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On the road [2016-02-15]

Wow, so much has happened since my last post!  We completed our work at Mulao NHS last Wednesday, holding orientation training for the teachers.  Thursday and Friday we reported to Compostela NHS to work on miscellaneous tasks, and early Saturday morning we headed off to northern Cebu for the entire week.  We’ll have teacher orientation training tomorrow at Almacen Torrevillas NHS in Medellin.  It’s been a whirlwind, but things have gone very well so far.

We celebrated the Chinese New Year holiday last Monday with a return to Mulao NHS, which is quite a bit off of the National Road.  The Municipality of Compostela was kind enough to provide us with transportation to and from Mulao each day.  Jade was able to join us on Monday, so we quickly completed the physical installation work and moved on to testing and training.  Neal spent a lot of time with Ma’am Ares there, showing her how to take care of the server.  Mulao NHS does not have internet, and it’s probably not in the cards in the near term given how far they are from the main part of town.  Hence the resources on the server were greeted with great enthusiasm by the teachers! It was really a joy to spend three days there with the Mulao teachers.  We’ve had a chance to get to know them over the years during in-service training sessions, and they are really a great bunch!  We also enjoyed the culinary efforts of Ma’am Susan and Sir Joseph, two very talented teachers (and chefs).

I spent quite a bit of time with Ma’am Nerry, the IT teacher at Compostela NHS, discussing the computer resources and how to optimize their use.  The rapidly expanding student population plus the imminent start of “senior high” (grades 11 and 12) in June of 2016 have resulted in many facility changes that motivated our brainstorming.  I think we have a path forward that will keep the Computer Student Specialists busy for a while!  It should result in better availability of the computers on campus.  Neal puttered around on the server making some updates, and he also made an emergency repair to replace a CPU fan with noisy bearings.  It does seem like things wait until we come to break down!

Friday night found us scrambling to pack for an early-morning departure on Saturday for the town of Medellin in northern Cebu.  We first began our work in northern Cebu in May of 2014, following typhoon Haiyan in late 2013 which devastated so many schools in the area.  Starting then, we have installed Reneal systems in three schools and are adding the fourth this week at Almacen Torrevillas NHS.  Given our ambitious schedule of installation, visits to the three existing schools, and scouting for later this year, we were thankful that we could get a good start on Saturday and Sunday.  The Municipality of Medellin graciously provided transportation for us and our gear to Almacen Torrevillas.  The folks there were also willing to work over the weekend – an extremely generous sacrifice on their part!  And the support extended well beyond the computer lab, with people providing us with delicious food, transportation, and arranging for lodging.  We have just been overwhelmed by all of the schools with their generosity and hospitality!

Jade had made an earlier trip to Almacen Torrevillas to do the network cabling, so things came together extremely quickly.  By the end of the weekend, all of the hardware was working and ready to go and we had begun testing.  Tomorrow we’ll have teacher orientation training!

Wednesday and Thursday we’ll be visiting the three schools from 2014 and 2015.  We are excited to see the IT teachers again and hear how things have been going!  We have a short list of updates to make, but mostly we just want to find out if there have been problems that we can fix.  Friday we’ll be scouting some schools – actually revisiting some of the candidates that we visited last year.  This will be for projects later this year.

All in all, a busy couple of weeks but full of excitement as we’ve met old and new friends and put new resources in place for the students in Cebu.

[No photo today due to frightfully slow internet]