Wish List for MPRC

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The Important Stuff!
• A Bible for each church family in the Department of Olancho ($55 for a case of 24)

Computer Equipment
1. Satellite Uplink ($2000 total installed)¹
2. Surplus Computers and monitors for the lab² (6 more)
3. UPSes for protecting the computers, servers, and copier/printers³ (need 11 more at $70 each - money for 3 already donated)
4. Computers and monitors for the remote churches⁴ (Have requests for 8. Could easily use 1 for each of the 54 congregations in our area.)
5. UPSes for these computers³
6. DVD readers for the computers⁵ (16 at $40 each)
7. Spanish Keyboards and dust cover sets⁶ ($15 together for each set, will eventually need 11 more - money for 3 already donated)
8. Computer DVD writer⁷ (0 more at $80 each - 2 already donated)
9. Memory upgrades⁸ ($40 each, not sure of quantity needed - 1 already donated)
10. Internal hard drives for upgrades⁹ (3 at $70 each)
11. Network equipment, especially routers and switches.¹⁰ (used)

Very Special Thanks to the following:
• Friends who generously donated money for Bibles.
• North Ridge and Maxwell Avenue Churches of Christ, for 15 cases of N.T. Bibles
• Madill Church of Christ in Oklahoma, for $700 to purchase books for the MPRC
• McAlester Church of Christ in Oklahoma for $2600, and 15 suitcases of clothes, shoes, toiletries and school supplies
• Naples Church of Christ for a 9' tall Goliath to loan, VBS materials and medicines
• Journey Mission Camp for $300 that helped with initial start up equipment purchases.
• Hunter Hills church of Christ for great VBS materials.

¹For those technically minded our current wireless provider has about 6-30% packet loss and often delay times of 4 seconds per packet. Even at the highest, error-free rate, it is only a little faster than a modem. With several users, access to the internet is horrible. And when the power goes off, even though we may be still up due to our generator, our provider is down. Satellites do not go down because of storms on earth. A satellite link would greatly increase our speed [and reliability] at the same monthly cost we currently pay.

²Does your organization or company surplus computers? You may be able to request donated computers for humanitarian or non-profit organizations. We prefer computers not more than 3 years old (because they will serve here for 5 to 7 years). We also ´wish´ for lcd monitors since they are much more compact and use less electricity, but please talk to us about what you have.

³The UPSes protect the computer and copier from the daily (hourly?) power outages and also protect the computer from persistent voltage drops and peaks we have here in Catacamas, Olancho, Honduras. These are not spikes. After a power outage, the 110 voltage could be 160V or higher for 10 minutes. And not infrequently it is 50 or 60V. Note also that the farther out in the mountains one gets, the more the voltage fluctuates.

⁴These would go in remote churches so that the youth (and others) could practice what they learn in the weekly classes at the MPRC lab. Many of our students travel more than 4 hours total for one class. If they could practice at their local congregation, their learning would improve more quickly.

⁵One of our purposes at the MPRC is to help train Christian leaders and one of the ways we are doing this is to develop a library of seminars and classes on DVD. This is so the learner can study at their own pace. The least expensive way to do that is to have DVD readers on the computers.

⁶Of course our students learn on Spanish keyboards. But the computers from the US only come with English language keyboards, so they must be replaced. The keyboards also wear out quickly because of the dust. We try to prevent that by keeping them covered.

⁷This is to create the DVD's for our library. Note that we are very particular to only use or copy material for which we have permission from the author.

⁸The computers we have now have sufficient memory. But donated computers are often missing or have too little memory to run current operating systems properly. (Although our use of Linux requires much fewer resources than Microsoft Windows.)

⁹The dust and power quirks wear out the hard drives very quickly, because they are mechanical devices.

¹⁰These are for networking classes. They should be SNMP enabled and Cisco equipment is preferred. There is much interest in networking classes, both introductory and advanced.

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