Day 12, Friday - our last day in Uganda

5am… 5am!!! That was difficult after almost 2 weeks of late nights and getting up early.

Dave Forney was the pilot we were flying with today. I refer to him as MAF’s very own top gun! He has the mirrored shades, is American, and he is pretty cool. You can see the link.

We were at the airfield by 7am and I managed to get some really great shots of our planes on the apron as the sun rose. In Uganda, the sun rises and 7am and sets at 7pm pretty much all year round. It doesn’t change like it does in the UK.

We helped where we could as Dave did all the pre-flight checks, manifest checks, weight calculations, fuel allowance, and aircraft checks.

Whilst Dave did all the technical checks, Steve felt he needed to do the most important aircraft check: kick the tyre!

I absolutely love flying and more so the technical side of things. I loved physics at school and learning how things work and why we do things. As Dave was doing his aircraft checks, he took fuel samples out of the tanks. This was to check there were no anomalies in the fuel but mainly water. He explained how water is heavier than Jet-A1 fuel and so if there was any water in there it would sink to the bottom so you can easily see it. He explained that if there was water in the fuel, the engine could stutter and if there is a considerable about, it would stall. Good thing to check then!

We took off from Kajjansi at around 8am. Our route today included 5 stops in Uganda. We were so grateful that not only were we getting a flight, but 6 all in 1 go. Our first stop was in the north of Uganda, Gulu. A 60-minute flight, the equivalent of around 8 hours' driving. We also flew to Pader, Kotido, Moroto and Soroti before heading back to Kajjansi.

This flight pretty much covered the majority of Uganda and we were back by 2.30pm. It’s pretty amazing just how much of a difference flying makes.

Gulu and Soroti are tarmac runways but the others are just dirt tracks, some barely wide enough for a car to drive up.

Our flight purposes included delivering blood to a doctor, important documentation and satellite equipment to Far Reaching Ministries, a few other parcels to another local charity and at the same time, picking up passengers to fly back to Kajjansi. Our first passenger got on at Pader.

When we flew to Kotido, we came into a bit of difficulty on the first landing attempt. Here, the local tribes people are fascinated with the plane. They hear it coming and all rush to the runway. The only problem is they all stood on the runway! We attempted a landing but had to abort as they didn’t move. We circled around for a second attempt and this time they realised they needed to keep clear.

It was great to be around some local tribes people and grasp just how remote these places are.
By the time we were at Moroto, we had 4 passengers and then picked up a further 7 at Soroti. These 7 passengers were a family visiting their family who are Christian missionaries in Soroti.

Throughout the day, Steve and I took it in turns sitting up front in the co-pilot seat and I took the opportunity to learn more about flying, flight rules, airport rules, what certain dials mean etc. It was really great and I loved the experience.

It was such a great end to our 2 weeks in Uganda, we had pretty much completed the entire office move and set it all back up again. The only thing outstanding was the VOIP phones which were held up still by the phone line provider configuring the satellite dish so we felt we had done our bit.

If only the day had ended there…

We come back to the office and the power had cut out suddenly and the whole office was in a state where nothing was working.

Typical! So after a lovely morning/afternoon, we had to help with getting things back online again.
We got the ball rolling and then handed over to Kalumba as we needed to start saying goodbye to staff and heading back to our house to pack and catch our flight home.

Our flight was leaving at 1am Saturday morning and so we got picked up from the guesthouse at 9pm. It took 2 hours to drive to the airport, but I got the driver to stop off for me so I could grab a last minute Rolex (see Day 7)!

After what seemed to be far too many security checks, we eventually made it to our flight gate and, would you believe it, we bumped into the family that we picked up from Soroti on the MAF flight! The flight was on time and I believe I fell asleep almost instantly! I was so tired after being awake close to 21 hours.

We arrived back in the UK at 8am safe and sound and I was very pleased to see my wonderful wife and daughter waiting for me.

Feeling thankful

I feel very privileged to have had the opportunities given to me on this trip. I have seen one of our MAF programmes, worked in a very different and challenging environment, met some amazing families serving with MAF, experienced first-hand the difficulties people face living and working in Africa and meet our sponsored child at Watoto. I have seen things that will stick with me for a long time, but most of all I feel proud to be a part of such a great organisation who can provide access to resources and information to the remotest of locations, helping people who need it the most.

I hope I have the opportunity to see more of the great work MAF does. Thank you to all the supporters who help make it possible and thank you to those who have followed me on my journey through reading this blog.

God bless.
Luke

Day 11, Thursday - a visit to a special child

Today was quite a special day for me and I was really looking forward to it. I had the opportunity to visit Watoto Child Care Ministries just outside of Kampala.

My wife has been sponsoring a child in Watoto for 9 years now and has spent time with her and Watoto before we met.

Throughout our relationship I have heard a lot about this child and Watoto and have supported my wife in this commitment she has made.

I couldn’t believe that I now had the opportunity to meet her and see Watoto.

Watoto is a Christian organisation that takes in abandoned babies and children and gives them a new life. Health, education, family and Christian morals.

I was so impressed with them and could see how it was such a good cause.

I enjoyed getting to know her, playing games in the garden and even managed to Skype back home to my wife while I was there which was great!

The perks of being a geek :)
MAF often flies Watoto staff or people visiting Watoto who are then collected from our Kajjansi airfield. Without MAF, the only other option is a commercial flight into Entebbe and to then drive for 2 hours.

 

Dinner with the Vines

This evening we had dinner with the Vines. Greg is our Chief Pilot from the UK, Jill is our Communications Officer from Australia and they have 3 daughters who have managed to pick up American accents? Very strange. I believe this could be from the International School they go to in Kampala.

They are a very fun family and we had a great laugh. Jill had cooked home-made quiche which was delicious!

