The Fantastic Four (Written 7/30/07)

Today was a very special day for me and for Chanel College. After coming up with the idea for a fourth computer lab in January, I was finally able to open it up for service today. Hooray! Now, the fourth lab is not currently working at full capacity – it has room for 28 computers but we only have about 17 up and running (we're still waiting on monitors for the rest of them). The week before the exams, I was finally able to get all the networking stuff (and thanks to Mom, all of the required keyboards/mice) that I needed in order to actually complete the project. In a way though, it was a bit anti-climatic for me. After all that hard work and waiting, no grand opening or anything like that – I just let the kids into the class and hoped for the best. With this new lab complete, I was finally able to set a stable computer lab schedule for all 4 computer labs. Labs 1 and 2 are going to be used primarily by the senior students (Years 12 and 13), while Labs 3 and 4 will be used by the junior students (Years 9, 10 and 11). This way if the junior students damage a computer (and trust me, kids are very inventive when it comes to ways to harm these computers), it won't have to much of an affect on the senior students – who have to have working computers almost all the time.

Now I have a listing of where each of the classes should be and it helps me know which labs need to be locked/unlocked at certain times – so security for the labs has increased dramatically! It's funny though, when I came for my On The Job training back in November 2005 the former volunteer here (Michael) spoke of just getting the 3^rd lab up and running – that way we would have 3 labs and 60 working computers. At the time, we only had about 20-30 working computers…the others were just waiting to fall over and die. Now here I stand – almost two years later – and we have not only passed the 3^rd computer lab mark, we also will soon have over 100 working computers in the labs. So you can probably say my time here has been characterized by expansion and growth of the Computer Studies program. It has cost a lot of time and money, but it's worth it to make sure that every student at the school has a computer class everyday. Still have a bit of tidying up to do, but I am going to take a break to handle some other things I need to complete here.

So after running through my first semi-organized day of running 4 computer labs, I had lunch with Dennis, Moira and a friend of theirs named Karen. In case you forgot, I met Dennis and Moira last year through their son Cecil – who now lives on Savaii in a village called Iva. So it was nice to spend time with them and talk about how things have changed within the past year for me. It's kind of funny that last year I didn't really know them at all, but this year it kind of felt like they were old friends and we were talking like we had known each other for a while – so in all, they were good people who provided good conversation. I was able to pick their brains on some of the travel issues I am going to face when I come back home in December – so it was nice to have forewarning on some of the things to avoid doing in order to make the travel process a lot smoother for myself. They will be headed home on Air New Zealand flight to LA later tonight, so I was glad to be able to hang out with them before they left. They only live in Clarksville – which isn't to far from my city of Nashville/Hermitage – so I'll definitely be seeing them once I get back.

So to continue the theme of 4 – opened the 4^th computer lab today; when Dennis, Moria, Karen and myself had lunch there were 4 of us – and now as we head into August we are now at the 4 month mark of my time remaining in Samoa. It's kind of strange – after waiting 23 months for this moment to arrive, its coming a lot quicker then I expected. It's kind of like a rollercoaster – you wait and wait to get to the apex and then before you know it, you're going downhill at a high velocity. So we enter a very busy August – filled with meetings, conferences, drafts, exams, two culture days and a little thing known as the South Pacific Games. Fun times folks, fun times! Just call me Mr. Fantastic!