GRACE'S COMPUTER WORKSHOP
When Grace Mwangi was fifteen, she found an old laptop next to a trash can in her hometown in Kenya. It did not turn on, but she took it home anyway. For three weeks, she watched videos at an internet café and slowly learned how to fix it. In 2012, she opened her first repair workshop* in her parents' garage. It had one table, two chairs and a box of old tools that her uncle gave her.(lines 1–9)
Today, Grace runs Laptops Again, an organization that repairs old computers and gives them to schools in poor areas of Kenya. Forty volunteers work with her in a large building near the center of town. Companies and families send them computers that they no longer want. "Many of the computers do not work when they arrive here," Grace explains. "Some of them have been dropped on the floor, and others have been left out in the rain." Every computer is checked carefully, and the broken parts are replaced.(lines 10–15)
Grace would like to fix every computer that arrives, but she cannot. New parts, such as screens and batteries, are expensive, and the organization depends on gifts of money that are often small. So about one computer out of three is taken apart, and its good parts are used to repair others. Still, Laptops Again has already sent more than 6,000 computers to 200 schools. Teachers in these schools say that the change is easy to see. Pupils now do their homework on the computers, and their results in math and science tests have gone up.(lines 16–22)
Last year, 30 computers were sent to a small village school in the mountains. At first, the pupils did not know how to use them, because most of them had never touched a computer before. So two volunteers stayed in the village for a month and taught them the basics.(lines 23–26)
Grace's idea has spread. Groups in Uganda and Ghana have asked her to teach them how to run a similar program, and last year she won a national prize for young leaders. In the future, Grace hopes to open a small training center where teenagers can learn to repair computers themselves.(lines 27–30)