Mukulat Magic [2013-09-05]
[Written Wednesday night] It seems like a week since yesterday morning. About 9:30 Tuesday we headed over to the Palace Hotel in Arusha for a conference organized by African Malaika, an organization that we’ve worked with for several years now. Participants included a team of newly-arrived volunteers from Buffalo, New York, representatives from several local schools and orphanages, and the wife of a local Member of Parliament who is very active on behalf of education. Being the resident geeks, we helped set up the projector and computer. There were several presentations about on-going and planned work by the various groups, and Reneal IEO had a short time slot as well. We also enjoyed two dance presentations by local youth, the second of which reminded us a lot of the dancing we know and love so much in the Philippines. There were then some break-out sessions followed by lunch.
Neal and I were itching to get to Mukulat Secondary School, which was on the agenda for the Buffalo group in the afternoon; we really wanted to get our work started there, since time is so short. We all arrived at Mukulat about 4 and were greeted by a traditional Maasai dance performed by the students. Neal and I soon zipped off to the IT lab. Wow, a huge amount of work had already been done setting up the computers, monitors, and keyboards on tables laid out neatly in the lab! Cloth covers for the computers had been sewn and were draped carefully over each machine to protect them from the dust.
The school head identified seven students who lived in the girls’ dormitory to help us connect everything up. I doled out the equipment while Neal showed them what to do. They made quick work of the 16 units, and we began the high-anxiety process of turning them on to see if they were functional. It wasn’t 100% successful, but the initial look was pretty good. That was just the first step in the arduous process of getting to know each and every one of these 16 units (and their idiosyncrasies) REALLY well over the next 24 hours. We left at about 7 with a feeling that we’d made a big step forward. It was also significant that the school head and the IT teacher were right in there with us until 7; it was clear that we had a great team to work with!
A couple of folks from the Buffalo group expressed interest in joining us, so the next day we all piled into our dear friend Edward’s taxi along with the Mukulat school head for the 30 minute ride to the school. For Reneal IEO, it was an absolutely magical day! One of our Buffalo compatriots laid out and fabricated Ethernet cables for all of the computer units in the lab, a staggering task that he worked on the entire day – he went through an entire spool of Cat 5e cable (enough to go from end zone to end zone on a football field!). Neal worked on setting up the server. Our other Buffalo hero joined the rest of us in dashing from computer to computer, adding memory, disconnecting hard disks, resetting the CMOS on a few that had BIOS passwords, doing memory checks, setting up network boot, and troubleshooting various problems. And then, starting from the back of the room on the right-hand side of the lab, we brought up the machines one-by-one as thin clients. Ah, it was fantastic to see the log-in screen and know that they were alive and ready for use! About 1:30 or so, the power went out so we carried on with tasks that we could do without electricity – but knowing that all of the computers are working and are ready to go! Neal and I marveled at how much easier this was than our first project in Compostela back in 2008. Having a homogeneous population of computers this time was a major step forward in efficiency, plus having fairly advanced members of the Pentium III family rather than Pentium I and II machines. Of course a few years of experience from then until now helped too!
We all left Mukulat about 4 and then Neal and I rushed over to get some additional power strips that we were lacking and another spool of Ethernet cable for our work next week. Neal has a couple of software glitches to figure out tonight, so no rest yet. We also had a chance to chat earlier this evening with our contact in the district office; we are planning to visit some candidate schools a week from Friday.
All in all, a day of remarkable progress that couldn’t have been done without some unexpected and absolutely amazing assistance from the Buffalo team!