Loyola's CCI Supports Brazil's Telecenters

by Lewis Berman

Loyola University Maryland is helping to establish computer literacy, and for that matter plain old literacy, in a far-flung culture 4,500 miles away.

Tucked away in a far-flung corner of Loyola's Columbia Graduate Center, Loyola's Center for Community Informatics (CCI) helps organizations around the world build and operate telecenters. One such organization is Gemas da Terra, "Gems of the Earth," located in the mountainous state of Minas Gerais, Brazil. There, five freely-accessible telecenters serve residents of remote areas who had never previously seen a computer. The telecenters host computers containing a variety of software and providing internet connectivity.

On a temperate "winter" day in August, Marco Figueiredo, the CCI's Director, and I pulled up to the telecenter at Tombaduoro after the final seven-mile, dirt-road leg of our journey from Diamantina. We were greeted by a collection of volunteers and computer users, who ushered us into the building. The modest computer space was supplemented by a larger room for meetings and activities. In the computer space, a girl of nine or so was practicing touch-typing skills. (Let that be a lesson for you power programmers who furiously hunt and peck!) Four or five teenage boys had been working on homework assignments specifically issued by the school to be done at the telecenter on the weekend. Now they were catching a self-satisfied view of their self-produced hip-hop dancing video on YouTube. Eva Pinto, the on-duty volunteer solicited our help to re-establish internet connectivity on a machine that had recently been rebooted. Volunteers know the applications and are able to assist users, and they are absolutely enthusiastic and valiant, but their knowledge of technical concerns like Linux shell scripts is limited. A more technical person had recently made his once-a-month round and updated some software, but he forgot to put a command in the startup script. So I dealt with that, my first tiny but highly-appreciated contribution to global computer literacy.

Tombadouro is a self-sufficient agricultural community. It may have 2,000 residents. Any food or goods produced in excess are sold to a local collective, which in turn provides housing for the residents. Its several housing-lined streets make it vaguely reminiscent of Rumsey Island in Joppatowne, MD, given the addition of a few cows and the subtraction of pavement. Diamantina, on the other hand, is a historical town of 50,000, once the richest settlement in the Portuguese Empire. There one can find a for-profit telecenter among the shops, churches, and schools. Diamantina is the exception, Tombadouro the rule. That is why the government has embarked on a program to provide telecenters throughout Brazil. Gems of the Earth and other non-profit organizations strive to achieve creative, self-sustaining solutions. Marco and his colleagues are investigating cloud computing and other means as cost-effective ways to increase availability of computers and software. One might say that both Tombadouro itself and the telecenter movement are at the forefront of being "green."

Marco with telecenter volunteers.

Gems of the Earth can be found at http://www.gemsoftheearth.org/. The CCI's web site is http://cci.cs.loyola.edu. New volunteers (in the U.S. and abroad) and contributions are always welcome.

Lewis Berman is the Director of Program Operations for the Computer Science and Software Engineering graduate programs.