Retooling for Tanzania [2019-03-31]
It’s nice to be home, and we’ve made good progress in catching up on deferred tasks here in the US. We’re still wrapping a few things in Cebu, but now our thoughts are turning to Tanzania. We’ll be heading there in August, with big plans for expansion and upgrade.
Back in Cebu, Reneal Team Philippines has been deploying the units from the latest Free Geek donation. They also paid a visit to Compostela National High School-Day to make a few repairs and add memory to some of the units there that had only 512Mb. The Team is currently waiting for the end-of-the-year paperwork flood for teachers to subside before continuing with a few remaining tasks for School Year 2018-2019. They have done great! We are also looking forward to our OJT Ervin Formentera’s college graduation in May! After graduation, Ervin will continue assisting Reneal with his computer technician skills.
Six UCSAP-Reneal Scholars in Cebu are graduating from high school this year: Nerisan Arena, Jherwin Juntilla, Angelina Pogoy, Jandy Wagas, Marelle Mae Wagas, and Jimylyn Zanoria. We wish each of them great success in their future plans! Special congratulations go to Jandy, the class valedictorian for Compostela National High School-Day! Two other 10th grade scholars are “moving up” to senior high this year, Maurine Baculad and Daryl Lito.
Back here in California, we have almost all of the server parts that we need for the upcoming Tanzania work. We hope to add computer labs to four new schools, replace the laptop servers that were installed in two schools in early 2019 with desktop servers, and upgrade the servers at two existing schools. That’s a LOT of server parts! Our home currently looks like a computer warehouse, but Neal has been working steadily this week and already has the six servers built up. We are so grateful to “Network the World” for their generous donation in early 2019 to help fund this work.
Robert Nyangaka, Reneal’s computer technician in Tanzania, has been visiting the schools to help with beginning of the school year tasks. David Nyangaka, Reneal School Liaison, is researching the process to get customs and tax exemptions for the donated equipment that we’ll be carrying with us. We’ll be selecting the recipient schools soon. And the 12 scholars at Mwandet Secondary School are doing well so far.
The big unknown right now is getting enough laptops to meet our goals. We are excited to be working with the Danville Sycamore Valley Rotary to help us with that task. We are grateful for a recent donation of ten laptops from Arm Corporation, but we definitely welcome more donations to give new opportunities to students in Arusha District!
[Photo: server parts for Tanzania]