Bali to Singapore, Skype connections

Bali to Singapore, making connections!

One of the best things I’ve done while being in Bali has been to set up some of the kids at Widhya Asih Orphanage with Skype buddies at Singapore American school. Never having used Skype before, the students battled with the slow (but still very much present!) internet connection Stella’s Child has installed at the orphanage and the slow (yet still very much working) laptops that Stella’s Child have provided for the managers of the business programme and installed Skype for the first time on their machines.

The students asked questions about why they should even have Skype: what was even good about Skype anyway? Most of them already had already been introduced to Facebook so… why now introduce this? I found myself explaining it in very basic terms: when they were rich and famous and living in Jakarta or New York or Singapore, they would be able to phone home and speak to and even see their friends for free so long as they each had an internet connection. They were very intrigued by this. I explained that there were students in Singapore from all over the world who wanted to connect with them and help them with their English. They could hardly believe this.

When we finally connected with Saif, Sunita and Ros in Singapore (three high school students hoping to use this to count towards their service hours, sitting in their bedrooms and waiting for our connection as promised), well… the kids were just blown away. They could hardly believe that anyone in Singapore wanted to speak to them and were over the moon to have new ‘friends’ in Singapore. Since then, we have set up a Skype-buddy schedule and each of the managers has their own friend with whom they will have a weekly meeting. Already, more students from the SAS have signed up and I have no doubt that, by the time I leave, more than half the students at the orphanage will have a Skype buddy.

Yey for technology! Yeyyy for service-learning programmes at privileged schools! And yeyyyy for Tim Cameron at Stella’s Child for providing the machines and internet connection to make all of this possible for the kids at Widhya Asih!