Wednesday of this week gave me a little bit of a break from installation. Tim didn’t need me to go on site with the team so myself and Kemon spent some time repairing PC’s at Rosalie Forest. We set ourselves up a nice workshop and managed to get through quite a few machines. We also had some machines from Grand Fond to bring back to life but sadly we could only repair one of these as they were in a quite a bad state of repair

Once we had finished our repairs, we delivered a PC to the Health Centre in La Plaine which we hope will assist them with their administration tasks. While we were out, we did a little sight-seeing and took in some lovely views of the Atlantic side of the island and also a waterfall nearby.

On the whole, Wednesday was a nice, easy day. Thursday was to prove rather different though.

Thursday saw us at Dominica Grammar School in Roseau to install around 15 workstations and cabling. Tim and his team set about cabling while Kemon and I looked at the machines. We had a lot of trouble with this batch of machines as well as issues with the electricity supply in the school. The power proved to be rather inconsistent when we used the 230V supply (it blew 4 power supplies in the PC’s) so we moved over to the 110V supply which proved to be a lot better. Quite a few of the machines here had been tinkered with by the school technician and I’m afraid to say he had made a little bit of a mess. Much ‘Yorkshire Working-Class Latin’ ensued and for the first time during my stay here, I got a little vexed. We eventually got them finished and headed for home. Needless to say, after a stressful day, I had my ‘beer-head’ on and sank a few Kubuli in the evening.

Friday was my last official day on the schools project and we went to install some machines in the Adult Education Centre. The cabling team were in fine form and had all the points done for us by lunchtime (even though one of the guys had had a few too many the night before and was a little green around the gills. Ady would not have been amused). Kemon and I weren’t hanging about either and we had all the PC’s tested and running with a copy of OpenOffice.org installed.

With all work finished, the cabling team headed off and we went for lunch with Nico who had brought us down to town. We were joined by Jem for lunch and once we had been heartily refreshed, we headed to Orion Academy which is a small public school on the way out of town. We managed to get 7 PC’s up and running for them and we also took away some of the machines from last year which had developed faults (I’ll be back in the workshop later to repair those). Then it was back ‘home’ for a while before we went out for a Friday night in Grand Fond. Needless to say, with it being Friday night, I had a few beers as I would normally do at home. The locals were most welcoming and we even managed to get a game of dominoes going

Hopefully, we’ll get out and about some more this weekend and I’ll have a few more photo’s to share with you

TTFN