Visit to Peru

March 21 2008

Just back from Peru last weekend where we finally saw the children with their laptops and were amazed. We visited the famous Arahuay pilot school. These kids 6 months ago where at the failing levels of reading comprehension. Now, most of them are in the highest or next-to-highest level for their grade. They love to read on their laptops. They use them outside and don’t even realize it’s special or unique to do so. And, of course, they love the camera.

Arahuay, the remote town in the Peruvian Andes, is a word in Quechua. Quechua is the language the Inca spoke and it is still widely spoken in the Andes today. Arahuay means “End of the Corn”. Without corn life couldn’t be sustained in the Incan way of life. They developed special high-altitude corn that we saw growing at 3400 meters in Cuzco, but Arahuay is much drier and, at 2600 meters, it’s the end of the corn, and thus, quite literally, the end of the road. There are well-built 4-floor-high pre-Incan (pre-Columbian) ruins nearby, with petroglyphs. From Arahuay, it’s a day’s walk to the nearest village; these kids were isolated. The laptops brought these children - and the entire town - a window to the world. They now think about life, the world, and their role in it quite differently than before where there life, their dreams, their thoughts were limited to the village. We encouraged them to participate in the two-way discussion on this and to tell the world more about Arahuay.