September 20,
Internet has hit the village! My language group meets for class every morning in this little library, attached to the village officer’s house, which was set up by an old Peace Corps (Sarah Weiner) a few years ago. It is a small room basically with a lot of different books and a smaller section that had some computers set up. When we first got to the room the computers were out of commission but after Chiara and I spent a couple hours in the “lab” we came figured out that the main computer was actually infected with a various that turned the monitors blue. We scraped the computer and set up the two laptops and convinced the town officer to reset up the internet! After many days of the company saying they would come and then not coming, a few days ago they actually fixed the antenna! Nakolo now has internet access. What this means is that along with the village all of Peace Corps has been stoked to be able to use the computers. Even our language instructor sneak over to our village after class ends to check their facebooks! As nice as it is to have internet, I am trying not to get used to it. We are actually having our Pre-Service Training in the most developed villages in Tonga so I don’t want to get used to things like internet, or running water…. The other issues is that although we got internet we had to essentially pack up two thousand dollars worth of computing equipment that included a mini network system that Sarah had put in place to run four monitors off of one computer. It just makes me sad to think that all her work writing a grant and setting up this center lasted about nine months. It seems that everyone is worried about sustainability, and for the right reasons, no volunteer wants to commit their time and effort to a project and then find out it didn’t last. I guess I will just try my best to make sure that the secondary projects I try and set up will utilize more community effort to insure the people will maintain the projects when I leave.
This is my language group/ village group where we have class every morning! From left to right: Katy, Chiara, me, Steph and Tasi
This is our class from the outside. On the right half is where the computers are set up
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