Asked of her say of the ongoing CILC training in their high school, a parent of one of the participating students in “Pulot” asked incredulously in the sing-song local tongue heavily laced with Waraynon, “Computers? Internet? Here, in Pulot? Impossible! When the crow finally turns white, perhaps!”
Well, whether she believes it or not, information and communication technology (ICT) is indeed invading the relatively comforting backwardness of her community. After all, Mark Dipad and Tony Castro – both computer instructors of the nearby Sorsogon State College – Institute of Management and Information Technology (Bulan campus) – are already at the barrio’s gates ramming down the ramparts of technological ignorance not only of the students but some of their teachers as well. They are trainers connected to the iSchools project, and both are in high spirits that their involvement will lead to technological advancement which will eventually change Pulot’s quaint lifestyle.
San Francisco, a barrio of Bulan town in Sorsogon, is most often referred to by the barrio folks as “Pulot”, meaning sticky in their dialect – attributive to the quagmire the soil turns to during the rainy season. The public high school sits on top of a hill situated behind the nipa houses in this quaint community’s center. A pair of paved pathways each a meter wide leads the occasional visitor from the main road to the school gate. A frontier barangay surrounded by hills and mountain ranges, the towns of Magallanes and Irosin are a few kilometers to the north; much nearer than the center of Bulan, located almost 9 kilometers southwest. In this geographical setting and the mindset of the people, one might perhaps have second thoughts on Mark’s and Tony’s initial enthusiasm about the project’s success.
