My New Office

Hello friends and family! Sorry we are falling behind on our blog posts - we have been without Internet at home for 10 days and borrowing wireless Internet from the Vennell's (Tim and Tonya our MAF neighbors) is a challenge. Plus with me taking the VSAT training course this past week and helping coordinate the housing and meals for other international students in the course things have been pretty hectic here. Fun, but hectic.

Before losing our Internet I was planning to post some photos of my trip to the mountain village of Nohana on February 20. Nohana is the site of the first Partners In Health clinic in Lesotho and will be the first to receive a satellite dish for Internet access. The Internet will be used by the medical workers. For this visit I conducted a site survey to get the GPS coordinates of the installation site, select the ideal location for the dish itself, and make sure there were no obstructions that would affect a satellite dish installation. I also visited with the solar installation team who is going ahead of me to each site and installing the solar panels and batteries that will power the dish and related network gear.

As you can see from the photos below, Nohana is a beautiful place. The airstrip sits a couple hundred feet below the village so I had about a 15 minute hike to the clinic. I was able to spend 4 hours at the site and ate lunch with the solar team (and film crew shooting a documentary on solar power in the developing world -- could this be my big break?!?) before my trek back to the airstrip for my flight home to Maseru. It was a fantastic day in the mountains of Lesotho...















Currently we are waiting for mounting poles to be fabricated in South Africa and shipped to Maseru. Then we can start flying the rest of the satellite gear to Nohana and I will begin the installation. I am looking forward to this being my new office for a few days!

Traig