Fiesta! [2016-01-29]
Drums are pounding here, and I can hear the “1-2-3-4-5-6-7-8-8-7-6-5-4-3-2-1” of the dancers as they practice their steps. Yes, it’s the school fiesta today at Compostela National High School, and all of the last minute preparations for the afternoon festivities are in full swing! This afternoon Neal and I will experience yet again the pageantry and magic of the dances in honor of the patron saint of the school. We’ll enjoy the bonding with the teachers here, our family for almost ten years now, and we’ll eat great fiesta foods. It’s a happy close to a productive week of Reneal work!
The schedule unfolded a bit differently than planned. We expected to work most of the week at Tipolo National High School in Mandaue City, but classes were canceled this week in Mandaue due to the International Eucharistic Congress being held in Cebu City. Thankfully Sir Don, the IT teacher at Tipolo, was kind enough to report to school anyway. We were joined by Mark, a 9th grader at Tipolo NHS and Sir Don’s helper in the IT lab, as well as Kenneth, the 7th grade son of Ma’am Nerry (the IT teacher at Compostela National High School). Last month Jade had worked with Sir Don to install the Ethernet cable, so the five of us were able to get the lab up and running with the server very quickly. By the end of the day, each of the nearly 30 computers already had penguins on the screen! We returned on Tuesday for system testing, which went well. We departed in the early afternoon, feeling great about our progress. Sir Don is already very knowledgeable about Linux, so the system is in good hands! We will return to Tipolo on February 22nd for the teacher orientation training and to meet the computer student specialists.
Leaving Tipolo, we took a multicab to SM Consolacion, our nearest mall with good computer stores. We purchased three UPSs, three AVRs, and eight power strips – the bulk of our remaining project needs. Neal had a cup of coffee at Bo’s (a great coffee shop chain here in the Philippines), and we also picked up some good crusty bread and a few groceries. With a load that big, we don’t attempt taking a multicab home – we waited in the taxi line until we were able to get a taxi home to Compostela. It’s nice to have everything in the apartment now ready for distribution to the schools!
Wednesday Neal built up and tested the last three servers. We asked if we could move up the start date at Mulao National High School to Thursday, since we had unexpected time on our hands. Thankfully they agreed, so Thursday morning found us winding our way up the hill to Mulao. It is an upper barangay in Compostela, so thankfully the municipality provided transportation for us and our gear. We were joined again by Kenneth, as well as Ma’am Nerry and Jade. We were deeply appreciative of their respective school heads for letting them join us for our first day of work at Mulao!
Mulao NHS has ten Pentium 4 units that were donated several years ago; we’ve seen this model at many other schools as well. Several of the units no longer booted due to hard disk failure, but they are perfect for the Reneal system. Reneal also donated five additional desktops and monitors received from Free Geek. It was a long, hard day of work, unpacking and setting up the five new systems, cleaning the ten old units and adding memory and new CMOS batteries to them, measuring out the network cables, mounting the network switch, setting up the server, and so on. Jade had to make a run down to the main part of town to get a bigger drill bit for mounting the network switch; there’s not much shopping around Mulao! The Mulao teachers kept us full of great food and snacks. When we finally called it a day, we had most of the hard work completed! We’ll return on February 8th to resume our installation there. We still need to route cables to about half of the units, but they’re the ones closest to the network switch so that will be quick work. We’ll also do our testing and work with the IT teachers there, then conduct teacher orientation.
Meanwhile, our sights are set on Monday’s installation at Tabok NHS. Jade’s principal has graciously agreed to let Jade join us again for the first day, which will be a huge help for Neal and me. We’re jumping around a bit more than we expected, but all in all we’re probably a bit ahead of where we expected to be and extremely thankful for all of the help we’ve received from Team Philippines!