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hi all,
first of all sorry for the late update but I didn't really feel like writing something so...
During these days I've been busy for the school and some cycling: in the morning I got on my mountain bike and drove into town for breakfast. After that I had a drink in a bar/hotel where they had internet access and then I asked to let my laptop there while it was downloading. It was never a problem as soon as I mentioned that it was for the Goodwill school. Then I got on my bicycle again and went for a ride of mostly about 3 hours along the beach or into the hills with the quaries... Totally exhausted and sweaty I went back to my guesthouse for a shower and then picked up my laptop and went to the school. They have two 'good' pc's: a 2.2 Ghz processor with 512 Mb of memmory, which should be able to run windows xp pretty smoothly... But that is not the case, the pc's are running badly: one of them simply stopped working after one month while the other one had no sound.
For the rest they have a 220 MHz pc with 64 Mb memmory and a few laptops which all are not working...
I'll have some work, because they had some requests of which I never heard and had no clue how to do it. Most of it was a software list and all pc's had to run xp. The two 'good' pc's wheren't that hard but I had to do it slowly because they wanted to learn how to do it. And they only have one windows xp cd so we had to wait a lot. The last day when I came there for the finishing touch I got to hear that one of the screens exploded. So we took the screen from the old pc and that is working now. The laptops are way beyond fixing: one of the laptops' screen isn't working, the other one has an ancient model of a hard drive of barely 1.5 Gb and the keyboard has a lot of characters missing. They said it's ok when I told them that that's not worth fixing.
Lundy (the one that teaches computer class) was really satisfied and he can now install windows + the software that I put on the pc's.
thursday in the evening I had a conversation class, which means that I had to teach them how to make small conversations. The first group were kids of 17 till 21 years old and it went pretty well however the girls were really shy and didn't dare to ask a lot of questions. With the necessary laughter the class ended. The second class was identically the same however with smaller children: 5 till 16 years old, their pronounciation is a lot better and they listen very carefully. After half an hour the class was suspended due to a power cut in town. I was left in the dark classroom without any means of light and bumped into almost everything while making my way out the door. Overall the experience was amazing! The children are so respectful, I will never forget this school!
I completely support the project, I've been there for quite a few days, sometimes without appointment so I know the way they work. They teach the children English, computer, Khmer, ... but most important is that they teach them values. In a school in Cambodia morals are not taught, but this school takes that task: they teach the children to think about their future, to clean up the littering, to create a sustainable environment,...
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