Google maps play a critical role in mapping rural areas. I thought of starting it from schools since they are the knowledge agents who carry the novelties into rural villagers in general when compared to the adults.
As part of my rural meetup, the morning session was to visit a school and I dropped into a school and met a click of millennials who just completed some revision classes and were waiting. This knowledge sharing session was an extremely exciting one through my local guide journey. I realized the fact that the digital divide is real and is existing in the rural areas of Batticaloa, Sri Lanka too.
During the session, when I asked them have you ever heard of Google and it’s products, the only word I heard from the audience was about maps, having that in mind, I gave them a short introduction about Google map, street view, and other information. Also, I let them experience VR with the Google cardboard I got at the summit last year. I got goosebumps looking at the enthusiasm shown on their faces. Being excited by the response, I felt like sharing more and more and I did.
Moreover, I explained to them my green moves too. They were even excited to hear about things like planting trees and cleaning beaches and also they urged to inform them if I’m hosting an event like that I’m future and they really willing to join me.
Also, they asked me whether is it possible to conduct similar knowledge sharing sessions time to time and I accepted the request with much pleasure. Also, I showed them sessions from India teamed up with Google Maps and Google Earth to create interactive learning tools for children in rural India which was featured by @JuanCh in LG connect. I want to say big thanks to @TraciC and the whole Local Guides team who were involved in this project.
However, this took around 2 hours and I left home with a heart filled with joy and satisfaction.
The second part of my meetup was to map a rural area and I selected Mandur which is 35 km away from Batticaloa town. However, the road condition is the major the challenging aspect for people accessing this area. When I started from Batticaloa, @nazeem and @Mansoor07 joined me. Nazeem came from really a very long distance.
We went on two motorbikes, this was the first time I went on a motorbike to a meetup. Assuming the road conditions, I didn’t want to take the risk of driving to the meetup location. Even though the journey was a bit hard, through gravel roads, bumps, potholes, cattle on roads, it gave an enormous satisfaction at the end of the day since there were a lot of editing, uploading of pictures and review writings were left. We did as much as we could and it took around two hours
We started from home at around 4 pm and it took an hour to reach the location. Since it got late when we finished the meetup and there were no street lamps on the roads, we had to leave the destination around 6.45pm even though there were a lot of places left to be edited and mapped. However, I have planned a lot of meetups in such rural areas where the actual need exists gathering scholars now living in various places of Sri Lanka and are native to rural areas.
Even though, this was a very tiring journey, the satisfaction gained through updating Google maps to support travelers feel like home, at the end of the day was bliss!
@KarenVChin , @ErmesT , @LucioV , @SalmaanN , @SoniaK , @brittym , hope you will also be interested in this.
More Photos please check this Meetup album
