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Digital Miracles Project in Jamaica Summer 2005

Service project takes students to Jamaica

By Janae Hoffler
Philadelphia Tribune Staff Writer

Joking and laughing, five students from Gratz High School talked about their experience in Jamaica earlier this summer, as they hung around at Penn’s Landing Aug. 20.

From the ginger that spiced every meal and drink, the goats that hung around outside the school, the food they liked, and the food they did not, the students talked about all there was to see and do in Jamaica.

They were among seven total CommuniTech Club members who during a nine-day visit repaired and refurbished computers in the basic and high schools in Jamaica’s St. Thomas as part of the Pennsylvania Digital Divide Initiative.

Melissa Howard, 18, and Rebecca Young, 17, had just joined CommuniTech in February when they heard they were going to Jamaica. Just a month before, the Gratz Cluster Youth-Driven Service-Learning Center had formed the International Student Technology Enrichment Program with Edu-Tourism and the Pennsylvania Service-Learning Alliance.

The goal of ISTEP is to provide computer repair and technical training and bridge the digital divide in countries around the world, in essence, replicating PDDI.

All but Howard, who’d gone on another service-learning trip to England last year, spent spring months getting passports, and raising money for their expenses. As the end of the school year neared, they got creative in their fundraising.

Soul-food platters were sold to nearly everyone in school, 17-year-old Kevin Zuber said. Those sales and in-kind donations from teachers supplemented the funding they got from PSLA. In Jamaica, they taught the high school students and teachers how to repair the computers in three days.

“We took (the computers) apart, let them put it back together, we had fun with it. We would put them back together and stuff,” Zuber said.

Howard and Young were the software experts, and Rashon Branch, Mustafa Brown and Zuber worked in hardware. To make it fun, they had challenges with the Jamaican students.

“Our quiz was we’d do something wrong with the computer and they had to figure out what to do and how to fix it. They tried to quiz us; they would mess up the computer and let us fix it,” Young said.

When not in the computer labs, they visited the beaches, parasailing in Negril, touring the National Gallery of Art and shopping in Kingston. They unanimously favored the Jamaican grapefruit drink Ting, a Mountain Dew-like beverage.

“I thought it was going to be like the tourist sites like when you see on the commercials, but when we got there it was totally different. It wasn’t that bad. It was more like a summerhouse that we stayed in. We got the best of both worlds because we seen, you know, the poor, and we seen the good stuff,” Howard said of her first impression.

It gave them a chance to experience Jamaican culture, and appreciate their school back home. The high school, Yallahs High School, had names like C-block and D-block for the rooms, and was surrounded by bars like a prison, they said.

“At the basic school there, they had what, how many kids there – like maybe 50 – and they had one computer, for the whole school. One, just one. At the high school, they had a couple more computers – maybe like 15 in their center,” Howard said.

Once the Jamaican students warmed up to them, they were comfortable enough to dance and laugh with them. They learned new words in the patois dialect, and demonstrated the handshake.

“Once we broke that barrier like, ‘we don’t know them,’ we started having fun. They were at first like, staring, but after a while, you go on and on it starts to get boring, so I started cracking jokes, and that was when they opened up,” Zuber said.

By the final evening, on June 25, they all came together for a party.

“The party was just for the two high schools coming together to relax and reflect on what we did … and dance,” Young said laughing.

They exchanged numbers with the Jamaican students, and some of them had contacted the Gratz students over the summer.

Aside from the trip, they said raising the money and making the platters were the best part. In an earlier phone interview, Maurice Benson, 17, said the same thing.

“It was interesting because Mr. Zemanek and other teachers who talked about how the trip to Jamaica is a little more expensive, so that means you have to put together all this stuff like projects and events to hopefully get enough money for the trip to Jamaica, it was tricky and a little bit hard and challenging. But we put out heads and minds into it to overcome obstacles that we faced and we did it,” Benson said.

He left for Lincoln University before everyone else met. Zuber is going to AmeriCorps, but hopes to be around to help out with CommuniTech next year.

Branch, who does animation and is planning to work in California, is going to Art Institute in the fall. Brown, 19, is going to Art Institute and hopes to transfer to Bloomsberg and study genetic engineering. Zuber is studying for A+ certification, and Young would like to get CC&A networking certification.

The CommuniTech Club trained the students in software installation, hardware repair, troubleshooting and applications, and they later refurbished computers for the Nicetown Boys and Girls Club, Parkway Gamma High School and within their own school. Howard and Young are hoping to visit Africa, possibly South Africa, for next year’s service-learning project. They each plan to run for school president this year.

“Imma miss the whole Gratz atmosphere, because when you go there for four years it’s not a friendship thing anymore, it’s like a family, an extended family, a second or third home,” Brown said.

He said, “Imma miss just hanging out with these people right here. If it wasn’t for Tuesdays and Thursdays at the end of the day I’d probably be in jail.Because people was pushing me all day, everyday.”

He put his arms around Howard and Young and said, “and they kept me together.”