Winding down [2015-02-21]
It happens every time we are working overseas – things are clicking along, we are immersed in our long task lists, and then suddenly we realize that time is running out again. No matter how long we stay, it is always with a sense of surprise, panic, and sadness that the days suddenly appear so limited. It seems especially so this trip as we’ve also been dealing with side effects from Neal’s new medication. While it is always nice to get home, saying goodbye to friends and projects old and new is always difficult. Thankfully we plan to be back in Cebu for two more months starting in mid-May, so that is a comforting thought as we begin to wind down our work here.
Reneal IEO Team Philippines set a new record for efficiency this last week. I joined Jade, Jillian, and Raul on Monday at Liloan National High School, a very large school with about 2200 students. Sir Icot, the IT teacher, had another commitment in the morning. By the time he arrived at noon, the physical configuration (network switch installation, server setup, Ethernet cable fabrication and bundling, setting of clients’ BIOS, memory checks and upgrades, and so forth) was almost completely finished! Jade returned on Tuesday for some system administration training and orientation for Sir Icot, and then Wednesday he held the orientation training for a subset of the Liloan NHS teachers. According to Sir Jade, it was yet another great batch, and we will return to run a cable to their faculty room from the main server so the teachers can use the system from there.
On Tuesday, I was able to meet with the teacher-in-charge at the relatively new Compostela Night High School. Ma’am Nerry, the IT teacher at Compostela National High School and a valued member of Team Philippines, also joined the meeting. The plan is to partition off part of a classroom to create a small computer lab for the students – probably six computers plus a server. This will give the Night High School students a resource for projects and research so they don’t have to go off-campus in the evening to an internet café. I am in the midst of planning how to allocate our current stock of Philippines hardware for this sixth project, as well as to provide additional computers to the largest of the 2014 schools.
Thursday was a holiday, so Neal and I spent a quiet day at home together working. I completed the testing and setup of the computers recently donated by Aboitizland. There are ten computers and a printer ready to deploy, and two computers that can be deployed once we get video cards. I still have keyboard testing to do, but we are so pleased to have these machines to share with Cebu schools! Neal began preparing the server for Compostela Night High School and finished his work on the Kawit NHS server (next week’s installation). He also wrote up some instructions for a program that he wrote to rebuild the Squid partition on the server (at some schools it seems to need a rebuild occasionally, otherwise the internet will work intermittently).
On Friday, two of Sir Jade’s CTU OJT students came to Compostela National High School to help out with some troubleshooting and maintenance. It was a great experience, and we all learned from each other some different troubleshooting ideas and approaches in the process of getting everything into good working order again.
Kawit NHS will send a vehicle Tuesday to pick up Jade, Jillian, and a mountain of computer gear for installation. Unfortunately it is too far for Neal and me to travel at this point in time, but we hope during our return visit in May to make our way north again to see everyone there. In these last two weeks, we still hope to make a good start at Compostela Night High School, get some fixes done at the new 2015 schools, plus address a host of other little things on the list. There’s never enough time, but we still regard it as a miracle that so much has been done. We are so grateful to Reneal IEO Team Philippines and everyone else that has been so generous in helping us!