May 2, 03:24 PM
BoscoBillyBlog
While training the Kigali staff of WE-ACTx on basic Web programming and how to maintain their Web site, a nurse named Bosco kept poking his head into the room to see what we were doing.
I told him about the Web training, and he expressed an interest in joining. But the clinical staff see a steady stream of patients here and his schedule wouldn’t allow it.
We got to talking about other things while he was between examinations for a minute, and he told me that he was from the Congo and had lived in Tanzania, Kenya, and now Rwanda. He spoke French, Swahili, Kinyarwanda, and several more tribal languages from the countries he’d lived in. We talked in English, a language in which he had no trouble communicating, although he’d only begun learning it last November.
He had nearly completed training as a dentist but then couldn’t pay the tuition to keep going so he started working as a nurse in order to make some money. He’s my age.
So he’s an impressive, interesting guy to say the least. When another nurse, an American living at the house WE-ACTx keeps for volunteers, suggested that I ask if he wanted to have a short HTML and Web site training on Saturday, I couldn’t believe I hadn’t thought of it.
So I taught Bosco some of the basics; this is how you make a word bold, this is how you insert an image, this is how you create a link.
Then we set up a blog for him. Check it out at BoscoBillyBlog.blogspot.com. I hope he keeps it going, because, first, that’s about the best Web address I’ve ever heard (I love those alliterative B’s), and, second, it’s hard to imagine a blog that would do a better job of bridging cultural divides.