Well Monday. What can I say, can't trust that day! We had class this morning and then went to the little coffee shop for lunch. The only thing available was donuts and tea. Not Dale's idea of lunch. We smiled and had a donut. I went to my little (empty) office in the old science building to grade papers and talk to students. In walked a woman who introduced herself as the assistant HR director. She was looking for offices for the 10 new faculty members that had been taken on for the fall semester. I told her that the office was available for as many as they wanted. Before there were 5 of us in there and now I sat there all by myself a couple of hours a week. She sort of looked at me like "silly American, why don't you go up the hill to the brand new office we gave you in the new science building?" She also indicated they only had one key. I told here I made my own key (hint hint, nudge nudge lady make some more keys). I was going to suggest the 5 gallon bucket full of keys that they went thru last week to get Dale's key, but that would have been too obvious.
Anyway she said that at least two faculty were coming in there. That's fine with me and I hope that I get to know some more of these new folks I see. I did go up to the new offices in the New Science Building. No one around, so I still don't have a key for the office that I supposed to occupy.
We came back to the apartment about 2:30 PM and the rest of the folks headed up the Focolore after school project they have been working with for the last few weeks. They are playing games to teach some of the kids English. Caleb's real thrill was to teach the kids about baseball. Now baseball is the most confusing game in history: if you are offense, you cannot touch the ball; some pitches are balls (I thought they all were); the foul pole is in fair territory; and so on. I hope Caleb has a lot of patience to try to explain all these strange rules. Anyway, they come back all enthused over trying to keep 20 or so little folks in line while singing "Heads, Sholders, Knees and Toes".
For the past few days, one of my students has been inviting me to his "business" which is supposed to be very near to the apartment. Timing just didn't work out and he just kept trying and found me at school on Monday morning. I told him I would be back at the apartment by 3 and he could come by. He rang the doorbell and 3 and we started off across the street. Low and behold, the large complex just 1/2 block away is Iringa City Hall. This is where most of the administrative office (HR, licenses, health services, etc.) are housed. It is not impressive from the outside, but very nice inside the walls. There are covered walkways from building to building (handy in the tropical downpours) and very nice offices down long corridors. In the back was a little networking room that connects the local area network of all the offices to the Internet. Most of the city's management is done with web based systems and they were connecting the existing network to the Internet via a Network Management System called Zanytal. This is a computer that sits between the Internet and a company's network to control security and keep the internal network from being attacked by the Russians. (What they would want from the Iringa City Offices, I have no idea, but I am sure the Russians are the source of all Internet attacks).
Anyway, they had upgraded from Zanytal 2 to 3 and couldn't get the system to work. The previous versions were sort of plug-and-play but this one had many more features and seemed to need more setup. I scratched various body parts and just started to carefully remove some of the settings they had modified and finally we were on the internet and the Firewall system was working. They had the right idea, but were inexperienced with DHCP (again, ask a geek for a 3 hour description of Dynamic Host Configuration Program if you really want some exciting times). We had a very similar system at the Augsburg Computer Science Lab so I was able to work thru most of the settings and get things running. They have much more to do, but I think I helped a little. We made City Hall very happy. We are hoping that this will help us from losing power so often, but of course, they have no control over the power company in City Hall. We can only hope.
Dinner was BLT's and the Roma tomatoes here are very good. I think it is more due to the fact that these tomatoes were picked just a couple of days ago in a place that is in the same time zone (actually there are truck farms just 5 miles out of town). We do have a little ritual with our vegetables. They are all washed in a bucket of clean water with a little bleach. This takes a little system management as we have to keep track of which vegetables have been washed and which are awaiting the bleach treatment. The sun is up now and this is the quiet time of day. The little bar across the street has music all night and then the Church of the Louder Day Saints starts about 5 and the call to prayer starts about the same time. They all get tired by 6:30 and we get some sleep.
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