I can READ! Now I know how the six-year-olds feel that magic day in first grade when the shapes and lines and squiggles on the page turn into meaningful symbols! This is the first time in my life...well, since that day in first grade, which I sadly do not remember...that I have ever learned a whole new alphabet. When I went to Greece, I learned to sound out some of the street signs, but their alphabet, while different from ours, is not anywhere near as different as Devanagari, the alphabet they use here.
If you'd like an example of this script, check out the BBC World, here.
And while you're surfing the internet, you may want to find Darjeeling on a map of India, and then zoom in to the Himalayan mountains. One of the readers of my personal blog used Google Earth to find me. He entered "Chow Rasta," the name of the big open piazza at the top of the ridge into the program, and could zoom right down to look at the city's location. He thought I was living in a valley. Ha! Darjeeling is right up on top of a mountain ridge, cascading down one whole side. That's one reason why the place so resembles a natural StairMaster.
Here's a map of Sikkim. Look closely just south of Sikkim, in the northeast and you can see Daj (pronounced "Dodge," a local nickname for the city.)
By the way, the Perry-Castaneda Library Map Collection is the best site I've ever found for online maps. On their index page, they always have maps for the latest news. Right now, they're featuring World Cup countries, Korea, and the North Korea test facility.
Here's Google Earth. You have to have a pretty fast machine to enjoy it, and you must download the software onto your computer. Be careful, though. Many people find it addictive, running around the world, looking at geography they've heard about all their lives.
http://earth.google.com/
The other big news of the week is my association with Hayden Hall, a wonderful charity located in the heart of the city. This is another example of the generosity and helpfulness of my new friends here. Father Van at St. Joseph's School and Father Victor at St. Joseph's College, University Division, as well as Udaya Mani Pradhan and Mr. Gopal of the Rotary Club-- all of them were unanimous in suggesting Hayden Hall as the place I might want to do my volunteer work.
This week I met Father Burns, the elderly patriarch of the organization, who even in his 81st year is still fund-raising. I met Radha Karki, Father Burns' administrative right hand, and Mr. Gopal (another Gopal), the head of the microfinance division and the "accidental techie" of the outfit. Mr. Gopal's the one who has that "natural touch" with technology that every nonprofit needs in order to make the best use of technology to further the organization's mission.
Nonprofits are, by their very nature, constantly short of money and staff time. Everyone wears several hats and those hats keep them extraordinarily busy. The folks with high-powered technical expertise who graduate from universities are usually looking for the high-powered salaries that everyone's heard about. The nonprofit sector only sometimes attracts that talent. Besides, nonprofits are usually somewhat behind their counterparts in the for-profit sector in seizing the benefits of technology to accomplish their missions. They tend to think of computers as glorified typewriters and adding machines and that's that.
Indeed, at Hayden Hall, there is one fellow who sits behind a MANUAL typewriter, banging out letters to Hayden Hall's donors, one by one. Copying each one onto the next aerogram. Father Burns has a reason for this labor-intensive, time-consuming practice, Ms. Radhka explained to me. People who send him money like to get hand-typed letters, he says.
That could be true. It could also be something to consider in an overall approach to technology and strategic planning for Hayden Hall's next ten years. And that's what I'll be doing with Hayden Hall while I'm here. I plan to do a computer systems assessment, looking at who uses the organization's computers, what they are used for, what skills do the various staff members bring to their computer use, and what skills they want and need. In today's world, each nonprofit can benefit from an Information and Communications Technology plan.
For instance, as I learned in Nepal working with a nonprofit with a similar approach to similar goals, micro-finance is at the heart of the organization's success in bringing poor women out of poverty and giving them and their children a whole new lease on life. The women gather together into Savings Clubs and pool their scant incomes. 75 cents a month is the required contribution here, for example. But five years down the road, these groups are able to start lending each other the money for a whole host of needs, like new homes (sometimes first homes), education fees for their children's futures, startup funds for new (and sometimes first) businesses.
Micro-finance is a very labor-intensive, time-consuming operation, even with computers back in the main office. Hayden Hall, in effect, acts as the bank for the roughly 90 savings groups. Every transaction has to be painstakingly added both into a big ledger book and in the HH accounting program. Hours and hours of staff time is dedicated to entering data...numbers that are crucial to the lives of the women who count on this organization to give them a glimmer of hope from within generations of poverty.
I already have a few ideas about using technology to speed up the process, free up some staff time, and streamline the process in the micro-finance division of Hayden Hall. But all these ideas need to fit into an overall approach to technology, a technology plan-- and that will be my job for the next three months: assessing the technology in use now, and helping the staff plan use technology (a new web site? a geographical mapping system for the savings/credit groups in the villages? computer upgrades? staff computer training? new software?) to achieve its vital mission.
I've also promised the Rotary Club's webmaster, Mr. Prolad Roka, that I'll look over the Rotary's web site and give him an assessment. He'd also like some guidelines to good web design for future use. I'd like to have a nice little handbook on that myself, so that will be fun to put together from the various web design sites I've already bookmarked.
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