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Wrapping up [2016-10-07]

It’s been a long and eventful two weeks here in Daanbantayan for Reneal Team Philippines.  We are all tired and ready to go home, with just one more day of work between us and the bus ride home.  We have finished installing the Reneal system at Calape National High School and Tominjao National High School.  We had orientation training for teachers at both schools, and it was really a delight to work with such dedicated and interested folks!  We hope it translates into heavy computer use for students and teachers in the coming months at those schools.

We were thrilled to install our second Polycom lab at Tominjao NHS.  A million thanks to Polycom for the generous donation of laptops that made this work possible!  And we delivered the last box of the Free Geek (www.freegeek.org) flat panel monitors this week.  Thankfully there's another set of boxes already on the way!

It has been great to see the continued recovery from Typhoon Yolanda (Haiyan) that devastated this area in northern Cebu almost exactly 3 years ago.  The schools were very hard-hit, but it seems like at last the damage has been repaired and they are moving forward with new construction for the Senior High classes.  It was really a dream come true to support these schools in Daanbantayan that had so little that survived Yolanda!

During this time in Daanbantayan, the four of us have been staying at a home right on the beach that we found advertised on Airbnb, the Rainbow Paradise.  It has been quite an experience!  Gerd, Elvie, and their daughter Naki have made us feel so at home, and we have had literally an around-the-world culinary trip!  Gerd, an electronics engineer during his career days in Germany, is also a master chef and has treated us to dishes from Italy, Germany, France, Spain, England, India, and of course the Philippines.  It has been a joy to see our OJT students, Rhog and Lloyd, have a chance to sample so many new and different foods!

On the down side, most of us ended up having one ailment or another during our time here.  The rapid transitions from rain to intense heat this time of the year seem to always wreak havoc on Neal and me, and we’ve both been coughing and sniffling almost the entire time in the north.  Neal even missed a couple of days of work, very unusual for him.  Thankfully we both seem on the mend at last.

The week has also brought continued questions regarding the future role of Reneal in the Philippines in light of the widespread DepEd Computerization Program (DCP) donations.  Much to discuss at the upcoming Board of Directors meeting in November…