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2023 Reneal TZ-US Teams Reunited [2023-09-16]

It’s great to be back in Arusha with Reneal Team Tanzania!  We arrived late on September 5th and were met at the airport by Reneal Country Director David Nyangaka.  We finally got to meet James and Juma, the newest members of Reneal Team Tanzania, in person.  One of our main goals for this trip is spending time with the Team to identify major challenges and to share Neal’s detailed knowledge of the system with them.  Another key goal is doing some updates on the thee Reneal MacBook labs, since last year we were focused on updating the regular thin-client systems.  All in all, it’s a big chunk of work but we are optimistic that we can get it done together with the Team.

Timing was such that we were able to attend the annual general meeting of our partner NGO Arusha Node Marie (www.arushanodemarie.or.tz).  It was exciting to see the presentations by the students of Mwandet Secondary School and Einoti Secondary School, who demonstrated some of the capabilities available in the Reneal system.  Reneal and ANM signed a collaboration agreement in 2014, and we are happy to continue this partnership along with Habari Node and the Arusha government. 

We started the MacBook update work at Mateves Secondary School on our first Friday in-country.  We hope to get their lab back up and running this Monday, and then proceed to updating the system at Enyoito Secondary School.  Neal has been working on a couple of unique server issues as well.  My focus is on attempting to repair laptops that are no longer functioning.  Our Team has been contributing on each of these efforts, and we’ve also had some great Team meetings to share ideas and knowledge.

We shared with the Team a demonstration of the server developed by Teacher-in-a-Box (www.teacherinabox.org.au), an Australian NGO.  These servers are packed with educational content that is accessible to teachers via their phones or tablets.  Thanks to our generous donor Apto Solutions (www.aptosolutions.com), we will be able to deploy TIB servers in three secondary schools as a pilot program in 2023.  David is working on identifying the candidate schools for this effort.  The tablets used for Tanzania’s national census effort in 2022 were turned over to primary and secondary school teachers, so the TIB server will leverage this donation. 

Thursday Neal and I visited JR Institute of Information Technology (www.jriit.ac.tz), a local college that offers coursework leading to a certificate or diploma for various aspects of IT.  We were first introduced to JRIIT last year and are very excited about the opportunity to partner with them.  Neal is planning a seminar with the JRIIT students to discuss the use of AI in programming.  We met with the students and have a general plan worked out for the seminar.  We are very grateful to Mirjean and Fatma Pirbhai for this connection with JRIIT.

As always, the time will not be enough but we are very happy to be here and are so grateful for David and Reneal Team Tanzania who keep our projects thriving!

[Photos: visit to Mateves Secondary School, student demonstration of website development at the ANM annual meeting]