Every once in a while, I play the part of an IT professional at a
health clinic run by the Benebikira Sisters. I really never imagined myself doing this
type of work until I got here and I find that I really enjoy technology
work. I know that it is fairly thankless
and invisible work to update the antivirus and upgrade to Office 2010. But I it is important to keeping everything
running smoothly and most Rwandans do not have the skills to do it. When I am working on computers, I also try to
answer any questions the user may have and also teach some good computer
practices (especially in regard to avoiding viruses and not filling your
computers to the brim with movies and music to slow it down).
Actually a lot of computer work here involves simply
waiting. Many computers are slow from
too many movies, as mentioned above. In
fact, on one computer, there wasn’t enough room on the drive to upgrade to
Office 2010 and he had to delete some of his films.
But also, the computers are rarely updated because
they rarely have internet access. In
this screen shot, you can see the computer has NEVER been checked for updates.
And it was several years old.
And, in addition to that, the internet itself is very
slow. Here you can see the internet was
on for 1 hour 3 min and had sent 3.99 MB and received 20.27 MB. To put that in
layman’s terms…like a snail.
And slow internet affects other things. I was
updating the antivirus on a computer and what “might take a few minutes” turned
into 1.5 hours. But it got done and that is the important part!
Viruses are a huge problem here. I am often using my flash drive between
computers and now I barely put anything on it and never anything important
because it gets a virus from other computers a few times a month, so I need to
completely erase it so I can keep using it.
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