La Carpio Slum

La Carpio has no known internet connectivity, partly because of major lack of resources but also because of geographical isolation. It is actually within the capital city of Costa Rica, but because it's a slum built around a garbage dump, it is nicely isolated from surrounding areas by a river on each side, a garbage dump on the third, and the only way in and out is a thin road on a sort of peninsula.
Our partnering with the missionary Steve Edwards who has been serving that isolated community for the last five years, has shaped the Christian impact in that poor area.

A computer lab is already in place and running, installed in August 2008. Steve, the missionary there, has been using the lab almost exclusively to allow kids to use. However, with little supervision, the lab has been largely just an arcade. This has also served to open up the lab to become a nice dish of viruses.
The proposed solution has been taking place in the last few months with the active role of our team through the hard work of our coworker Brendan Blowers.
The first step was some considerable maintenance work, including cleaning off the viruses and loading office tools and training tools on each computer.
The second step was networking the computer lab (12 computers).
In the past months the kids spent inordinate amounts of time playing senseless flash games.

After introducing a few “new games”, there has been the children have increased their interest, and a few specific kids are exhibiting potential for more training and higher-level learning.

One of these “new games” is a new programming language software that makes it easy to create interactive stories, animations, games, music and art.

Then while the kids are “playing” they are acquiring high level skills and at the same time are exposed to the Word of God.



Opportunities vs. Challenges

We had the opportunity to spend some months in our former missionary field in Pto Ayacucho, Venezuela.

We were able to visit some relatives and friends there. Rosalia and I were teaching and preaching in some churches there. There is a lot of need of good teachings about different Christian topics related to families..

While we were there, we faced sometimes the frustration that Christians who are lacking of education have, when they try to access knowledge and training using technology.

We sometimes had to deal with electricity cutoffs, very limited access to internet, and slow internet speeds (200 Kbps) when available.
People there spend 3 to 5 minutes just to have access to websites like Google.
For our ministry these and other barriers become tremendous opportunities all along Latin America and the Caribbean, to serve communities and individuals with education, technology and digital resources.
There are two main needs for us right now: Funds and Human Resources.
We want to encourage you to partner with us in the big challenge of using education and technology to help growing the church.