Day 2- Become One with Your Camera Part 2

Finding students for the male class is a lot easier than finding females. First I let Hameed ask his fellow classmates and professors at his university if anyone wanted to take the class. Hameed came back with 6 students, all between the age of 24-30. Next, I turned to my FabLab teachers and let them know, for the photography class, I'm going to need 14 students, 10 students below the age of 20, and 4 students above the age of 20. This is done because as Amy pointed out, it's a ton easier to teach Pashtuns by age, because they're a very proud people. If there is a 30 year old man learning something in front of a 10 year old kid, he will never learn a thing, because he will never admit in front of the young one that he doesn't already know everything there is to know about everything on this planet. So by dividing the two classes and keeping the males separated by age, I figured everybody would be comfortable enough to effectively learn. A few days later Saidjalal says that he doesn't have any students at the lab that are old enough for the older male class, but has the 10 students for the younger class. This is perfect, this is two extra cameras, and 4 extra girls I get to add to the girls class, having 6 older men is just fine. So now I have my 10 younger students, who signed up for the class with Saidjalal, and my 6 older students who are friends of Hameed, perfect.

Come 3 o'clock, the start of the first, younger class, Saidjalal pokes his head out, yells at all the kids in the lab, "Logan's starting the photography lessons now, everybody come!" So now I'm in a room filled to the brim of kids. I pull Saidjalal off to the side, ask about what happened to the list of 10 kids that he said he had to take the class. Oh, right, now he remembers. Some yelling in Pashto later, I now have 10 kids in my class. Again, just like the female class, we go over all the basics of the camera, from setting it up and turning it on, to understanding all of the buttons, same assignment and all.

After the class was over, Saidjalal brought in the 6 older males for my next class. As I'm getting ready to begin the class, I get a call from Hameed saying he has his six friends with him, they're running a few minutes late..... Again, Pashto Pashto Pashto, and I'm now sitting in a room with 10 older males for my class, as originally planned. Now that I had already gone through one class directly before this with Rahmat translating, the final first class went by very quickly and smoothly, because Rahmat remembered everything we had done the class before and I didn't need to do as much talking or explaining, instead just pointing at buttons on the camera and having Rahmat explain it to them all. For this class, a few of Hameeds teachers brought digital cameras of their own, so I sat down with them and showed them how to do all of the same things on their cameras, and some extra features that their cameras had that the ones I provided didn't.

After a few bumps along the way, and dealing with only 10 cameras, the first lesson across two days went by fairly easily.