2009 (March)

In March 2009, 2 groups from UCC landed at Lewa with two seperate agendas.  The first group, led by Mr. Adam Ross, was composed of ten (10) students and was focused on construction and collegial interaction.  Funds were raised for the construction of a school library and the students participated in the construction, as well as, a number of curricular oriented lessons and out-of-class athletic training instruction.  A number of photos from this trip are found below:

The second group, led by Mr. Mark Battley, was composed of four (4) innovative FY and IB1 students who traveled to Lewa to test an innovative way of bringing laptops and the Internet to Lewa supported schools with no power and no previous experience with computers.  The boys' groundbreaking idea was to use a combination of durable OLPC laptops, local cell-phone SIM cards, portable wireless routers, and solar panels in order to bring the Internet to Ntugi. You can read about their implementation in these two posts: ntugione and ntugitwo.

The video below, made by two of the four participants, Amal Chandaria and Connor Cimowsky, documents both their struggles and their successes.  The video won the National Middle School Association's Video Contest and, in November 2009, was shown as the closing video for the NMSA's annual conference. The theme of the conference was "Making A World of Difference".

The 2009 UCC/Lewa trip participants have since graduated from UCC and helped establish the Ntugi Group, an informal organization dedicated to the implementation and support of laptop computers in the Meru region.