Busy, Busy, Busy, and Tired

The last week since I have been back in Haiti has been a busy one, full of ups and downs. Sean Blesh, formerly the school's technical director and the one in charge of all technology and communications for the school and the relief center, has been in the States seeing his family. So I have been called upon to deal with a lot of the technical issues. Saturday evening the entire system crashed, leaving all of our internet-based communications completely non-functional. I found out about it at about 8:00 and spent the night working on it. I wasn't able to fix it but I did find a way to connect individual computers so that they could get internet, so I made sure that those who were involved in crucial things got the connection they needed. I got to bed between 3 and 4 in the morning, upset that I hadn't fixed the system but pleased that at least it was working in a skeletal way. Well, I was woken at 6:30 Sunday morning by the principle, Tony Dekoter, rapping on my window to tell me that the system was down. I did what I could, hooked up new people's computers as needed (at this point getting internet on a computer was a fairly involved process and couldn't be done en masse), but I was so tired that I couldn't stay and troubleshoot. I explained the situation and told him I needed to get some rest before I tackled it again. So I went back to bed and he called the other tech guy who is available, David Farquharson, former chemistry teacher and wife of the 6th grade teacher. When I had rested some more I woke up to find that David had taken apart the electrical system that our servers, routers, etc. were plugged into! Apparently he felt that may have had something to do with the problem. But it removed my temporary fix, leaving the entire site without internet. It took us until 3 or 4 in the afternoon to get it up and running again, which required us to completely wipe the system and rebuild it from the ground up. It was not what either of us would have wanted to do on a Sunday. We both missed church, David had to spend his day off working, and I was up all night. But, on a positive note, we got the internet up in time to follow the Gold Medal hockey game! I only watched the live stat updates on the Vancouver2010 website but it was still an exciting game!
This basic scenario has repeated itself a couple of times since then. The internet goes out, usually in the evening after David has left, so I have been spending a lot of time, especially at night, getting it back running again. Some people are abusing our system, using the internet connection that we have set up for communications, doctors' use, and for the school administration for downloading things. That has really tested my patience.
Things have been very busy with school, as well. We have physics and calculus classes on Mondays and Fridays and, due to lack of space, those have been meeting in my house. That's been a lot of fun, actually. The seniors at our school are great kids and I enjoy getting to teach them. But we have even fewer resources than we had before (not even enough textbooks for all the kids because the books are mostly buried in storage rooms in parts of the campus occupied by the military) and we are literally sitting around my table (about a 3 foot diameter circle) in old rattan chairs with one tiny whiteboard. But it's been great. Several of the seniors who didn't have the prerequisites and weren't in physics before are taking the class just for fun and they're doing very well. We are studying electricity and physics is just a lot of fun.
Yesterday was World Maths Day, an online competition for elementary, middle, and high school students in basic math skills. The games consist of 60 second speed drills played against opponents all over the world. Tony Dekoter signed up the school for the competition and we set up several of the computers that had been donated to the school so that the kids could compete. They had a lot of fun doing it! Unfortunately, our internet was working unreliably so we weren't able to participate as much as we would have wanted to.
I have a lot of other things I want to say about the school but I don't have the time right now. The kids are doing well, for the most part. You can see the improvement since we started school again after the quake. It has been so good for them. I am living for those hours where I get to teach and work with the kids.

Thank you all for your prayers and support. I appreciate it tremendously! For those of you who want more information about the activities of the school and relief efforts, check out the blogs at quisqueya.org and relief.quisqueya.org.

Keep praying!