Some happy South Rivers children learning how to use the computer. My YES Program assistant, Nigel, teaches a student how to type. Two community members, Juliana Horne and Uranus John, volunteer to help out with the classes. They were students in my International Computer Driver's Licence class. Now they are teaching. That's the Peace Corps in action!

"Summer Computer Program" 07/29/2003 I have been keeping myself fairly busy over the past few weeks. My summer computer program is in full swing. The children at the local primary schools didn't get computer classes during school, so I decided to have a program for them during summer vacation. I have one program in Colonarie in the mornings and another program in South Rivers in the afternoons. Each student comes in for one week of crash course computer learning. I have been completely surprised at how much these young children (Grades 5 - 9) can learn in 8 hours of class. I asked the adults who participated in my earlier courses to come back and volunteer with the kids. So far the adult/child ratio has been about 1 to 4. That makes for a much better learning curve. I organized everything through the local schools, and was worried that students would forget to show up for the classes later in the summer. I was also concerned about my ability to control 8 to 13 year olds in a room full of expensive computers. So far all of the students have been showing up, and behaving themselves too. The children have a real hunger to learn about computers, so that prevents a lot of problems that teachers of other subjects may have to face. Other than that I haven't been up to much. It has been more than a year now since I last touched American soil. That's kind of strange to think about. I'm rooting for the next year to go fast. That means I'll be having fun and getting closer to going home at the same time!