Kenya Update

Plans are well underway for the trip and I have received my passport and purchased my plane tickets. I will be leaving DFW for Nairobi on July 10th and will be returning on August 1st. I will be traveling with good friends Jerram Froese and Emily McRoberts and our focus will be sharing and teaching both online and offline technology resources that can be used to communicate, teach and learn. We are hoping that the internet connection gets installed there in May or June, but costs look incredibly high right now. There is a donor to who is willing to pay upwards of $5000US for the installation and hardware, but the monthly service costs look out of reach at the moment. The quotes we see are in the neighborhood of $1000US a month for internet access. We are investigating a number of other ways to get the data transmitted, and we aren't ready to let go of the internet idea yet.

I am working a little each evening investigating possible operating systems, software packages, etc. that will be free for use to use, and easy for us to install and easy for them to use on their own long term. They have approximately 12 existing workstations (some desktops and some laptops) varying in age and model. I am currently considering using Ubuntu as the OS for all of them and going with a suite of opensource/free applications like: OpenOffice, Picasa, Audacity, and more to help them remain self-sufficient without any cost at all. I am also working though some networking and storage issues and trying to find the best solution for them. Its all a very interesting lesson in problem solving. I just hope to have THE solution by the time I leave.