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Brownouts, Rats, and a New School Year [2015-06-03]

I’m writing this in the dark in our apartment, as the power has gone out again.  These outages, referred to locally as “brownouts”, have been following us around perniciously for the last few days: from Ormoc City to Compostela to Consolacion and now back again in Compostela.  And – HURRAH! – the electricity has just begun again, giving me that intense feeling of joy that one seldom experiences in America where utilities are taken for granted.  How unbelievably lucky we are to have such reliable services in the U.S. 

We were extremely busy last week, helping out with in-service training at Compostela National High School and then conducting our all-day Reneal IEO System Administration Training on Friday for 23 IT teachers.  Thanks to lots of help from Team Philippines and folks from host school Tayud National High School, it was a great success!  We then spent the weekend in Ormoc City, on the island of Leyte, visiting our U.S. Peace Corps host family.  The brownout, lasting almost 24 hours, was made easier by a visit to a nearby resort with an ocean breeze to counter the intense heat.

School Year 2015-2016 kicked off Monday here in the Philippines, as did our schedule of visits to the 14 Reneal IEO-equipped schools in Cebu.  Today we returned to Tayud NHS for our follow-up visit.  They are heavy users of the system, so it was quite a blow for all of us to discover that a rat had chewed through both of the network cables that run from the server to the second IT lab.  So much for redundancy!  Thankfully Jade and Jillian patiently worked to splice one of the Cat6 cables, and we were happy and relieved to see the Ubuntu penguins back alive in Com Lab 2 before we left.  One of the electrical workers doing projects at Tayud NHS fashioned an elbow piece out of PVC to protect the cable near the “rat door” leading into the attic of the building.  We’ll return later to splice the other cable and make the fixes permanent (hopefully).  Other than the rat damage and brownout, it was a great day!  We continue to learn new, unanticipated skills here at Reneal IEO!  There are lots more schools to go, so here’s hoping no other odd issues arise to delay us.