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Chaos Part 2 [2018-06-28]

Well, that was a long hiatus for the blog!  We were off on some personal travel and then had a dear friend from the Philippines visit us for a few days.  In the meantime wonderful donations of computer equipment and fabric rolled in, so we were at capacity here at headquarters.  With a frenzy of packing, we’ve been able to ship sixteen boxes to eight different schools in the Philippines this week.  There is still more to do but we’ve made great headway.  And our team members in the Philippines and Tanzania have been on the move too, visiting schools and preparing for new installations.

Before we left, we had received donations from Free Geek in Portland (www.freegeek.org) and UNeed2 in Tracy (www.uneed2.org).  That put us in great shape for desktops, but I had started to worry some about our monitor supply.  Thankfully those worries are gone now!  A few days after we got home from vacation, we got an email from the National Cristina Foundation (www.cristina.org) that a local elementary school had selected Reneal to receive the old monitors they were replacing.  And then I heard from my sister-in-law that her office is also replacing their monitors.  I’ll be heading up to the Seattle area in a couple of weeks to pack and ship those.  What wonderful timing!  We’re now in fantastic shape for our 2018 and 2019 projects in Cebu!

We also received a large donation of fabric, thanks to the generous support of my former co-worker and her sewing club.  Reneal sends this fabric to high schools in Cebu that offer a major in garments and sewing.  It gives the students a chance to work with a large range of fabric types without having to purchase them.  That fabric is now on its way to three different high schools.

Since the new school year just started in the Philippines, our computer technicians Lloyd Tuñacao and Rhog Sampan have been visiting the schools in Cebu to check out the computer labs and make repairs.  We are very pleased to have a new college student, Ervin Formentera, working with Reneal this year as a part of his on-the-job training (OJT).  Ervin is working under the supervision of Sir Jade at Arcelo Memorial National High School, and he’s been accompanying Lloyd and Rhog to the schools to learn the ropes.  We are so grateful to have these hard-working guys on Reneal Team Philippines.  We have already shipped much of the equipment to Cebu for two new computer labs (Calero Intergrated School, Cantumog National High School) and two libraries (at CTU Carmen and at Daanbantayan National High School).  As soon as the equipment arrives, Reneal Team Philippines will be able to do the installation.

Reneal School Liaison David Nyangaka has been very busy in Tanzania as well, and we are so pleased now to have his brother Robert Nyangaka also working with Reneal.  The schools there are on mid-year break, so David and Robert visited at the end of the first term to check out the computer labs.  They are also helping our four new schools prepare for installation in September.  The other big news is that we are contemplating a major purchase of computers from World Computer Exchange for shipment to Tanzania.  It’s a long road, but we are excited about the possibility of getting a big batch of machines there in addition to what we’ll be carrying with us when we go in August.

Neal spent a lot of time this last week wrestling with the off-line RACHEL Plus Wikipedia trying to improve the indexing for searches.  Unfortunately he hasn’t been able to get it working yet the way he wants, in spite of multiple days of hard disk rattling here.  He has also been building and testing a lot of servers for the new installations.  We’ve been able to send three of those to the Philippines already – in fact, one of them went back with our friend and Reneal supporter Rogie Abala who was visiting from the Philippines!  Thanks Rogie!

 [Photo: picking up equipment at Maloney Elementary, with computer teacher Paul Seipert and our visitor from the Philippines, Aboitiz Digital Strategy Manager Rogie Abala)]