District team members have literally made some hard drives to truck these used computers to needy Indian schools and offices

“They’re having a great time with them,” says Darlene Lopez, administrative manager of the Tohono O’odham. (The tribe once was called the Pima by conquering Spaniards and later was known as the Papago, or “bean people,” until they voted in the ‘80s to change their name to a phrase in their language which means “desert people.” With some 216,000 members, the tribe is second-largest in the state.)

Several adults and children alike are being trained on the machines, she adds, at the facility which hosts a library, community room and recreation area used by tribe members.

The digital divide is deepest on the nation’s reservations. According to an article in USA Today, in 2000 only 9% of Indian homes had a PC, compared with 47% of whites.

After working among the Navajo and Hopi for much of the past three years on a massive abandoned uranium mines project, Glynn Alsup came to know their needs well. He alerted the Logistics Management Office in L.A., which has an inventory of computers available to donate. On the other side of the state, in the Sonoran Desert where they work as dam operators in Gila Bend on the Painted Rock Dam, Don May and Cliff Olson phoned the tribal school. “We just called ‘em and they were all for it,” May recalls. The first contribution two years ago led to last fall’s donation to the admin center. Originally, a 1996 executive order set up the program nationwide.

Preparing for one of his regular inventory monitoring expeditions, Romano Caturegli loaded up one of the District rigs—except the vehicle contained many of the used high-tech prizes soon to be turned over to needy Indians. Because the hard drives had been erased, there wasn’t a security issue involved in the gifts, Caturegli explains. “They were elated,” he says of the recipients, and he plans to repeat the District’s largess again this autumn.

Closer to home, the District also gives away its second-hand computers to Los Angeles-area schools. Last year, St. Turibius Elementary School, Vista Heights in Moreno Valley, a special education school in Bellflower, a high school in Lancaster and Valley Christian Academy near Vandenberg AFB all got badly needed computers, monitors and other surplus office equipment from the District.

St. Turibius, a Catholic K-8 school in downtown Los Angeles, had no computers in its classrooms before the District’s donation. Now many of the school’s 300 mainly Hispanic students are learning Microsoft Word and soon will be logged onto the Internet on the 18 computers given by the District. “We really do appreciate it,” says Olga Echiribel, office manager. “And we can always use more."