Less than two weeks!

Corey and I leave for Kigali two weeks from last Friday. Tomorrow several members of the team and I start a non-credited course at the University to jump start language learning. We will be in class two hours per day M-F with homework (wait, didn't I just finish the semester?!?!). I hope this will help prepare me to be able to better communicate with the locals. I don't expect to be fluent but I think they will be impressed and feel like we are trying to do more than drop off some computers if we can introduce ourselves and communicate a few basic phrases.

Tomorrow we should come close to our final budget and the money from OLPC should be in our account and we will begin purchasing equipment. Our equipment is dependent on the number of sites that we visit which will also be decided tomorrow. We are required to provide additional equipment we will need on site which will include Buffalo router/access points for each site. We chose this type because it features an internal amplifier and powerful antenna to hopefully broadcast beyond the schoolyard.

Buffalo WHR-HP-G54 - The wireless access point which we will use at each site.

Tomorrow should be a big decision day for our group as we select the sites, or at least how we will select the sites once we see the actual conditions. OLPC wants the saturation to be one laptop per child, whereas with our current plan it could be as many as one laptop per 5 children. We are thinking about giving each child a flash drive to allow them to save their work and share the computer to create it but the costs of the flash drive ($6.25 per drive) will likely prohibit this plan.

I'll update with any new details tomorrow.

-XO Mike