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Team Philippines in Action! [2016-08-07]

Reneal IEO Intern Jade Reyes has been up in Daanbantayan in northern Cebu for the last couple of days, along with Rhog and Lloyd, our two college students doing their on-the-job-training under Jade’s direction at Arcelo Memorial National High School.  The guys worked with Sir Chester at Daanbantayan National High School and Sir Denver at Calape National High School to set up the client computers sent by Reneal and to do the network cabling.  As Jade said, now it’s just “plug-and-play” for Neal with the main server!  Next weekend the guys will go to Carmen National High School and then back up north the following weekend to do the prep work at Tominjao National High School.

Neal and I are now a month out from our trip to Cebu, so lots of work to do and lots of issues to resolve.  Neal’s work on the Xubuntu 16.04 upgrade is going well but (of course) slower than expected.  We have pretty much decided on a limited deployment for that upgrade in this trip, and we’ve asked Jade to help us with beta testing at Arcelo Memorial before rolling it out to other schools.  While Neal is disappointed somewhat by the delay in deployment, it definitely removes a lot of stress for this trip.  We also found out that the room where we planned to add a Senior High School lab at Arcelo is in a building being demolished this month (!), so we’re in the process of identifying options for those units.  The advent of Senior High in the Philippines has been a big challenge for the entire country in terms of teachers, buildings, curriculum, and resources, so we join everyone in trying to be flexible as this big change rolls out.

On the Tanzania front, we had a great meeting this week with Judy and Denis Severson of The School Fund (TSF).  We discussed options for a joint Reneal-TSF project in 2017 in Tanzania.  The next step is to prepare a list of questions and information for the TSF computer lab contact, so we can try to nail down what would be most helpful and effective for them.  We are working with Reneal School Liaison David Nyangaka as well to identify Arusha-area candidates for 2017.  Through Judy, we also had a chance to meet Maya Escudero, a delightful and dynamic Filipina who is very active in Bay Area philanthropy.  We hope to meet up with Maya in September when we are in Cebu at the same time!

The Polycom laptops have all been tested, and the vast majority are now ready for shipping.  Katherine Yen is coming tomorrow and we’ll start putting together some boxes for Philippines 2017.  The small laptops are designated for Tanzania 2017; I’ve just ordered the double-walled boxes that we need for packing those.  Neal has found lots of good deals already on server parts, so things are looking great for 2017!