Laptops for South Sudan
Retired naval lieutenant who served with UN hopes to help schools
In newly independent South Sudan, where roads are dirt, electricity comes from portable generators and people live in earthen huts, there is still the Internet.
That’s why Esquimalt resident Peter Dibben, a recently retired lieutenant with the Royal Canadian Navy, is looking for cast-off laptop computers he can transport to a South Sudan high school when he heads there this month, so students and teachers can go online.
“I would really like to donate half a dozen laptops that could really make a big difference to people in that school,” Dibben said.
Dibben, 49, spent about six months in the newly independent Republic of South Sudan as an unarmed UN military observer.
He said he got the idea for the laptop-computer donations while talking to the headmaster of a high school in South Sudan.
The country officially became an independent state July 9, following a referendum the previous January. That independence followed many years of civil war.
Dibben said despite the widespread poverty and lack of infrastructure, many towns and cities have erected cellular telephone towers.
Laptop computers, equipped with cellular modems and charged up with portable generators, could provide some Internet access.
“You’re not going to download a movie on it, but you can use it if you want to access email or get some information for a school project,” he said.
Anyone with a laptop to donate can contact Dibben at dibben.pw@hotmail.com. You need to act fast, however: Dibben is due to leave for Sudan from Ontario Feb. 14.
A divorced father of two grown children, and now a grandfather of three, Dibben is committed to paying his own way to South Sudan. Besides his request for laptops, his principal aim is to assist in setting up a co-operative for processing a nut grown in Sudan.
While there, Dibben said, he realized that one of the few resources South Sudan has is a supply of a locally grown commodity called shea nuts.
Also called lulu nuts by the Sudanese, the nuts produce an oil that is valued in cosmetics sold around the world.
He said he hopes to act as a middleman, linking funding sources in North America with an African agency that works to set up local co-operatives to operate processing plants to extract the oil from the shea nuts.
Dibben is already online with one potential funding agency in Vancouver.
Ultimately, he believes the co-operatives might spawn other benefits.
“I can see whole bunches of schools there so moms can bring their sons and daughters to provide a cheap, or even free, education while the mothers are working,” he said.
Dibben said his motivation stems in part from his Christian ethic, but it’s mostly just something he wants to do.
“I don’t have to do this but it’s like something God is calling me to do, and it’s something I just want to do,” he said.
rwatts@timescolonist.com
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