Kaédi

Contact:

Matt Protacio

matt.protacio@gmail.com

Kaédi is a large departmental capital along the Senegal River, approximately 350 km from the Atlantic coast. The majority of the population is haal pulaar (lit. speaks pulaar), but there are also substantial Hassaniya, Wolof, and Soninke speaking communities. The city proper has about 30 thousand inhabitants, with another 30 to 40 thousand in the outlying areas. Since I have been here electricity has only gone out a handful of times, and the municipal water supply
seems clean to me. Both DSL and GSM based internet are available. The DSL tends to be very reliable, though the cell network is not. If the XO has a network jack then a DSL connection is possible, if not then the GSM modems are USB based.

In the past the Peace Corps has used the local high school over the summer, so it should not be too difficult to get use of facilities there. The salle d'informatique there has a fast DSL connection and ~15 networked desktop computers in varying states of repair. There are 17 écoles fondamentales (the 6-12 age range) in the city, 14 public and 3 private. Each has about 300-600 students, at least 20% of whom leave to their familial homes for the summer months. One
in-city volunteer that has agreed to help with the project has regular contact with 2 of them, and another volunteer has recently completed a large project involving 7 of the others.

My main job is to provide support for other volunteers and to help flesh out the curriculum at the local lycée technique. Beyond that I spend most of my time dispensing technical advice, and teaching basic classes at a local, disused computing center.

One issue that I have to question is the choice of age range. If French is not spoken much at home, students that young will not yet have learned much of it; teaching them would require translators. I know people who have the language and computer skills to handle it, but they would want to be compensated for their time. I speak a little pulaar but not enough to teach well. It may be necessary to target collège level students.

A couple other things:
While power in Kaedi is reliably present, it can't be counted on to be 220 V and 50 Hz. They might want to have a budget for a couple regulators. We could probably use the ones at the lycee but I don't know what is available in boghe and bababe.

Now that I think about it, this is a big enough city where I could probably find enough french speakers in the 6 to 12 age range. That's sad for those who do not speak french at home, though.