Anyango’s technology autobiography

I always grin when my aunt compares her typing with mine, stating how I type fast, and how jealous she is of me. She begs me to help her type her work because she is too slow!!! I grin because I was in her shoes only a few years back. I grew up in a house, school and community without any technological device of any kind. The only machine I knew was my father’s music stereo that he used to play his records on. It was sacred, and none of us cold touch it. I always watched him clean it and changed the “needles” that made him play it better. He cleaned it by himself, operated it by himself, and transported it around the house by himself if he needed to.

Thinking of my father’s stereo, I grew up knowing that any kind of machine was sacred, and was to be handled with maximum care, almost fear. So, in awe, I looked at machines from afar. And lack of them did not help to change this mindset either. I started watching TV in my early teens, at a neighbor’s house a block away. It was the only television in a one mile radius, and most of the children my age could congregate in the good neighbor’s house to watch one favorite program, “vitimbi”, once a week. It was a half hour comedy in Swahili, and some children could walk two miles to come and see it.

Then there was the school radio. Our teacher was its master, and we could surround the small radio to listen to different programs broadcast once a week by the Kenya Institute of Education. I remember thinking there was no better job than teaching in the radio, and all the children in the country, plus their teachers, would tune in to listen to your voice! I wanted that job. It sounded so mysterious, and big!!

The most interesting of all these early experiences that made me think of technology as a wonder, were the “walk-in” cinemas we used to see once a month. We could walk to the nearest police station, about two miles away, to see the cinemas every month. I got so curious as to how the pictures were being projected on the white canvas, and so I could o early just to look at the plain white canvas before nightfall. As the rays fell on the canvas from the track, I could not help but think of the smartness of what made them; whether they were machines or people that were the authors of these amazing gadgets, I was left wondering!!

All this time, I had to marvel at technology from afar…and then came the time when I had to actually handle and deal with it. I remember how I respected my neighbor who was a secretary. She earned extra money by typing theses and dissertations for students, I being one of them. I could not believe that she could handle that amount of typing all by herself! When I finally had to type something, it was in Japan when I realized that I needed to communicate with my husband more often, and I did not have enough money to buy calling cards all the time. I learned how to type, and however slow it was, I was proud that I could finally do it. Losing an email made me cry several times, because the pain of retyping the whole thing again, one or two paragraphs, was unbearable.

In America, I learned that I had to type my own work at all times, be it for class or for work, and I quickly developed my typing skills. To date, I communicate more with email due to my early attachment to it. I also think that having never had an opportunity to handle technology at an early age has kept me always aloof about it, and it takes me time to master something, but once I do, I feel in control. I make it my priority to have my children exposed to technology so that they do not see it as a strange thing far from them, but a part of their lives. More so, I am open to learning new technologies and ways of using them in my classroom.