February 10 (part 2) - Denham Town

This afternoon at 3:30 Arthur McKinley, a teacher in the Denham Town Skills Training Project, picked us up in his car to take us to Denham Town to do our thing. As we came near we took a right turn past two soldiers in fatigues with rifles sitting on partial road blockades. A few blocks later Arthur told us that we were crossing the line between two warring communities, Hannah (sp?) Town and Denham Town. Denham Town and neighboring Tivoli Gardens are two JLP garrisons surrounded on all sides by PNP garrisons. As we drove through, everything was calm. We were certainly more of an attraction than anything else happening. Had Arthur not pointed it out, I would not have known the divide between the two communities. (Later in the evening Arthur and his wife told us that in June 2001 there had been a large violent outbreak in the area in which tens of people were killed and hundreds injured. The soldiers were there, they explained, to keep peace, but neither side trusts them.)

Also in our ride there we learned some about Arthur and his hopes for the community center. He wants it to be the beginning of a larger movement in which the Internet is used to help bring communities back together. By starting in Denham Town and getting kids into being creative and productive on computers and on the Internet, and then helping to spread that to near-by communities he hopes to enrich everyone's lives. His grand plans for use of the Internet to create a sense of community and bring people together sounded to me very like our ideas for using it to bridge the digital divide. In both his case and ours I find the project very laudable, with a lot of potential for doing good for those who participate, but ultimately quite unlikely to have the large-scale desired effect. I am at peace with this because I feel the process itself is useful to all those who participate. As Jonathan Zittrain put, if we can get kids having fun making music and working on computers, that is an end in itself. I'd take it slightly further even, to say that those who learn in the program, teach in the program, or just participate in it by hearing the songs students make and viewing the school and community center websites that are popping up will have gained something valuable from it: as Wayne or Trevor Rhone would put it, "a change in imagination."

Thankfully, in addition to his grand plans, Arthur's teaching focus is on drawing students into productive, creative activities by using material and methods that are engaging to them. As always, Wayne exceeded all expectations. The students were somewhat inscrutable during the demonstration, but they were rapt, and (possibly most importantly) they were dancing in their chairs when Wayne showed them something good. They were game to participate in making a song, though as usual the girls were a bit shyer than the boys. You can hear the fruits of their music-making in Wayne's blog. We didn't have time to install FruityLoops on the computers (and we hit some snags when we tried to do it), but they were ready for some hands-on work of their own. Sean Mad (that's the "DJ name" of a student named Sean) sat down at Wayne's laptop (still up on the projector screen) and others sat around them. For the next hour and then some he and his friends worked on a beat that they were loving.

Before we left I showed wayneandwax.org to Arthur and demonstrated how skyBuilders worked to him and Maxine Reed (the principal of the community center and also the head of the computer lab at Tivoli Gardens High School.) We picked out a domain name for them (denham-town.org, which I'll link as soon as the site exists) and planned to have a more in-depth training on how to use and manage the site when it exists next week and we come back to Denham Town again. More even than St. Andrew, they have a strong interest in having a web presence and getting their students using the web. They are about to begin publishing a newsletter that they would like to put online on the website. They would also like to make the website a site for the entire Denham Town community so that the community can have contact with their relatives and friends all over the world. Because the Jamaican diaspora is so large--there are the same number of Jamaicans living outside of Jamaica as there are living in it--everyone has relatives far away. The website, they hope, will provide a link for those far away back to their home community.

We planned with Arthur and Maxine to come back each week on Mondays starting at 2 to lead workshops in both music making and skyBuilders-based web design. As we were leaving, Sean ran up to us asking our names (he had come a little late and missed the introductions). He was relieved to find that Wayne (and I) would be back next week. Of course having a camera always ruins something like this, but I wish I had been able to take a picture of his expression just then. He had found something he loved and something that was clearly a new source of self-esteem for himself.

Arthur and his wife (whose name I regret I did not get) took us back to his office with their daughter Jodi (sp?) and son Andrew and fed us jerk chicken and festival. Yum. It was my first time eating festival (a sort of fried, sweet, cornmeal thing, kind of like a cornmeal doughnut) and actually my first jerk chicken in Jamaica too.

On our drive to Denham Town Arthur asked us what we were getting out of this project. No one had asked us that before. At dinner his wife asked us the same question. It is a very good question and one that I hadn't actually considered until it was asked of me. I never asked myself because it all seems like fun to me. Somehow my intuition tells me that this is something I want to do. But why? I think it is part the adventure of finally going to live in a vastly different environment from what I am used to, and one in which I cannot easily blend in. It is definitely part the weather, the food, and the fun of playing at setting up house with Wayne. But overall there is something that I can't capture about it in words without sounding silly and cliched. There is a great reward in meeting a teacher like Arthur who is dedicated to making things better for his students and who, along with his family, takes us into his life and helps us feel at home here. There is an immeasurable reward in going to a place where life is as hard as it is in Denham Town and finding people there with minds open, and then being able to help teach something that gives joy, hope, and self-esteem. Damn the cliches, it's true.