7th
Hacking in Nigeria
Alhamdu, one of my good friends from Nigeria, was taking a Cisco networking course in Kafanchan when I was there. It was through a small local NGO, and taught in a remote, poor part of a poor country. (Map. This is where there was an outbreak of bird flu when I was in Nigeria, a few days after I’d visited the place. The big problem was that instead of incinerating poultry stocks after the flu had been identified, people were just selling their chickens for food as quickly as they could.)
Unable to get a decent laptop in Nigeria, he got me to buy him one when I got back to Canada and send it with a CUSO volunteer who’d be working in Lafia, the same town I was in. This is when he was 18, and his mother sacrificed some of her savings towards the laptop.
Fast-forward to today: he’s managing the technical tasks involved in getting a cybercafe running in his hometown (in Nigeria, this is more difficult that it seems). He just got his laptop to dual-boot Vista and the Mac OS. Yes, Mac OS. That isn’t easy to do, you have to mess with the internals of a machine to do that, and fine-tune the hardware drivers to make sure the system accepts them. He’s editing the kernel files on his computer to get his wireless card, etc. working.
I’m encouraging him to start a *cough* semi-legal business of finding technical books and manuals online, printing them and selling them at a profit. Fill a local need and sustain his techy endeavours. He also plans to teach a range of computer classes and sell his web design services. Besides for the networking bit, this is all self-taught.
Now obviously none of this is development per se. But I personally am floored by this kid’s motivation and ability to learn. Despite growing up in one of the most tech-unfriendly places in the world, I’d say he’s more tech-savvy than at least 95% of North Americans.
