2015 – First Monday at Kasulu Bible College
Today we started the day by attending the chapel service here in the compound, had breakfast and then drove down to the Bible College, after Bill had shared some videos he had made with Canon Wilson Mafumdi. We also had one of the carpenters in the compound take a look at the front door lock on the house. It got broken yesterday when our housekeeper locked the doors after we had headed to church. Unfortunately she ended up locking in Felix, a male nurse from Germany who is working at Shunga for 18 months and who was down in Kasulu with Christine, who runs Shunga, for an R&R weekend. He tried to force the doors open and succeeded, but he also succeeded in bending the latch so that the lock does not work anymore. Fortunately, he decided NOT to try forcing open the door on the porch, which was also locked. The carpenter wasn’t able to fix the lock so they are going to have to purchase a new mechanism from somewhere. There is a very good lock on our bedroom door, so we will be able to keep everything secure in there, and the locked porch door should also be a deterrent until the front door can be fixed.
New thin clients on the library side of the building.
It was Christmas in December for the Bible College. We started by stringing some new ethernet cat-6 cable to the library side of the computer/library building. The five new thin clients we are installing will be for the use of the students only, so that they will not have to wait for general internet cafe users to finish their sessions. It was a general organized free-for-all of unpacking monitors, keyboards and thin-clients and connecting them to each other and to power-sources.
Of course, we still had to connect them to the server and configure them. As we did not know exactly how many ethernet cables we would need, or how long they would need to be, we opted to purchase a big coil of ethernet cat-6 cable and bring a pair of crimpers and a bunch of ends. Bill made up the first few cables, and connected and configured the first two new thin clients before lunch.
Putting ends on ethernet cables.
We headed back to the compound for lunch. The food was late in arriving, so Bill and Emmanuel Bwatta headed over to the immigration office to register us with the Kasulu authorities. As our visas say that we are visiting we can’t do any work while we are here. Therefore we are not installing the new equipment, just verifying that it arrived safely and in good working order!
After lunch Bill showed everyone (Reginald, Festus and another gentleman, who’s name I didn’t catch) how to make up cables. They made up the remaining cables needed to connect the thin-clients which had been pre-configured at the server level. The men then went to a classroom with a blackboard so that Bill could give them a basic understanding about TCP/IP and firewalls.
Bill teaches a class on tcp/ip concepts.
At that point it was time to head back to the compound for a bath before heading out to dinner tonight. We stopped at a little store on the way back to pick up honey, mango juice and bottled water. How I love being able to run errands like this ourselves instead of depending on someone else to do it. I know that they love to show hospitality, but I HATE asking!
Tonight we will have dinner with Deacon Eldah…and we are driving ourselves there!
After dinner selfie: Eldah, her nephew and third year student, John.
