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.
