Community Outreach Merit Program

A celebration is in order, because this is the FIRST blog post from the new computer lab! We started at 8:30am today, and so far, we have managed to get wired Internet access for the entire school. I will leave the students to tell you the most challenging part, but I think that on the whole, everything has gone fairly smoothly so far (knock on wood). This afternoon, we will work on the wireless access and start the software setup.

We arrived here late yesterday afternoon. The environment here is okay, it’s harsher than Hubei but that was expected. The landscape here is very harsh and forbidding. It’s completely dry here and everything is brown, probably because plants have a hard time growing. Every now and then we would see caves carved out of the mountainside — my guess is that they are used for storage. The few houses we could see were low-slung with brown roofs and walls that practically faded into the background.

The school is built on a very Hong Kong-style of architecture, so it looks like somebody took a primary school from HK and transplanted it here. The children were really friendly and welcoming — our own students had a good time playing games with them last night (as again, I will leave it to them to share). Supposedly tomorrow night, we get to babysit for 3 hours to give the teachers a break. We shall see how our students can manage other people’s students :-).

The lunch bell is about to toll, so it’s off to lunch we go. More later!