Our laptops well received

Docklands resident Ryan Saville has just returned from his “Give A Laptop” trip to Nepal, where the initiative has restocked a school at the epicentre of the 2015 earthquake.

Give A Laptop started in 2016 when Mr Saville travelled to the mountain town of Barpak, where the 7.8 magnitude earthquake hit the year before.

He came back to Australia and put the call out for donations of second-hand laptops.

“The goal at that point was to set-up one main computer room, get the infrastructure all working and then later send one laptop at time, maybe one a day or a week.”

And that’s what Mr Saville did over his recent three-month trip.

“We took something like 35 or 40 laptops over. But, you can’t normally get 40 laptops on a plane. It’s not a normal thing to do.”

Such a large quantity of laptops, taken apart and wrapped in bubble wrap, weren’t exactly inconspicuous in an airport environment.

Mr Saville kept an example laptop battery and his airline approval documents with him, and ran ahead at each security stop to explain to staff what they were about to see.

The school, whose computer room before the earthquake consisted of a handful of bulky old computers, treats the laptops as “gold”.

“They lock them up at night, they literally put them in a safe,” Mr Saville said.