This month Katie Winterbottom and Audra Gatts, both 04 Alum will take a batch of laptop computers to the Richard Akwei Memorial School in Accra, Ghanna. There, they will establish a computer lab and lead teacher training workshops and student computer classes until the end of the academic year in June 05.
Katie and Audra have been overwhelmed by the enthusiasm of the Dartmouth Community for this idea. In particular, they note their pleasure to have worked with Bill Hochstin, Procurement Services Materials Management Coordinator. Bill has supported the project by allocating a number of Dartmouths old computers to their project. Katie and Audra also note the significant support they have received from WinCycle.
Richard Akwei Memorial is a government sponsored junior high school serving an extremely impoverished area of Ghanas capitol city. Katie, Audra and Dartmouth administrators are excited about this project because they believe that basic computer skills have the potential to create education and employment opportunities for the students of Richard Akwei Memorial. Familiarity with computers has the potential to foster socioeconomic mobility.
In addition to creating possibilities for Ghanaian students, Katie and Audra hope this project will also provide an outlet for obsolete computers within the United States. In a market in which computers are discarded after only a few years, we have found that many perfectly usable machines are being recycled or simply thrown out, adding tons of harmful substances (lead, mercury, and arsenic among them) to the waste stream. We are happy that this project can also provide a positive outlet for some of these machines. You may contact Audra.Gatts.04@alum.dartmouth.org with any questions, comments or to make donation arrangement.