Protecting Endangered Cultures

In 2007, Ted Hein was trekking through the mountains of Peru. After a long day of hiking, he arrived at an impoverished small town, where, he had heard, he could take a bus to the next section of the trail. So he stood at the side of the road and waited.

A group of indigenous children, each of them around 10 years old, was standing nearby looking bored. Hein, who was on vacation from his job as director of the IT department at the personal care company Burt’s Bees, passed the time by chatting with the children; they told him their school was temporarily closed due to their teacher’s illness. They proudly showed Hein the school through an open window: a single room, desks, a few well used notebooks, and a whiteboard. Nothing more.  

Hein remembered he had some educational games on his iPhone, which he thought might interest the kids. They were fascinated. “I showed them a logic game,” he says, “and one of the children was doing really well. But he was struggling to type anything on the keyboard. He asked me, ‘Why are the letters all scrambled?’” Hein realized the boy had never seen a keyboard before, let alone a computer.

The bus showed up and Hein eventually flew home to Durham, N.C., but the image of that child’s classroom and his inexperience with the digital world stayed with him.

When he returned to work the next week, he noticed a stack of laptops—only a couple of years old—ready to be disposed of. An idea began to form. Hein knew of the foundation One Laptop Per Child (OLPC), whose mission was to produce low-cost laptops for impoverished children around the globe. He understood OLPC had both innovative hardware and a unique pedagogical approach to integrating computers into primary education, and it used open-source software.

Here in corporate America, thought Hein, laptops have short lifespans, with slightly outdated but good technology getting thrown out every few years. Rather than build computers from scratch as OLPC was doing, why not donate these old systems for another purpose?

The laptops are loaded with carefully curated educational content in indigenous languages, and they are designed to be used offline in areas without internet connection. They have custom-designed keyboards for indigenous languages and use Linux rather than Windows for better performance and stability. The laptops have robust content in most every academic subject, including offline Wikipedia, PhET STEM simulations from University of Colorado, LibreOffice (open source office software), image and video creation tools, and a digital library of books (biblioteca) and videos (videoteca).

“In many cases we believe we have created the largest library of digital content for that culture,” he says. “We are using modern tech to support, preserve, and repatriate indigenous languages and knowledge that is threatened from an educational system that has otherwise excluded them.” And it’s working.

“We have our own knowledge and technology,” says Seyaringuma Maku, a community leader who belongs to the Arhuaco people, a traditional culture in the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta mountain range in northern Colombia. “But the Arhuacos are also willing to learn Western ways. We see technology as a very important tool. We want to share with others, and for them to understand, value, and respect our way of life as older brothers and guardians of water and the Sierra. Computers are useful tools,” continues Seyaringuma, speaking in a video produced by Repurpose-IT. He is the academic coordinator of the Bunkwimake ethnoeducational school that has received computers and teacher training from Hein’s organization. “We must use this technology to teach about nature and to respect Mother Earth.”

Hein’s project is addressing an urgent need. In Colombia, where Hein’s work is now focused, the indigenous groups are perhaps less well known than those in the Brazilian or Peruvian Amazon, but Colombia is home to 116 distinct indigenous cultures, 65 of which retain their own language. Indigenous communities amount to a narrow sliver of the country’s overall population: only 4.4 percent. And although the Colombian constitution does, in theory, provide for indigenous people’s rights, they are frequently violated in practice.

The government in Bogotá, the country’s capital, could do much more to address indigenous educational inequality, according to Hein. He says the Ministry of Education, which tightly controls the curriculum and relies heavily on standardized testing, has dragged its feet when addressing the inequality that impacts over half a million indigenous students throughout the country—this despite the National Indigenous Organization of Columbia (ONIC) successfully suing the government to force it to address those inequalities.

Now Hein, together with his team of volunteers at Repurpose-IT, are working closely with ONIC to tackle this educational inequality. They are helping combat “the non-contextualized curriculum, outdated pedagogies, and the digital divide” that afflicts indigenous Colombian children, he says. “It’s my life’s true Camino. I certainly didn’t plan it. I never said, ‘Oh, I’m going to go and address educational inequality.’ But now I feel compelled to keep going.”

Hein grew up with a love for technology, adventurous travel, and nature. But it was at WPI he had an experience that would set up the rest of his life. As a newly arrived freshman, he went to see a film showing in Alden Memorial. While he didn’t know anything about the movie, he was immediately entranced.

The film was Koyaanisqatsi, a wordless documentary directed by Godfrey Reggio and composed of slow-motion footage of scenes that seem, at first, to be unconnected. Cars crawl along crowded freeways. Waterfalls and waves crash into clouds of vapor. Mining vehicles drill into the earth. A sunset is reflected in a skyscraper.

