Monday, August 22, 2011

Week 2

During our second week at Shree Lukla School the exam period continued followed by two well deserved holiday days (for pupils) so teachers could mark the exam papers. They were extremely busy marking the exam papers over these two days. School begins as normal on Monday.

During this time we kept busy in the computer room. A summary of our week:

We have eight fully working computers. Three computers in the PC hospital are in a “computer coma”, their power supplies have blown and we will need new ones to revive them. When Guy took the CPU’s apart they were wet inside (likely the reason for the blown power supplies) resulting from the extremely damp room. As expected, we could not save one of the PC’s with a broken motherboard (Capacitor Buzz) and one monitor with no backlight. This CPU has been a donor for parts and we made a super teacher computer with double RAM, disc drives and a backup hard drive.

We now have four computers connected to the internet and networked to share the new colour printer.

In order to repair the comatose computers we will require three standard switching ATX size power supplies - 250 W min.

Dr Guy treats patients in the PC Hospital

 Wet CPU from the damp computer lab
We set to work this week recording some AudioBooks, it was lots of fun and we enjoyed laughing at each other getting nervous and failing to read the story fluently! We feel that this is a great project and that it will be most useful to the school. So far we have finished 11 books that we brought from with us from India – they are really nice as most are relevant to the local area. The books are on a CD and are also accessible as files on each of the computers. So far, we have only found one set of headphones and so more sets will be required to allow groups of children to use this facility at any one time. We hope to continue this project during our time here and will speak with teachers to find out which are the favorite or most useful books to record.

 Recording Audio Books

Continuing with the book theme, we are happy to help out with the new library. While painting is still on hold, Emma set to work logging all of the current books in an EXCEL spreadsheet that should help with getting the library catalogue/borrowing system up and running. She has also completed the computer room displays, the help documents and the local A to Z of Lukla. These are  not yet printed, as a trial print and lamination proved that the paper is too damp to laminate or print neatly...

This coming week we hope to increase our communication with the staff. We had a meeting with all the staff this morning, and a round of "Meero Nam Emma Ho, and with much amusement among the other teachers "Meero Nam Guy Ho". Yep, Guy means Cow in Nepalise. They have expressed an interest in building a school website for Tilak to maintain and keep up to date, and have offered computer classes for any staff. We will unveil the new computer lab to the staff, and help them with setting up personal folders along with printing and using Windows XP/Office.

During our two day weekend holiday, we took a walk to Namche. The weather was perfect and we had wonderful views of Mount Everest. We feel very privileged to be working and living in this beautiful part of the world.

 Weekend Views - Everest and Lhotse (centre)

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