A week long journey to hightech rural Nepal

It was unexpected but very pleasant surprise for me to receive a call from Basanta Dai (http://basantashrestha.blogspot.com) asking me if I could manage time to go to Nangi for follow-up training of PAN localization, a project by MPP (Madan Puraskar Pustakalaya: http://madanpuraskar.org/). I needed to teach the trainees about Blogging and CMS.

But then I was a bit hesitant since I needed to miss college for at least 10 days. I talked about this to Suraj, Manish and Shishir Dai. Everyone said that I should go. And so I was ready for a lifetime experience.

We started our journey from Kathmandu on Nov. 17 and had a night stay at Beni. The next morning we had to trek for 10 hours to reach our destination, Nangi. It has been the most difficult trek of my life till date but such a beautiful place is worth every pain.
The view of Annapurna South, Annapurna II, Dhaulagiri, Gurja Peak all make you feel like a heavenly creature.

While you trek, you wonder if you would even find salt at such a place, you will be amazed that most of the villagers use VOIP as the sole telephony medium. Most of them are good at emailing, chatting and you would find most of the communication in the neighbouring villages taking place through forum on a local webpage. What more, they have a tele-medicine centre.
I was really stunned to see this hightech village. And despite this all, they are so friendly to you.

The training was arranged by ENRD (E-Network Research and Development). Uttam Sir and Ambika Madam from ENRD accompanied us.

While Basanta Dai needed to discuss the new features in Nepalinux 3.0 like Text-to-speech, Nepali Sabdakosh, Nepali spell checker in Open office as well as GIMP, English/Nepali Wikipedia, Web Domain Registration, I was assigned the task of teaching Blogging and Website building using CMS. I chose Drupal (http://www.drupal.org).

From the next day, we had to start the training session. And, it was supposed to be a 9 day training session.

The trainees (or probably I say trainers since it was a Training of Trainers programme) were from 5 different locations namely: Krishna Sir, Kishan Sir and Boj Sir from Nangi (Myagdi), Sete Sir and Yamshree miss from Shikha (Myagdi), Narayan sir and Amrit ji from Tolka (Kaski), Shivaram Sir from Dandagaun (Rasuwa) and Chhanu Sir from Jhuwani (Chitwan).

In these 9 days, we got along very well with everyone and it was all fun inside and outside the class. We would take classes from 9.30 AM to 4.30 PM with an hour break and would then go for walk around village.What more, we also got to participate in the traditional Magar dance. I am glad that I got to experience all this.

In the meanwhile, Amar Sir from MPP joined us on training on 8th day while on his way to Ghorepani with his friends. We organized a small feedback session. And it was pretty good that we received good remarks about the training from the participants. Only the complaint that the participants had was that the curriculum in schools had to be Vendor independent so that they themselves had the opportunity to use Nepalinux regularly and teach their pupils. We assured that we would do the best we can. By the way, let me bring it to your notice that we are already putting the curriculum issue before CDC (Curriculum Development Committee) and I am taking charge on this front on behalf of FOSS-Nepal.

By the end of the training, the participants from the centers had developed the center's respectives sites. The following are the links to the sites:

Dandagaun -- http://dandagaun.com.np

Jhuwani -- http://jhuwani.com.np

Nangi -- http://nangi.com.np

Shikha -- http://shikha.com.np

Tolka -- http://tolka.com.np

Well, I have a lot to say, but let photos express it in a better way.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/jitendra-pic/sets/72157609561027757/

BVS, First Private School to opt for Linux!!!

It may sound astonishing to many that in Nepal school computer lab runs on Linux. But it's true.
LTSP (Linux Terminal Server Projects) has already been running in 4 schools in Nepal (in Dang, Bhaktapur, Phulchowki, Myagdi). Several projects are still under planning. These projects were funded by HeNN (Help-Nepal) and MPP (Madan Puraskar Pustakalaya). Luckily, I was a part of the project in Bhaktapur funded by Help-Nepal.
But today (September 1, 2007) is a special moment in the FOSS (Free and Open Source Software) history of Nepal because today Brihaspati Vidya Sadan (BVS), Naxal, a reputed school in the capital got Linux installed in the PCs in its computer Lab. I was lucky this time too. I was part of this historic moment as well.

Around a month ago, we were in Brihaspati Vidya Sadan for the FOSS awareness program. We get presentation on what is FOSS, why use FOSS and blahh blahh. Mr. Pravin Joshi, the computer teacher had already been using Linux in his PC at home. He was so impressed and positive that he asked Shishir Dai (our senior and motivator) to help setup Linux in computer lab in the school. This must be the first in Nepalese history that school administration has approached for getting FOSS implemented in its lab. I must say even the students were really sharp and keen to try things. And, so we were there today to install Linux.
The computers didn't have cdrom so the installation method preferred was Net-Boot. Shishir dai configured his laptop for DHCP (Dynamic Host Communication Protocol) and TFTP (Trivial File Transfer Protocol). And made the Ubuntu available on his apache server. While, Ujjwal helped debug the errors that occured, we (me and my classmates along with a junior Kulchandra) looked at the installation in the PCs. The computers, hence, were ready to install Ubuntu from Network. And now Linux co-exist on the PCs with MS-Windows. Though, some additional packages still need to be installed which will soon be done, the greatest achievement is at least students have something to start with and know that much exist beyond Windows.
For the qbasic programming (that is a part of the curriculum for computers), we will we installing dosbox and wine. Besides, we will have bluefish editor, gcompris suite and other stuffs.
Hats off to Pravin Dai, BVS, Shishir dai who have reached a milestone with this step and have set example for other schools. I wish this step helps government consider for a syllabus based on Free and open source rather than propritory.

Cheers