How did Nerds Abroad get involved with our various partner organizations? Over the next few weeks, I will be writing blogs about our past involvement and future plans with our partner organizations around the world. Today, I will talk about my trip to Haiti in with an organization called NCompass.

Last March, Nerds Abroad was asked to join a missions trip to Haiti with NCompass, in partnership with the Mission of Hope. I have a great friendship with many of the members of the NCompass team and knew about their orphanage in the community of Titanyen, Haiti. I learned that they were able to get a fleet of laptops into the country so their students could learn computer and technical skills. I knew that Melci, one of the Haitian workers at the orphanage, was using the laptops to teach computer courses, but it revealed an opportunity to me: What if there was a standardized curriculum that could be used around the world? This is one of the major influences on the creation of our TechBox℠ program.

We are continuing to work with Ncompass, Melci, and the Mission of Hope to further refine TechBox℠ curriculum to be used with our partners around the globe. Moving forward with the Mission of Hope, we will coach and certify their staff as Nerds Abroad in order to teach their older students how to maintain their new computer lab they are building, and use them to learn programming!

Stay tuned for more stories coming this fall!