Thursday, February 18, 2010

From Eddie: Reflection

The trip to Rwanda was an eye-opening experience for me. I truly understand why Liquidnet is so involved with the ASYV - giving these children a second chance at life and better hope for their futures.

I went to Rwanda with six work colleagues and came back with six good friends. I feel honored to have shared such an experience with Dana, Zoe, Rob, Joseph, Brian and Rick.



Many things have been accomplished to get the ASYV to the point where it is today - everyone who has donated via goods, services, or monetarily should be proud.



However, there is much more to be done - we need to continue to do great things. I for one look forward to continued efforts for fund raising, donation drives, and providing support to the ASYV.


Below are some Pics:

1 - two children who live outside of the ASYV

2 - the Feb2010 Village People (sans Brian) during the gorilla trek (that's not Brian in the background)

3 - hanging with one of the 250 children at the village

4 - capacity crowd during "village time"; every Friday night




My technical adventure in Rwanda

Before I left for Rwanda, I knew that my goal was to replace the current Linux computer infrastructure with the Windows platform. I had to modify the 2 Windows authentication machines that were built in NY to function within the new environment. The successful deployment of those machines guaranteed that for the first time that each student and staff at the Village would be able to logon with their own username. In addition, having one of those machines function as a repository for files would also mark the first time that staff and students can share data or work together on documents in the village without the involvement of some internet based infrastructure or external disk based device.

The adventure wasn't all rosy for the team since we encountered major challenges. We had to deploy Office 2007 to 40 netbooks, and with the limited resources available everyone on the team rose up to the occasion and pulled it off after some neat tricks. To make matters worse the imaging machine that we brought with us had to be rebuilt due to hardware issues. Since I had never built an imaging server, I had to improvise with the team in New York over Office Communicator to get that task done. It took over 4 hours to download some files over Outlook Web Access. The team also got involved with fixing personal computer problems for those at the village, and we even got Windows to run on machines that we were previously told couldn't.
While the trip has come to and end, I must say that I had a blast working with the Liquidnet team. No task was ever too big or out of reach for us. Our perseverance allowed us to accomplish the majority of our main goals.