A film presentation from Offscreen Education

I was just expecting a quick meeting about the Timbuktu website when I turned up, but we had a treat in store first. A chap called Stephen had come along to tell us about the company he's a partner in, which takes kids from the UK out to the Middle East. This is far more than just a glorified school trip! The kids keep blogs, and make films, that are sent back via satellite link - and not just to their own school. 5,000 teachers were involved in the last trip they organised, to Oman, and they did geography projects, and artwork, and saw turtles coming to the beach to lay their eggs, and visited a mosque.... There was follow up in the way of educational packs for schools based on what the kids had done, too. They get as much sponsorship as they can, to keep the costs down, and they also keep the trips carbon neutral, and use solar panels to power their equipment and so on.

Stephen was in Hay because he had been talking to someone who comes to Hay Festival, who knows Ann Brichto, and the twinning of Hay with Timbuktu seemed to be the perfect opportunity to do one of these trips with Gwernyfed High School and Fairfield locally. Part of the package would also be bringing kids from Timbuktu back to Hay, so it would work both ways. Stephen had been up to Gwernyfed during the day to speak to the headmaster about it - and he cycled, borrowing a bike from Drover Holidays.
If it comes off, Hay kids would be heading out there in Jan 09, around the time of the Festival au Desert, which gives a lot of scope for music students, and the Timbuktu kids would come here around Hay Festival time.

It all sounds like a fantastic opportunity for both sets of kids, and it all came about by serendipity. If a thing is meant to work out, I find it often works this way, with opportunities arising that were never thought of when the whole thing started. Both communities would be able to contribute to the success of this project, and both would get a lot out of it - just from being able to see the other place at first hand, instead of being filtered through news programmes on TV, as well as the educational side of it - and schools all over Wales could share in that as it happens thanks to the internet. It's a bit harder to do it so immedieately at the Timbuktu end, as there are only about 40 computers in the whole city, but they can certainly make DVDs to show when they get back.

After that (and the beer, wine and nibbles that went with it - thanks, Luke and Anna), we got down to some discussion of the Hay2Timbuktu website. Not much has been done yet, not least because the man who set the website up is on an extended holiday in Marrakesh (Timbuktu's African twin) and only he knows the password to change certain things about the site. Which is awkward. But he'll be back soon.
We talked about the next newsletter too. The first one is going out hopefully tomorrow, and will be delivered together with Wye Local, the local magazine, so we were talking about ways of improving that and some of the content for it.
Anna had a customer in her shop, for instance, who saw the leaflets about the twinning and said "Is this a joke?" So we need to explain just why we think it's a good idea, and a realistic idea.
Matthew Engel, the journalist who used to live locally, wrote an article for the Financial Times which was reportedly a bit sniffy about the twinning (I haven't read it myself). Ann suggested that we ask him to do a short piece for the next newsletter, giving his point of view, to stimulate debate.
On the other hand, some local people get the idea already. Ann met someone from the Bell Bank Club, which is the local club for the blind and partially sighted, and she asked if there was a problem with blindness in Timbuktu, and how local blind people could get together with Malian blind people to share their experiences.