Updates from Nepal's Pilot Schools

[Bryan Berry]

David, good idea.

there are only about 6 light bulbs at the Bishwamitra (smaller school)
and less than 5 at Bashuki the larger school.

I will have to ask Ram (our power guy) about what's available on the
local market. 

Regards to getting some for free, it would be great if you could put us
in contact w/ someone to donate them. In my experience it can be very
expensive time-wise to seek donations from companies w/out an existing
personal connection. Sometimes it just cheaper to buy something than to
spend the time trying to get a donation. That said, a strong personal
connection can make it very easy to get a donation.

On Sun, 2008-03-09 at 04:26 -0700, david at lang.hm wrote:
> 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