Since 2013, I have been living and working on Tanna, a small jungle-covered island lost in the South Pacific. Here, at the Lowanatom Mission School, I share my expertise in computer science with the local boys and girls. It is pioneering work. When I arrived, it was the first time that computer science was being taught here and on the nearby islands…in villages just a short step away in the jungle, where there is not even electricity. At the same time, it is a beautiful work that allows me to participate in some way in something new, something that will help improve the lives of the local young people … and share with them their everyday life.
Well, life is a bit of a surprise, isn’t it? When I left the Lowanatom mission here in southern Vanuatu at the end of 2008, I had no reason to think I would ever come back… although I kept in touch with the local missionaries. With the help of our parish and our benefactor in the Czech Republic, we were able to buy a few computers for the school and set up the very first computer class in the province. Then I went to Madrid for World Youth Day 2011 and met the former priest of the Lowanatom mission. After a little chat, he told me, more jokingly than seriously, that they now had computers, but they still lacked a computer science teacher. The joke became semi-serious, then serious, and at the end of 2012, after defending my doctoral thesis in Paris, I left for a year of volunteering. So here I am, on Tanna, a small jungle-covered island lost in the South Pacific.
