Tuesday, June 9, 2009

Back To School

As a time-honored tradition, I got my haircut before school started. Sitting in the plastic chair, i felt that same anxiousness I was so familiar with as a student all those years and I began to wonder if all teachers feel that. I'm sure not every teacher goes to Target to get a G.I. Joe or Barbie lunch pale, but they must still experience those same feelings they did when they were kids, picking what design they wanted on their accompanying thermos.
It's wonderful to be back at school, at the time of this writing about a week and one half in. Already the malaise of summer has dissipated and I find I have a reason to wake up every morning. Classes have not yet started, per-se, but I have had some great opportunities both for project preparation and completion.
I would first like to mention and thank Grandma Pickle and her community who donated 171 books to my school on their own dime, which I received about 3 weeks ago. I have also spent months planning with a fellow Namibia program colleague, Emily Negrin, to connect her students in California with my students in a penpal program. Over the months, the penpal program snowballed into a books and materials drive, gifts from her students to ours. I anticipate receiving 5 boxes of books and materials from Emily and her students for our library and the use of our students.
With regards to Gram, her friends and community, Emily and her students, the hardest thing about doing development work is being able to count on people. Many of you have told me that what I am doing is good, a mitzvah and charitable and noble work, but without people like them, people like me are nothing but a drain on the community in which we planned on serving. They pump the lifeblood through my veins and through the veins of my community. With that, I say, and I think we all say, daghan salamat po (many thanks, with respect).
As for other projects that have been keeping me busy, I just finished building a Linux-based firewall called Smoothwall. I have never worked with Linux before and it proved to be more challenging than I had anticipated. All in all, building and introducing the Smoothwall server into our network took a good 7 hours. Smoothwall protects our entire network from hackers, caches data to free up bandwidth, blocks specified content like porn and lets us monitor overall network traffic. My principle, Ma'am Rachel, was very impressed. I would like to be sure to give a special thanks to Dr. Dave in batch 266 for his patience and guidance.
Otherwise, being back at school means hanging out with the students. Here is a video of the fourth year ICT students doing a 20 person human knot on the first day of school.

The kids really make it all worth it. People back home can break their backs getting books to our library and I have spent 9 hour days at school working on computer projects, but the kids really make it all worth it. I feel so much older all of a sudden than I actually am. To conclude this post, Attached is a candid picture Sir Erwin took of me wasting time with some of the fourth year ICT students, showing them pictures from my Europe trip; apparently Aaron has a handsome nose.


6 comments:

  1. Do remove the 'po' in the 'daghan salamat' phrase. While it has become more acceptable in the past decades to speak in Filipino or sugarcoated Tagalog, combining linguistic elements of Tagalog and Bisaya makes you a laughingstock. People around you are just polite not to bare their palates in laughter while you are around. Once you're out of the scene, you're shredded to pieces. Trust me, I'm Cabalianon. And I am not doing some sort of smear campaign; I just want to keep my kababayans from doing their nefarious deeds.

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  2. OMG! Telling someone they are a laughingstock is uncool, dude, and considered insulting. So yeah, you are on a smear campaign and doing a really crappy job of treating people in the process. Be polite, it won't kill you. And will make the rest of us respect your opinions a whole lot more. I'm appaled at the way you spoke to someone so kind. Relax, man.

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  3. So what if the gramma is wrong, what "nefarious deeds" have the Kabbayans done? I like how you missed the whole point of the entry: learning about other cultures. No one's perfect, get over yourself and leave people experiencing life alone.

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  4. Don't mind whoever that anonymous is!. Need not to waste you time on it.As long as you did a great job here in the Phils. I guess,that's all that matters, anyways.

    There's only 1yr and a half to go Sean and your job will be done here in Phils. So, there's nothing to worry about. At least you tried to speak the Filipino dialect. I'll give you a thumbs up for that.. =)

    -Roselle

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  6. Shame on you, Mr/Ms Cabalianon, for saying that "once he (Sean) is out of the scene, he's shredded to pieces." Hindi tinuturo sa kahit saang paaralan sa Pilipinas kung paano maging bastos sa kahit sino, kahit kailan.

    It isn't hard to be polite. Sean has been trying so hard to speak your dialect. The least you can do is shut your big foul mouth.

    If your intentions are good, why don't you just tell your "kababayans" to stop making him a laughingstock (if that is indeed true) and start appreciating this man's effort to speak your dialect and know your culture. Kung hindi mo masaway ang mga kababayan mo at maturuan ng simpleng pag-galang, wala kang karapatan na umasang makakapagsalita ang taong ito ng matatas na Tagalog o Bisaya!

    Oh, by the way, we do not put "s" at the end of Tagalog words to make them plural. It is totally unacceptable.

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