February 10 - Monday Morning

Sunday is a relaxing day in Kingston. Nothing is open. Even noisy Hope Rd. is temporarily calm. We spent the day relaxing and doing work at home. I managed to put up the beginnings of a St. Andrew High School website. (The idea is to put up the basics and then train Howard and other St. Andrew teachers and students in how to manage and update the website.)

Monday morning is different. All the calls we need to make were on a pad in front of me. I'm a little phobic about making phone calls, but Wayne is even a little more so, so I set to it. Somewhere in the middle of my little list, I find Arthur McKinley, the head of the Denham Town Community Project. Shereece Williams, the head of the Computer Repair Center and a talented skyBuilders trainer, had offered to Elizabeth Terry, the organizer of the ICT conference, to donate 10 hours a month of time to doing skyBuilders trainings for communities. Ms. Terry had responded with Mr. McKinley's name, saying he was eager to get a Denham Town Community Project website going. Shereece emailed us to ask if we'd like to take this one on. Implicit is the fact that Denham Town is a JLP/Seaga neighborhood. It is not easy for many Jamaicans to cross that line and help Mr. McKinley, however much they may want to. As outsiders we have a sort of immunity, an ability to transcend the local politics and work on both sides of the political divide. When I called Mr. McKinley and explained who I was, he was enthusiastic, effusive even. He wants to make Denham Town "the first Internet-friendly community in the Carribean." It is a bit hard to separate out rhetoric from true feeling, but it seemed to me that offers of help might not come often to his community project. What demonstrated above all else that he was serious is that he scheduled us to come in immediately, at 4pm this afternoon to get his students excited. That's one more place we're actually getting started! When I got home, Alton Grizzle called from Cornerstone Ministries to invite us to come meet with him tomorrow afternoon. Soon we'll be working at South Camp prison too!

On a personal note, while going to pick up the skyBuilders LCD projector from Shereece, I got a call from Professor Krishnamurthi at Brown who told me I'd been accepted to their Ph.D. program in Computer Science with full funding!

I'd say, a very very good morning. I'm floating on air a bit. (You'll have to excuse the excessive exclamation points in this blog...)