Vital statistics, school in Bagrami:
- approximately 10 classrooms;
- 50 teachers;
- 3000 school-aged;
- no electricity; and as of today
- 3 computers;
- 1 high-speed internet connection.
Today was the culmination of a couple of days of negotiations and waiting (see previous post) to get a small computer center set up at Bagrami school, a couple of hundred meters from the Taj guest house. The school does not have access to city power and does all their teaching on black boards in class rooms stuffed wall to wall with school desks. Because there are so many kids around, teaching is done in shifts with the girls attending in the mornings and the boys in the afternoons.
The school now also has 3 Inveneo computers running off a motorcycle battery plus 2 Linksys routers running of the same battery to provide them with internet access. The Inveneos were designed to run off 12V DC, making a car or motorcycle battery the ideal power source. The Linksys routers also conveniently run off 12V DC. We’ve been thinking more and more of just standardising all our hardware on 12V to make life easier in areas not served with grid electricity.
The Jalalabad fabfi network on 3 September 2009
The image above makes the geek in me very excited. Smari just explained it to the rest of us and I just colour coded his explanation. The relevant bit for this post is the blue connection pair coming out of the red source (the satellite internet connection at the Taj). The blue pair shows the connection from the roof of the Taj to Bagrami school. They currently have their computer switched off, otherwise you would have seen another link on the end of the blue chain. The second red node is the large reflector on the water tower in the center of Jalalabad. We set that up in January as a relay point for other sites in the city. The green pair shows the connection to the hospital right next to the water tower. Note that this image was pulled from the fabfi site where it is updated in real time to show the current extent of the Jalalabad network. The ability to generate these dynamic statistics is part of the offering of Fabfi 2.0. As we switch more links from Fabfi 1 to Fabfi 2, you should see more links appearing on the graph.
So, geekiness aside for a moment, a school that used to be completely off the grid now has access to computers with basic software installed. (OpenOffice and the web browser seem to be the most popular for now.) Not only can they learn and improve their knowledge of computers, highly valued in Afghanistan, but they can connect with the rest of the world in order to pull in ever more knowledge relevant to them and push out information about their existence and their place in the social fabric of the web.