Now I'm starting to get a little nervous...

Some of my worries have ended as our Visas and Passports have finally arrived back from New York. I just registered with the State Department to let them know that I will be in Rwanda and everything seems to be in order for our trip.

Except for packing...

I've cut down on what I had planned to bring mostly because of what Martin said about how he will probably bring less than one weeks worth of clothing. I think I'll have at least about a weeks worth of T-shirts and about a weeks worth of boxers but pants will probably be one pair of cargo shorts, one pair of athletic shorts, one pair of jeans and one pair of nice khakis to meet any big wigs. I will be bringing some equipment for our deployments (wifi routers, flash drives, etc.) as well as two baseball gloves and a frisbee.

I got some new equipment for the trip including a watch (because I won't have a working cell phone) and an external hard drive to backup data and my pictures. I think I have everything covered and I just need to see how much I can stretch my weight limits of one 13 pound carry on and one 44 pound checked bag. The checked bag should be no problem but I will want to take as much as possible in my carry on.


I've posted up pictures from Meredith's pinning ceremony on my flickr account here. All of the pictures from the event are hosted here.

Black sand beach in Sao Tome

Ate lago!
-XO Mike

I can't read a calendar correctly

Oi!

In my first Portuguese class I learned something I did not expect. I can't read a calendar and I have just under three weeks until I leave. This comes as both a blessing and a curse as I now have more time to prepare but also more time on campus (it's reallllly quiet).

The class went really well and I expect to learn a lot over the next three weeks. We have started with the basics and I can say, "Meu nome e Michael" (my name is Michael) along with a few other things including the alphabet and numbers through 100. What I think will be most confusing is trying to distinguish Brazilian Portuguese (Professor's language) and European Portuguese (STP language). The differences are much more than I thought and European Portuguese is much more difficult to understand than Brazilian Portuguese.

-XO Mike

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