A couple of weeks ago, I sat in on a staff meeting. It was all in Georgian of course. Instead of sitting there like a complete fool, I busted out my smart phone (yes, you can have those in the Peace Corps). I opened up Google Translate and translated words on the printed agenda that I could not understand. I puzzled things together and figured out what they were discussing. Somewhere on the agenda, I saw that “Google Calendar” was a discussion point. I assumed that this was in relevance to me. About a month or two ago, I taught my organization how to use Google Calendar. And it was a hit! We use it all the time and transparency and productivity has increased seamlessly. It was a good sign that my activities started permeating the organization’s agenda and objectives. Teaching my organization how Google can benefit business was beginning to take off.
To that note, they wanted me to me to conduct a training on how to use Facebook for the newly hired Community Workers. We hired 7 of them to essentially check-in on the World Vision Sponsored Children in the communities. Like any other organization and company, a team needs to collaborate and access the same documents. Want to take a guess on which platform was first suggested they would like to do the business collaboration on? Hint: I just mentioned it. Facebook.
Even though I’m not a fan of using Facebook for business purposes, we conducted a Facebook skills pre-test. I wanted to see how well the Community Workers know Facebook in the first place. When I got the answers back, I wasn’t not sure whether or not to be surprised. Most said that they know how to create lists, shared photo albums, events and the like. Yet, most also said that they do not have an e-mail address. Normally, I take people’s word when they answers questions about themselves on a simple test. However, you need an e-mail address to access Facebook. You cannot open an account if you don’t have an e-mail address. Therefore, how does someone not have an e-mail address and yet know how to conduct all these savvy things on Facebook? My conclusion is that they don’t. They probably misunderstood the question or misinterpreted it for something else.
My colleague also gave me some cultural insight when I was trying to make sense of the data. Apparently, many adults have their children create and open accounts for their parents. Therefore, the parents are probably completely unaware that their children created an e-mail account for their parents in order to access Facebook. Thus, the parent is not in the know that there is an e-mail address attached to their name in cyber-space.
So I dug a bit deeper into the activities that World Vision wants them to do on Facebook. I asked the following: how many pictures are they posting? Who is the intended audience of the photographs? Do they need to edit and send files? Sure enough, the answers told me that Facebook is not the right platform. Thus, I turned to show one of my colleagues the wonders of Google Drive and how compatible it is with e-mail. At first he was not aware that Google had more capabilities than the Calendar and Gmail. Giving a quick tour, he agreed that the G Drive was a much better internet platform for our business needs.
As I started researching topics to include in my training, I reached a fork in the road. The problem was that the G Suite is not translated into Georgian. Facebook is ahead of the game and has its content available in Georgian. How am I supposed to teach people to use a platform in which they cannot read its content? G suite does have Russian, which was a glimmer of hope. (Historical context: most older Georgians know Russian because it was required for them to learn the language when they were occupied by the former Soviet Union. Read more about that here). However, they do not use their Russian skills frequently and they are somewhat rusty. Thus, do I give them the right tools in a language they are not fluent in? Or do I train them on the less effective platform in a language they are fluent in?
This thing kept me up at night thinking. These questions would have NEVER happened to me in the United States. The content on the Internet is overwhelming written in English! Over 50% of the content on the web is in English and all the other languages don’t even come close to that percentage (if you want to see stats, read here). If you don’t speak, write, or read English, you are suddenly might find yourself excluded from consuming or sharing information. You speak a common language, there are things out there for you. But Georgian is not a common language. Heck, most my friends and family back home ask me if Georgia even has their own language.
Thus, I mentioned these concerns and thoughts to my colleague this morning. We both agreed that G Suite was the best option. The buttons on Gmail and G Drive are not complex. They will understand the basic words and format of the platform. I’m also assuming that Google will eventually translate things to Georgian. The community workers will be ahead of the game and know some Google skills before other people. May then they can train their friends and family on Google since they would have used it before.
Coming to this realization, I thought I’d share my conclusion: English speakers are privileged when it comes to the internet. This is privilege plain and simple. If you are reading this blog post right now, then you have a privilege that most of the world does not have. I don’t mean that in the sense that my blog is so fancy that you are lucky to read this. No, you are privileged because you can access and understand most of content on the World Wide Web. You have privilege because you can access internet in the first place.
It is moments like these that remind me why I love the Peace Corps. It opens your eyes to truly how privileged we are back home. We become more grateful and more kind human beings when we finish our service. But we also have a great opportunity (and responsibility I might add) to share the knowledge we have gained from said privilege and teach others. I am equipped with tools to transfer my “basic” internet skills to empower others to access a platform on knowledge.