Why is friendship important in creating a community and a business in the new Africa?

              This week I started with 3 young students:Confort,Hilda & Lilian. They are learning about computers, starting with the basics.
This is the 2nd day am working with them. On the first day we just introduced word processing and
writing.Today will be even more exciting as we will move onto creating emails and sending emails. And that moves them into being able to connect with others.And of course,
 they want to create a Facebook account.

As we launch into this new program, I am reflecting on the fact that although I have spent months reading about training program from around the world, and have at least 20 different ideas of prepackaged curricula, I decided not to use any of them.What I know is that I have to start by fully engaging the students. Like Paulo Friere, I think about how the process I am following has to begin with what is more important to the students.My internet connection is not good. My computer is unreliable and disturbs our work. Often, I feel I don't really know how to orientate all this.I know that I want to them to learn Foss, and so I ask myself: Maybe I should put Linux on the computer and see if the experience will be different? But maybe that is a question for tomorrow. What I do know is that this is important for them. They are “just” three people in our little internet café.But what this experience will do is to take them to other places in this vast world, and will help them to learn how to live more carefully and more aware.
These opportunities have so much potential.
 This what I received from one of the students, as a first mail to the others and me: ""Friends are the people close to you. you can have [different] types of friends; bad and good friends. the bad ones are out to destroy while the good ones are out to build. secondly, the bad always
  take the best in you while the good bring out the best in you." Together, we are working on bringing out the best in each of us, while trying to create some protection against being destroyed in this difficult work environment. Creating this new digital Africa is really  hard work – although it can be fun as we learn to use
Facebook and send emails. I believe that we all need good friends and mentors to achieve progress, to keep our critical eyes open,  and to help us keep going when the “bad friends” discourage us.
Thank you for reading, friends!  We value your encouragement.
Marc Stephan Nkouly
Technology Evanlgelist