The ASU SolarSPELL team’s final two days in Vanuatu were spent at the national ICT Days conference, May 17-18.
The conference proved to be a fantastic opportunity for the team to explain, demonstrate, and all around talk about the SolarSPELL and the Library Lab.
The team never would have imagined such a level of interest!
I do believe our table was consistently the busiest one there! There was regularly a crowd of people around it, excited to learn about it, eager to use the tablets we provided, to surf the library’s content.
We had an eager audience in the Smart Sistas ICT Camp for girls, when the whole group came over to visit us.
We had a few groupies who spent quite a bit of time with us.
Longtime collaborator and friend of SolarSPELL, Ian Thomson, from the University of the South Pacific, took some time to talk with the team.
There was even an opportunity to demonstrate the SolarSPELL to the Australian High Commissioner to Vanuatu, Jenny Da Rin!
The team so greatly enjoyed being able to talk with so many ni-Vanuatu people about the SolarSPELL.
The team wondered many times whether there was a language barrier, as we explained everything in English, and there are a number of technical terms. However, the rate at which people returned to the table, after listening to the explanation once, and then explained to their friends and relatives how SolarSPELL worked, and how to surf the library’s website, showed us that language was no real barrier.
There are so many pictures from this fun event!
