Frustration and the art of patience

Patience is a virtue, right?

Does that mean that every time I lose my patience, I become less virtuous?

This week has been frustrating.

Alot (but...  not all) of my frustration this week stems from technology. Technology can be frustrating. It can be frustrating to learn new technology, and frustrating to teach new technology.

Namibia is on the brink of being wired. Since I've arrived, several PCVs have had computer labs installed at their schools. Offices are getting broadband. Even my school has an Internet connection, and we're working towards getting the whole office building networked.

Without the proper education, technology booms can do more harm than good. Computer viruses are wide-spread and devastatingly harmful around Namibia. Entire computer labs are crippled because viruses have done so much damage that the computers don't start up anymore. Yet it's been a challenge convincing my Namibian colleagues that they need to be more discriminatory when sticking their memory sticks into others' computers/mp3 players/dvd players/usb ports in general. They willy-nilly stick their memory sticks wherever they please then come back and stick them in the school computers and infect the school computers, and I spend my time de-virusing. My response: now all but one computer are running Edubuntu (insert shameless promotion of Edubuntu here) so viruses are less of an issue.

As happened in the industrial revolution, the technological revolution promises to take jobs away from people. It is deeply ingrained in school culture that after marks are entered (manually, in pencil or pen) and tallied on grade sheets, someone else must go through them and moderate them to be sure that all the math is correct. With Excel doing the math, there's no need for moderation – the errors won't be in the calculations, but rather the entering of the marks, and there's no way to moderate that.

The other day, I spent an hour (a full hour) explaining how to find cell B4 in MS Excel (“The letters are across the top and the numbers are down the side....”). When we moved onto other cells (“OK, now select cell H5.”) she was lost. Couldn't do it. (This actually touches another topic which I find quite frustrating – a majority of Namibians with whom I work can't read a map and have no idea how to use coordinates.) I was happy that she wanted to start learning Excel, but.... well..... I had to step back, recenter, and find my patience, which seemed to be vacationing somewhere more pleasant at that moment.

Remembering to be patient is a challenge.  Remembering that being patient will get me much farther than frustration is a challenge. Some days it's easier than others.

But at the end of the day, this is what I came here for. And no one said it would be easy.