It Starts at the Keyboard: Why I Teach Open Source from the Bottom Up

What drives a man to spend his savings, carry eight terabytes of knowledge across an ocean, and give it all away for free? It is a question I have been asked many times. This is the answer.

Where It Began

I was a student at the University of Khartoum, studying Surveying Engineering. In our holidays and vacations, my friends and I would travel back to our home towns and teach. Not for money — for the love of it. We taught high school students preparing for their finals: mathematics, physics, and science, prepping them for the Sudanese high school certificate. It was my first taste of what teaching feels like: the moment a student's eyes light up when a hard idea finally becomes clear. I never forgot that feeling.

The Long Road Away

After graduation, I worked in road and bridge construction in Saudi Arabia, then migrated to the United States, where I again worked in roads. It was honest work, but somewhere inside me I knew I wanted more than concrete and asphalt. So I went back to school — this time for GIS, with a focus on natural resources management and watershed analysis. That decision shaped everything. GIS taught me to see the world differently: the land, the water, the people who depend on them, and how knowledge organized in the right way can help. It showed me not a career, but a way of helping others.

The Pivot

Now, at an age when many people plan only their retirement, I have been planning the opposite. I began reaching out to my home town university, to non-governmental organizations, and to government offices, offering free training in computers, programming languages, project management, and community service education — aiming at youth, women, and families, to help them become productive and independent on their own land.

In 2022, I took my commitment a step further. I gathered eight terabytes of open source data — documents, manuals, and resources — loaded it onto six desktop mini computers and three laptops, and travelled with it all to Sudan. I visited the University of Khartoum, the University of Nyala, and others, offering free training: computers, typing, and honest conversations about technology. My dream was to set up an open learning center.

It was not easy. I faced many problems. Some people did not want the knowledge to be free — they wanted to profit from what was freely given. It would have been easy to walk away. But then I saw something that changed me forever.

The Office That Could Not Save

During my visit, I discovered something humbling: most students, teachers, and even PhD holders did not know how to type on a keyboard. They did not know basic computer habits that most of us never even think about.

One case struck me harder than the rest. In one department, the staff typed official letters again and again without ever using Save As. Each new letter overwrote the previous one, and they quietly lost the serial numbers and the track of their correspondence. Whole months of official letters, gone — not lost in a fire or a flood, but lost because no one had ever shown them a single command.

I sat down with them and showed them: how to save the current document, how to create a folder for each section, and how to set permissions so that only the staff allowed could enter that folder. That was it. Half an hour of the simplest habits, and a department began to function again. They were relieved. I was shaken.

The Lesson That Drives Me

That moment answered a question I had been carrying my whole life. The gap is not about intelligence, and it is certainly not about degrees. A PhD holder can be stopped just as easily as a beginner by a missing "Save As." The gap is simply access: nobody had ever shown them. And what had never been shown, nobody could ever know.

So I committed myself, on that trip, to keep going. And I committed to start from the bottom — always. No matter how old you are, no matter what grade or school you graduated from, you start at the basics. Typing. Files. Folders. Save As. One command at a time. From that solid floor, everything else becomes possible.

That is why I adopted open source, Linux, and geospatial tools as the vehicle for this mission. They cost nothing. They run on the old laptops people already own. They are owned by the learner, not rented from a company. And they are the same tools professionals use every day — nothing watered down, just honestly taught.

An Invitation to Keep Learning

I am sharing this story now because the road I chose is not the only one, but it is open to everyone. You do not need to wait until you are my age to start sharing what you know. Start with one person. Show them one thing — even something as small as Save As. You have no idea how far that one minute will travel.

And if you are a student, a teacher, a PhD holder, or anyone who ever felt behind: you are not behind. You are exactly where every great learner starts — at the bottom, with a keyboard in front of you. Type one letter. Save one file. Master one skill. Then teach it to someone else.

That is how a department keeps its letters, how a village keeps its land, how a community keeps its future — and how a life, one small lesson at a time, is changed.

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— Sallah