On Thursday, May 11, 2017, the ASU SolarSPELL team had an unexpected, additional opportunity to meet a group of current Vanuatu Peace Corps volunteers, and give them a training on using the SolarSPELL, as well as provide this group with updated hardware and content.
It was a fantastic opportunity to let these volunteers know the history of the project, get them up-to-speed on using the digital libraries, and introduce them to all of the new content we’ve assembled and added over the past two years, since our first deployment in Vanuatu two years ago.
A number of these volunteers had “inherited” the 2015-versions of SolarSPELL digital libraries from the previous volunteers who had served in the same location, but they had not received any official training and knew very little about the history or background of the project.
Because these volunteers already had a year of experience in the field, at their work-sites, they had plenty of insightful questions for our team.
Yet because most of them already had experience with using the libraries, they needed very little training on how to use them. As the photos show, the volunteers were very eager to discover all of the new content we had added over the past two years, and there is a lot!
Since these volunteers already had the housing and solar panel from the prior version of the SolarSPELL, and these were all still working, we simply provided a new Raspberry Pi with an updated micro SD card to each of the volunteers who attended this training with us, and we were grateful for this unexpected opportunity—an opportunity that presented itself because of Cyclone Donna!
We came home to a beautiful sunset at our hotel.
