COSTA RICA – Two computer laboratories

Playa Potrero and Brasilito are two communities in the Guanacaste region of Costa Rica. They are underserved and vulnerable communities with inadequate public education, inaccessible public services, unreliable and informal employment and high levels of violence.
Located near the Cathedral in Playa Potrero is Abriendo Mentes, a non-profit organisation trying to help the two villages to access education and employment. Abriendo Mentes can be roughly translated as 'opening minds', appropriate, since one of their projects is to install a computer lab, or classroom, in each of the communities. This will allow them to offer, free of charge, computer classes to the childrens' after-school curriculum, thus opening their minds to the modern world.

A Costa Rican tech company has donated several computer towers for the project. Our funding will allow the purchasing of computer monitors, power cords, keyboards, mice and computer tables, allowing the completion of the two classrooms.

Once in operation, classes will be offered to schoolchildren but also to adults in the two communities. In the first six months classes will be offered to some 100 children and about 20 adults, but with time these two classrooms will serve some 250 people. The opening up of the eyes of so many students from Playa Potrero and Brasilito to the modern, hi-tech, world through these two classrooms, will help in a very real way to change their lives.