mapuru    (last updated october 06)

telephones: There are three telephones in Mäpuru. One public phone, which fortunately takes both coins and phonecards. One in the school, this is not for general public use but has local numbers such as the Resources Centre, other schools, airline companies, etc access though Abbreviated Dialing and Call Control.  Since moving back to Mäpuru Roslyn has had a private line connected to her house. Telstra services to Mäpuru could only be called moderate, the public phone is regularly not functioning due to system faults, and faults may take weeks to repair.

business equipment: The school has no photocopier, or other office machinery. The fax machine was given to Jackie by one of the women who twice attended weaving workshops.

other

acer pc

2 mac I-book g4 (jackie’s)

telephone (with speaker)/fax machine (edu call blocked)

satellite receiver sender

telstra modem and wireless router

ups (not working)

solar power (no battery back up and something else not quite right apparently)

usb speakers

web cams (2)

People

working with jackie and

michelle at this stage

Mapuru is Wolbukarra country. It has a permanent freshwater creek, good soil, and airstrip. People began building permanent houses at Mapuru in the 1960s. Although the 120 residents come from a number of nations including the Guyamirrilili, Ritharrngu, Liya-dhalinymirr and Ganalbingu, all are closely connected through kinship to Mapuru. All residents are determined that if they are to have a future it must be on their own land. They say Galiwin’ku, the nearby township is on “somebody else’s land’.

There are 32 CDEP participants living at Mapuru. Many of the women are active weavers often working 14 hour days. All residents expressed a keen desire to have greater control over their finances, to learn English and to develop sustainable businesses.

Champion: Mapuru residents identified Jackie Nguluwidi as their champion. Jackie is the Assistant Teacher in Charge at the Mapuru School where he has been working for over 20 years. He is respected and highly regarded for his energy and knowledge.

In 2002 Jackie began managing the Mapuru shop which is located in the school building. Jackie is extremely keen to continue learning and to assist other learn, “we are going forward, for the future, childrens’, childrens’ future”. Jackie continued, “when I die, they will have a store, weaving income and other businesses. We don’t yet recognise all the possibilities. Now we have a chance to teach and start other businesses.” Jackie bought his own iBook computer

last year because he couldn’t rely on the school computer for internet access.

notes

while, as far as I know, there is supposed to be 4 computers being installed at the school at mapuru at some stage, at the moment there is only an older acer pc which was installed together with the original telstra satellite service almost five years ago. jackie nguluwidi has his own personal I-book which he had until now only been able to connect to the internet by using the radio phone line, a line which is effective but very slow. for example, to transfer money from one account to another using the internet could take more than half an hour to complete. the reason why he couldn’t connect it to the satellite service was due to the modem that were installed having no suppport for routing to more than one computer and no apple mac support.

we had arranged for a new modem to be installed, it is now possible to use the mac to connect to the internet wirelessly using the satellite and a cdu wireless router, it is now possible to connect the acer pc as well, originally there was no ethernet port on thois computer but  i installed one on the return trip through.

(notes from earlier; not possible to connect the pc. this is because the acer computer that was installed with the original satellite service had neither ethernet or wireless card installed, the lack of an ethernet port being quite unexpected, but the type of thing that I am seeing quite often with the cheap education packages that have been provided to remote areas)

.so now there is an older acer pc with basic software such as internet explorer (IE) and microsoft word installed, as well as Jackie’s I-book, which comes with a full range of multimedia software, safari and IE and web conferencing software (I-chat).

we have also set up a wireless router and both computers have web cams. telstra have set up a new satellite and modem, which is currently giving a reasonable fast service is capable of maintaining web conferencing connections although the upload speed being slower than download speeds may mean that we have trouble sending both audio and video at the same time even though it can receive both easily, working on this, but in the interim, we can use the telephone as an audio backup.

Jackie has his own telephone/fax which he uses quite regularly, but it is installed in the school/shop office at the moment and he hopes to be able to both access the internet and fax/ phone from his own residence which is about 200m south of the school building.

other equipment includes two uninterrupted power supplies (ups’s), both of which didn’t appear to work and I have dropped them off at shepherdson to be checked out.

it seemed to me that the main reason why they had so  much trouble with the old modems and satellite was due to power failures. each time the solar ran out or the generator stopped unexpectedly, the computer was not given the chance to shut down properly, which in turn affected the modem to the extent that the original modem install software would need to be run to set up the modem again, a process which required the original install disks (or a copy of the program on the computer) and some degree of trouble shooting expertise to manage. I am hoping we will now be able to avoid this problem as the new modem has it’s running software permanently installed on the modem, not on the computer, this also means that it is easy to connect more computers up to the satellite service, and especially easy if they have wireless capabilities. having said that, I think the power issues are a major concern.