From the outside, the building looks abandoned, but inside, 24 children are being taught by Director Rosa Sandoval and her assistants in a makeshift classroom. Our Rotary team from RUG has just arrived at the “C.E.P. Felix Arnold Will Solis” Kindergarten after an hour’s drive into the more rural part of Roatán. We are here to hand out a tool that originated 4,700 years ago and is still useful today: the abacus. It developed independently in several cultures around the world and is brilliant for teaching basic counting as well as learning colors.
The excited children tear off the plastic wrapping and, with our team’s guidance, learn the basics. Our RUG member from Norway, Dorothy “Dot” Bjorøy, is visiting the island and has joined the team for this abacus operation. She walks around the room demonstrating how to use the abacus, counting in Spanish—and loving every minute of it.
We ask her if she thinks it’s a good idea to bring abacuses, and why.
“Absolutely. It gets the children interested in simple math by moving the beads back and forth. I started school when I was four years old, and it was with an abacus.”
RUG member Dorothy "Dot" Bjorøy remembers her own abacus exeperience as a child when she teaches the kindergarten children the magic of this ancient tool. (Photo: Roger Bjoroy-Karlsen)
Rotary focuses on education among other key areas. Education is a powerful way to combat poverty and give young people a better foundation in life. More than 775 million people worldwide aged 15 or older are illiterate—that’s 17 percent of the world’s adult population.
Our goal is to strengthen communities’ capacity to support basic education and literacy, reduce gender disparities in education, and increase adult literacy. We support education for all children and literacy for both children and adults. So we are starting with these small but very useful tools that can boost knowledge among young children. RUG has been running Operation Abacus for a while now, and the goal is to bring abacuses to all kindergartens on the Bay Islands.
Let’s hope that in the future, some scientists from the Bay Islands will say it all started with a tool from ancient times!
Happy children and the Rotary members: Dorothy Bjorøy, Heidi Blake Maly, Taisha Matute, and Angela Claire Bjoroy-Karlsen. Mission accomplished for now! (Photo: Roger Bjoroy-Karlsen)