, the possibility to experience and to entirely learn how to use the data processing tools.
Furthermore, for the youngsters we will pre-install a set of autodidactic tools, as well as videogames, and video material of all kinds (cartoons, documentaries and so on).
OsES will support, through a collaborator sent to Kagaene, all the phases of the room’s setting, of the computers’ installations and training.
At the end of his stay in St. John, the mission will be able to offer basic computer training courses to the local population.
The delivery date of computers is estimated on the 30th of April of 2009.
If you are interested to give your contribution to the realization of this project, please contact us to the address info@oses.it
