Day 29 - Network Troubles

(Post for 13 June) Sorry there have been no updates for three days. I'll catch up tonight. Basically I've been without a network in the barracks until now, but I'm back. First, here are two pictures I scrounged up from our little vehicle mishap on Saturday. You can see all the coolant on the ground in the right of the picture. The next picture shows a decent view of the protruding hitch on the lead vehicle that did the damage. It was a good thing we were back on base by the time we had the incident. It allowed us to sort things out at a leisurely pace and leave the vehicle till the next morning. I saw the folks I traveled to KMTC with on Camp Eggers today and they said all the reports were completed and the vehicle made it to the shop. Masha' Allah as they say here.


Most of today (Sunday) was spent auditing and mentoring the CompSci instructors. I sat in on a networks class and spent time having Chai with Col Rahman. The instructor covered router and host configuration using CISCO simulator software. It was a pretty good lesson, but much more akin to training than education. I have to rate all the instructors I audit, which is a delicate process. They need feedback, but there is a delicate line between constructive criticism and insulting them and their pride. I'm doing my best to be diplomatic.

A fairly slow day as far as blogs go, plus I'm three days behind. I already have pictures for the next post, so I'll start that after dinner.

Late addition. Thought I'd add a few pictures of the actual lab we put together with the Afghans. I realized I probably focused too much on the auto incident and didn't actually show off our lab construction.

This is the director of English language training at KMTC. He's was really excited about adding the new lab to his course offering.


Here's all our conscripted help unloading the lab pieces from the shipping crates. The entire 16 workstation lab, with desks, network wiring, and electrical wiring all come in two 4x4x4 foot containers. The classroom building we installed everything in is in the background.


Here things are mid-build. We're headed back to KMTC to finish things up in a few days and ensure all the software and lesson materials are loaded up properly. I'll include final pictures in a future post.