Student Vanessa Laureano is delighted with the new laptop which survived a mammoth journey all the way from St George’s School in Bogotá to Puerto Nariño in the Amazon, one of the most isolated areas in the very south of Colombia.
The refurbished computer was the generous gift of students and staff at Colegio San Jorge de Inglaterra in the Colombian capital Bogotá. School Principal Jaime Acosta and the school’s IT team made sure that the laptop had all the proper licences and applications required to make it a really useful educational aid – very precious in an area where, unlike Bogotá, laptops are very hard to come by.
The laptop left Bogotá on 27 March this year. It was taken by courier to Leticia, capital of the Amazonas region of Colombia. It had to wait for a while as local contact Marelvi from Fundación Natütama was ill with Dengue fever and not well enough to make the long boat journey up the river to collect it. It finally reached its destination in Puerto Nariño on 5 April – but proved well worth the wait!
Vanessa is studying to be a teacher so she can follow in her mother Marelvi’s footsteps as an educationalist in this remote area of the country.
Thanks to everyone at St George’s for their generous gift which will be put to very good use to help less fortunate students many miles away. One of Bogotá’s best known schools, Colegio San Jorge has a special interest in conservation and the environment – a principal it shares with Natütama the charity dedicated to environmental education and conservation – especially of endangered species – in the Amazon.
“Our school is a natural reserve made up of a savannah wetland inhabited by multiple species of birds, fish, frogs, algae, amonth others. In addition, we enjoy large areas of high Andean forest and gardens that provide food and shelter to many species of flora and fauna which we can appreciate on a daily basis. We have identified 208 species of plants and 35 species of birds.” explains the school’s website.
IT – along with English – is another specialist subject for which St George’s prides itself, so the refurbished laptop was the perfect project to fit the school’s philosophy and areas of expertise.