Waveplace Blog : February 2010

In two hours, I'll be meeting with William Stelzer, our chief mentor, who flew up from the Virgin Islands last night, and Allison Bland, who just returned from Crisis Camp NYC, which was a very helpful event. The three of us will start two local pilots today, one at the Fayerweather Street School, which has an ongoing relationship with the Matenwa Community Learning Center in Haiti, and another at Graham & Parks with a class of mostly Kreyol speaking Haitian children. We'll meet with each pilot class once a weekday for the next two weeks, teaching them Squeak Etoys and...

Surely the XO cannot be panacea to all existing infirmities within Haiti, particularly the devastation caused by the recent earthquakes from January 12 and on. However, these devices, along with skilled Haitian mentors, can introduce creative problem solving in an area that has suffered for too long from discrimination based on color, and the discouragement of imagination.

Waveplace friend and colleague John Engle presents footage narrated by Dan Hobson and Chip Coffin of destroyed schools on his Haiti Partners blog. This video highlights the dire need for educational programs, like the pilots we are running this month in Boston, to be implemented as soon as possible in Haiti. We look forward to coordinating a hub in Darbonne with John in the coming weeks....

...deeper issues of translation are at stake. Throughout the day while the children are beginning to integrate the language of their everyday life with this new scripting language, volunteers for Waveplace Foundation and One Laptop Per Child debate translation of Haitian Kreyol.

The past two weeks were jam-packed. We taught sessions in the morning and afternoon and then decompressed and adapted plans in the evening. We progressed through our eToys curriculum and figured out what worked and what needed to be tweaked. We also kept our ear to the voices of local communities, here and in Haiti. This is the strategy we believe gets the best results. We attended events around Cambridge with our friends at OLPC and MIT and attended Haitian Creole church services in Dorchester. We also trekked to NYC on the weekends to attend Crisis Camps there and connect with burgeoning efforts in translation and community activism.