Whenever people talk about how modern electronics and the internet have transformed communication, I find you can count on them to use the word “disconnected” as sure as they will use the word “revolutionized.” It’s been my experience that almost everyone fears on some level that new technology is sucking the humanity out of each of us little by little. Just last week, in a Voices piece tellingly entitled, “Talk to me baby: getting connected in a wireless world,” the Voice’s Fiction editor Sadaf Qureshi wrote about her nostalgia for the kind of small talk and human interaction that ATMs, texting, and automated checkout at grocery stores have rendered avoidable. “[R]emote and the wireless … are really just synonyms for detached,” she wrote.
I disagree with this dim view of technology for a whole host of reasons. But my addiction to texting and Gchat notwithstanding, it’s my family’s involvement with small charitable projects in Kenya that proved to me that the internet is so much more than a tool of convenience. It can provide an overwhelming level of human interaction that was unavailable to us just ten years ago.
Last Thursday, my father e-mailed me to let me know that he and my mother had given the go-ahead for construction to begin on a school outside Nairobi. When it’s completed, the school will serve as a home to 30 Kenyan children whose parents have died of AIDS and have no other means of support. But it will also represent two years of fundraising and management on the part of my parents, coupled with dogged organization and negotiating on the part of the two Kenyan priests who will administer the school. So when I heard construction could begin, I e-mailed Father Boniface Mungai, one of the priests in charge of the project in Kenya, to wish him congratulations.
I have only met Boniface twice, but because we keep in touch regularly, and because I have seen pictures of his family, ordination, and parish, we are much closer than we would have been after only two face-to-face meetings. Knowing the person who is receiving the donations to build the school makes the project itself all the more real to me.
The internet has expedited the process of building the school every step of the way. Once Boniface and another administrator, Father Kimani, had secured four bids for the construction contract, there was no need to arrange for both of them and both of my parents to coordinate an (expensive) phone call. They hashed out the details electronically and quickly settled on a bid. My parents’ ability to be hyper-involved in the contracting and planning of the school has helped bridge cultural barriers that may have gotten in the way of progress otherwise, too. My mother said that Boniface and Father Kimani’s understanding that they needed to keep my parents apprised of the schools progress created a “kind of a melding between our United States expectations of ‘we need a date when this is going to be done’ and Kenyan expectations of, ‘whenever you get around to it.’”
Of course, my parents had to rely on “traditional” tools to fund the school, too, such as connections to wealthy potential donors. Their largest donor, however, and partner in overseeing the project, is an Austrian doctor whom my mother communicated with for months before finally meeting her.
The school grew out of a project of my mother’s that relied upon the same type of relationships, built and sustained over the internet. For about a year and a half before they committed to funding the school, my mother ran an informal child sponsorship program, through which members of our parish could donate tuition money for children in Boniface’s parish.
The idea of supporting a child’s education is a powerful one, but what made the project all the more popular amongst potential supporters were the pictures and updates that my mother received about the children and passed on to the donors—something she plans to continue doing once the school is running. It’s been an effective way to ensure that people continue to give, she said, since donors are not just “sponsoring a child in Africa.” they know the child’s name, family situation, and progress. They can put a face to the child’s name.
