Sheila Kiplagat

This is Sheila Jelagat. She is in sixth grade. It was her first day at the lab. Like most of our users, she had never used a computer. We introduced her to touch typing, she was leaving five minutes in.

I ran into her on her way out. "this is really hard. I have never touched those things", she said. I convinced her to come back. I handed her a pen and paper for the arithmetic and showed her tux math. She loved it. One hour in she wanted to give touch typing a go.

She did not come back. I later learned it was because she was helping her mom harvest tomatoes to sell door to door. This was not uncommon with the girls in our lab. I for one would not have been able to attend TechLit's open lab session if it existed when I was growing up. I spent my weekends herding cattle or selling food.

Not to worry though, we have just shipped enough computers for our next phase of the project which is ten schools with computer labs. They will all get equal access in schools.