and
*sigh*
This website came highly recommended as a great resource for finding multimedia by the 3 facilitators teaching the 2-day E-Content Quality Assurance Workshop I attended, one of a series of workshops over the past several weeks held at Makarere University's School of Education Curriculum Department's e-Learning Lab.
I walked out of the workshop on Friday with Abigail, Immaculate, both Makerere University professors, and Margaret, my old co-worker, and I felt this crazy notion of sisterhood among these 3 strong, ambitious, and youthful women I was talking with about technology and education. They were laughing and so full of as much energy as the 20-30 schoolgirls I walked by on my way to the workshop that morning. And then later, I felt sad that the feeling was so palpable for being rarely felt enough.
(In 2002, the average age of marriage for a Ugandan female was 17, and the average age of first birth for a Ugandan female was 18.)
It didn't occur to me until I was living and working in Kampala, how hard it is for women in developing countries to choose a field of study like Computer Science or Engineering, and how unequivocally amazing they usually are, and how surprisingly easy it is to relate to one another. There's subtle indicators like this everywhere, like when Janepher, the doctor at IDI who sits next to me, joked about buying a "boda" (motorcycle) to drive herself to work, but then quickly added that she can't because of "public opinion," or when Mariam, one of IDI's IT staff at the Learning Hub, matter-of-factly stated that men don't want to marry a woman that's too educated or intelligent, for fear she won't respect them.
And like animated gifs, what Ugandan culture demands from a Ugandan woman, food preparation and cooking, sometimes on a charcoal stove, sometimes fetching water in jerry cans, sometimes hand washing clothes, the power outages, the lack of computer resources, and insanely expensive Internet, its all just so... distracting.