After a while, though, the connections reveal themselves, and the film, set to a score by the composer Philip Glass, becomes a warning about the environmental destruction and the loss of indigenous wisdom. In the Hopi language, Koyaanisqatsi means “life out of balance.” During the ending credits, a Hopi prophecy appears on the screen: “If we dig precious things from the land, we will invite disaster.”

Reggio suggested that Hein look into ecopedagogy, a movement that promotes critical awareness of interconnectedness, fostering action toward social and ecological justice by transforming traditional education through experiential learning, critical thinking, and community engagement. Reggio and Hein talked for hours—and have remained in contact. Reggio donated his films for use on the laptops and ecopedagogy is now a core part of the Repurpose-IT teacher training.

After Hein returned from Peru in 2007, he set to work. First, he tested the concept in Bhutan. He contacted the Ministry of Education, and within a few months, he was on the ground, delivering three Burt’s Bees corporate laptops, wiped and loaded with educational programs from the One Laptop Per Child project, to a remote elementary school high in the Himalayas. The children had never seen a computer before, but they started using the devices immediately. It was at that moment that he knew the idea had legs.

“These schools had over 1,000 students,” says Hein. “And I was donating only three laptops. But they were so appreciative—it was obvious they didn’t have anything like it. And I thought, ‘Gee, there’s something to this.’”

Hein spent several years traveling to remote, impoverished areas in Honduras, Kenya, Peru, Bolivia, and Panama, delivering laptops to schools and speaking with local communities about their most urgent needs. In Peru, he met with Sebastian Silva, a Peruvian programmer with a background in open-source software who ran the NGO Somos Azucar, which develops free open-source educational programs for impoverished schools. Hein and Silva began working closely together to curate their own Linux environment and content. In collaboration with local educators, Repurpose-IT organized training sessions for teachers in indigenous schools, introducing them to the technology and apps. “We provide an intense three- to four-day customized teacher training during staff development week when school is not in session. Frequently, many of these teachers have never received formal pedagogical training. So not only are we explaining how to integrate the laptop content into their classrooms, we are also teaching them how to teach.”

By 2017, Hein, who was then working at the semiconductor company Wolfspeed, was getting restless and wanted the project to make a bigger impact. Partnering with a large, national organization, he thought, would help scale the project up to ensure the greatest impact. A year later, Repurpose-IT joined forces with ONIC.

Repurpose-IT now works exclusively in Colombia, where Hein and his team make regular trips to remote indigenous communities—donating technology, training teachers, working closely with community leaders, and returning for follow-ups. So far they have taught 252 teachers from 46 schools representing nine distinct indigenous cultures.

One of the most vulnerable indigenous groups in Colombia is the Wounaan, a group of 10,000 individuals living on the banks of the San Juan River in the Pacific Coast rainforest. Long impacted by violence between warring armed groups, the Wounaan have suffered displacements and crippling poverty. “This close-knit community and school thrive despite challenges of abject poverty and food insecurity,” says Hein. “This decade, they’ve been displaced from their ancestral homeland several times due to ongoing violence.”

Hein is helping prepare the children for the future, but he’s also putting them in touch with their past. Several years ago, he discovered a series of documentaries from the 1960s called “The Wounaan Trilogy,” directed by the pioneering anthropologist and feminist scholar Elizabeth Lapovsky Kennedy. Because most people in the community had never seen the films, Hein hosted screenings in the villages and loaded them onto all the computers that he donated to the Wounaan people. The films, says Hein, became a catalyst for dialogue between the schoolchildren and the village elders, who were their age when the films were made, deepening children’s connections with their history and culture. “They were from the time before we became poor,” said one elder, after viewing the documentaries for the first time. 

Hein’s work is being increasingly recognized. In 2019, UNESCO selected Repurpose-IT as a partner organization for their international decade of indigenous languages. And in 2022, Hein, who lives in Durham with his wife, Elizabeth, temporarily stepped away from the corporate world to focus on Repurpose-IT.

Today, among many projects, he is helping foster connections between indigenous communities in the United States and Latin America. He has recently partnered with the Eastern Band of the Cherokee Nation, which has long been on the forefront of technology. The Cherokee Nation agreed to donate used laptops for use in Colombia. And although Hein’s mission is to enrich indigenous education, he is adamant that he and his team have learned more than they have taught. “It’s not a model of ‘we have solutions and you don’t,’” he says. “We’ve got content and tools, and there are many things to learn from one another.”

The core values and project-based learning approach that Hein gained from the WPI Plan have significantly shaped his work with Repurpose-IT.  “My WPI education, particularly through the IQP (Interactive Qualifying Project), has instilled in me a lifelong commitment to viewing the intersection of technology and society with a critical eye,” he says. “I often reflect on how Repurpose-IT is like an ongoing IQP, guiding me to responsibly harness technology for meaningful, positive change in communities.”