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Week One in Arusha [2015-10-09]

It’s been a whirlwind this week, but I’m so happy to report that we’ve finished the installation at our first school and will start the second school today.  And at last, all of our boxes are now here!  We were also excited to welcome two volunteers from Kids on Computers (www.kidsoncomputers.org) who arrived yesterday to work with us.  So even though the electricity continues to come and go, we’ve had a really good start on our work here.

Monday we headed to Mringa Secondary School.  There are about 1300 students there, but the school did not have a computer lab.  The Headmistress and computer teachers made sure everything was ready for our arrival.  The tables and chairs were in place, the lab has good security features, and there were electrical outlets positioned well.  They had borrowed a generator that was ready for our use when the electricity was absent.

The computer teachers, Mr. Adam and Madam Pascalina, were with us every step of the way.  We got all of the laptops, power adapters, mice, and socket adapters distributed to the tables while Neal set up the server, network switch, voltage regulator, and UPS.  Then I showed Mr. Adam and Madam Pascalina how to fabricate Ethernet cables from Cat6 cable and RJ45 connectors.  The three of us then fabricated cables to go from each laptop to the network switch.  We had most of that finished by the end of Monday.  Our testing was slowed a bit on Monday because the generator was putting out 260 volts.  While we had a voltage regulator for the server, we didn’t for the laptops and we were concerned about that high of voltage.

Tuesday we were lucky – the generator was now putting out about 230 volts.  I finished up the last of the Ethernet cables, our friend Edward (a taxi driver who helps us with transportation) attached the cable bundles to the wall with cable clamps, and Neal began showing Mr. Adam and Madam Pascalina the server features and the content on the clients.  We were also joined by Asu, recommended to us by the non-profit organization African Malaika.  Our team was finally able to turn on all of the units and make sure everything was working together.  Success!

When we arrived Wednesday, there was electricity coming from the grid!  The day was mainly devoted to training.  Neal met with the students who were selected to be Computer Student Specialists to assist the computer teachers.  The teacher accounts were generated, and then our first batch of teachers arrived for the basic orientation class.  What a fun group!  They were great about just diving in and exploring different things during the hands-on time.  Unfortunately, just as the training for the second batch started, the electricity went down.  There was a bit of a delay to get the generator started.  Once that got running, we resumed training.  However we hadn’t gone too long before the generator sputtered to a stop – out of gas.  We ended up finishing the session using Neal’s laptop as the display, so unfortunately these teachers did not get the most useful part of the training: the hands-on time.  Still, we considered ourselves very lucky that we were able to work as long as we did!

Now on to school #2, Ilboru Secondary School.  This school has older computers that we intend to use as clients, so it will be more work to bring up the lab.  Thankfully we have a GREAT team to help us, and we’re excited about the days ahead!