Internet access is nearly repaired throughout much of the area. A recently release news story ruled out sabotage as the cause for cutting the cables. It is now believed that stray 5.5 ton anchor cut a cable near Dubai – they are still not sure what caused the cuts in the cables between Alex and Palermo. New cables that are and will be laid are to “resilient" against cuts and "provide diversity in routes." This provided a good teaching point for my high school IT class – we take for granted the access that we have throughout the world for telecommunications and the Internet and often don’t think about how the infrastructure has been set up. As we have mentioned earlier in our blog, we recently completed a major overhaul of our infrastructure for our network which took nearly a year to finish. Guess we can’t complain too much with limited access for a couple of weeks!
We will not be able to field a boys or girls basketball team this year. We barely have enough boys (7 – 10 is recommended) to compete and even fewer girls (5). Of all the sports here, basketball has been the one in recent years that have had difficulty fielding a team. The girls have not had a team for 3 years while the boys have barely had enough the past two years. This year the ISAC organization made it clear that if a school couldn’t field both teams, they would not be allowed to send any teams. I am going to continue to practice with the young men that I have and try to find a couple younger boys. The school made a decision this year to only field varsity teams, hoping that the older students would participate – but it did not work. We would have had enough at both boys and girls if we would have had only JV teams as the interest is with the younger players.
Over the weekend both Pat and I got our haircut. Pat went back to Green Plaza to Ahmed – she had gone to a different place in San Steffano the past couple of times because it was closer. Ahmed is indeed an artist. He was very happy to see her and took her right away even though there were others waiting. I went down Schutz Street to my guy, Sala. He was finishing a young boy when I came and the boy’s father, who is learning English, began a conversation with me. He seemed like a pleasant man. Later on, when I was getting my hair cut – he came back and asked me a computer question. His office was about 5 minutes away by car and I told him that I would take a look at his problem. So we hopped into his car, went to his office and looked at the problem that he was having. It was kind of an unusual issue. He took a windows system, reformatted the hard drive and installed the Mac operating system so he could run a video editing program. As is the case throughout much of the area, both the operating system software and the editing program software were not from “original” software installations, so without the original installation disks, I was unable to get things to work properly. We spent about 90 minutes at his office before he brought me back to the school. When I told Pat where I was and what I had been doing, she asked if I was worried about getting into a car with a man I just met and going off somewhere with him – guess when she put it that way I wondered why I hadn’t thought about that. It would be hard to imagine doing anything like that in a city of 6,000,000 back in the states – but here I didn’t even give it a second thought. As we have often said, the neighborhood around our school, while lower working class – is very safe and everyone looks out for each other.
