Vocational Training Team to Phillipines

Greetings fellow Rotarians,

As team leader of the District 5020 Vocational Training Team (VTT) to the Philippines I want to take this opportunity to introduce myself and our team to the clubs in our zone.

Our District has developed an agreement with District 3770 on the island of Luzon in Philippines to exchange teams of teachers. The objective of this exchange is to upgrade the skills of Filipino science teachers. Our outgoing team was chosen in February and I was selected to lead the team. Our team has just completed its first team meeting during which we concentrated on learning about Philippines.

Team members come from around our district, two from Courtenay-Comox, one from Duncan, one from Victoria, two from southern Washington and myself, from the Rotary Club of Lantzville. We are all experienced teachers and looking forward to our work with colleagues in Philippines. One of the needs identified by Filipino teachers was the need to improve their use of computers in the classroom. As I have corresponded with contacts over there it seems there are few computers for them to use. One email talks about two computers per school and another about one projector per school district. We are considering how we will respond to their expressed need with these few resources.

I have been advised that taking computers over and leaving them is unwise as they operate on 220 volt power and Canadian computers will need adapters to be of any use there. I have two ideas that I would like to implement as part of this project.

1. I would like to watch for possible projects while I am in the Philippines. When I return I would like to suggest one or more projects which clubs in our district might take on as part of their avenue of international service.

2. I would like to purchase 5 computers and 5 projectors while in Philippines. The number 5 is significant because it represents 5 team members so each team member would use the combination while overseas, but also there are 5 school districts in which we will be working. When we finish we will leave one computer and one projector in each district as a legacy of our trip. It is also worth noting there are 5 Rotary clubs in Nanaimo.

Please consider whether your club would be able to fund one of these computer-projector combinations. From doing a cursory web search, prices in Philippines appear to be similar to prices in Canada. Based on that information I believe that a suitable combination can be purchased for under $1000. If you were to agree to provide our team with $1000 to carry out this purchase I would personally undertake to get the best value I could with that money and, if there is any left over, to use it to purchase other educational resources that could be useful in the schools which we visit. If you were only able to fund a part of that cost, we would work with the amount that we were provided.

I thank you for considering our request. Any assistance which you can provide our project would be greatly appreciated.

Yours in Rotary, Glynn Currie Team Leader VTT Philippines 2011