Updates from Nepal's Pilot Schools

[david at lang.hm]

On Sun, 9 Mar 2008, Bryan Berry wrote:

> Sulochan Acharya and I are keeping journals of Nepal's pilot schools on
> the wiki and the OLE Nepal blog.
>
> http://blog.olenepal.org/
>
> http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Bashuki_Journal
> http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Bishwamitra_Journal
>
> We will do our best to keep updating the wiki pages.
>
> We hope that reporting this info will be helpful to other pilot sites
> and to the larger OLPC community.

thanks for posting this info.

one thing that struck me as i was reading your write-ups was about the 
power problems. both schools have very limited power, one of the schools 
mentioned the power consumption of the light bulbs as part of the 
calculation. Assuming that they schools are useing conventional light 
bulbs, they could probably save more power than the laptops need to charge 
by switching to a high-efficiancy bulb.

given the unreliable power, florecent bulbs are probably not a reasonable 
option, but (assuming theft is not too big a factor) LED bulbs would last 
and save the power needed to run the other equipment.

equipping a school with such bulbs is not cheap (a few thousand dollars 
per school), but there may be charities around who could fund this. I'm 
willing to bet that nobody has ever asked them to fund anything like this.

you may be able to get some donations from the manufacturers as well.

David Lang