Steve also caught up with me on how the day went in the office, but it was probably best I hadn’t asked. Still no further with the VOIP system, EMI had got some extra switches and so they were now separate from our network, and Steve had managed to fix an issue with the fileserver that popped up yesterday but progress was slow due to the power keep going off. But then he had some pretty cool news…

Tomorrow (Friday) will our last day in Uganda and it had been arranged that Steve and I could go on an MAF flight! Amazing. We were both very excited, but then he said...  we need to get up at 5am!!

What?! Ok, this is worth it.

Day 10, Wednesday - a day of IT challenges

Today was a challenging day! I felt like the day just didn’t have enough hours in it.

Due to the ongoing power issues, we had to keep shutting servers down each night and turning them back on in the morning. This process took up between 1 and 2 hours each morning as inevitably some servers didn’t start up all their services correctly so they had to be restarted again. Servers are designed to be left on and they can get unstable when keep being turned off.

Once everything was on, Steve and I started with getting the Wi-Fi network up and running. We plugged in the Wi-Fi access point and logged onto the server to register it but struggled to connect to the access point. We tried various things to get the server to register the access point but it wasn’t working. We thought it may be an issue with EMI (Engineering Ministries International, based upstairs) again but they were still unplugged, we did a factory reset on the device, changed cables but nothing. We then moved the Wi-Fi to another network port and VOILA! What are the chances of that? A dead network port.

We managed to get 4 access points set up, 2 in the office, 1 in the hangar and 1 in the passenger terminal.

We then tried to set up the VOIP (Voice over IP) system. Unfortunately we still didn’t have the satellite connection for the phone line so we couldn’t get any VOIP calls but we thought we would at least set the server up. The phone server is a virtual server and so you can only connect to it by a Remote Desktop Connection or by VMWare’s client connection tool vSphere. Because we had made the IP address changes on the network and the phone server was still on the old IP address scheme, the only way to connect was by vSphere. This tool was only installed on Kalumba’s laptop and he was working at the old office today to set up a satellite office internet router. So we were out of luck and had to leave this until tomorrow.

I then attempted to create some VLANs on the network to route EMI’s network traffic through our switch but only be allowed to communicate with the Internet and not any of our servers or PCs. I spent the rest of the day trying to get this working with the IT director from EMI but by 4.30pm we still couldn’t get it to work. We decided that due to our limited time frame (we were flying home Friday, and he was flying back to the states) that we would abandon that idea and he would get a couple of extra switches to place in the office and hangar to allow his network to be completely separate from ours all the way out to the internet.

Steve managed to get the Site to Site VPN up and running between Ashford and Kajjansi by linking up a secure tunnel between the 2 firewalls and he also managed to get a client VPN for users in the Uganda programme to connect to the Uganda servers from home… well, while the servers are turned on that is!

So in summary, quite a frustrating day but we have all enjoyed the challenges. I felt the pressure a bit more as I knew I wasn’t going to be in the office tomorrow. Read why in tomorrow’s blog.

Day 9, Tuesday - cracking firewalls and fileservers

Another bright and early start. In the convoy and on the road by 7.30am. First on the agenda was to try and crack the firewall. The issue with having a cloud managed firewall is the device has to see the cloud portal to be able to download its settings. The firewall also acted as our DHCP server and so without it online, no one’s PC or laptop could get an IP address in order to communicate on the network.



After around an hour, we cracked it!! Hurrah!

We had to check cables were wired correctly, check ISP settings, make sure the satellite link was receiving a connection and try many different configurations but we got there. With the fibre link also working between the hangar and the office, the PC’s were now also picking up their IP addresses from the firewall.

Now everyone could turn on their PCs, the pressure was on!

Fileservers needed to be communicating so they could get their files, database servers had to work for finance and operations for flight management, printers all had to be communicating and emails had to be coming through.

Emails to all the staff in Uganda are routed through servers in the UK. Whilst the office move was happening, this server in the UK was holding the emails until we went live again in the new office. We logged on and there were just short of 1,000 emails waiting to come down to the staff. This had built up over 4 days! It just shows you how busy our programmes can be.

After a full day of configuring servers, running round all the users helping them get set up, ensuring they can connect to things, print and access files, we were so glad we had got to the stage of a functioning network with staff all able to work.

At one point in the day, a spanner was thrown into the works by EMI upstairs turned on their server which started to also hand out IP addresses, so our PC’s started to not communicate properly as they had wrong IP addresses. We quickly realised and so unplugged their network from ours until we can separate the traffic on the switches to not conflict with each other.

This is a fun job for tomorrow!

While I was in the hangar helping some staff with their printers, I also checked in to see the Cessna 182 which has now had all of its vortex generators installed. It looks really neat!

The remaining things for us to do tomorrow will also be to get the Wi-Fi network up and running and talking to the unifying server and then to setup the VOIP phone system.

We hope that by the end of Wednesday, we may have just completed the office move from an IT perspective! Let’s hope and see!

We were invited to dinner at Simon and Pam Wunderli’s house this evening. Simon is a pilot for MAF and they have served in Uganda for 13 years! Amazing. It was great to hear their passion still for the programme after so many years. We had a lovely dinner and a cappuccino! Mmm, that was soo good!

Day 8, Monday - the first day in the new office!

All the staff had to travel to Kajjansi for the first time today. A large convoy of cars were organised to collect all the staff from the main road near to the old office. We were lucky in that we didn’t have to walk anywhere as we were going with Mark. He was one of the designated drivers. We were in the Land Cruiser again and when it’s not being used for cargo, it has two fold-down benches in the back for 8 people, so on the way down we had a total of 10 of us squeezed in! Around 4 other cars were in the convoy which left the pickup point at 7.30am.

We were really hoping for everything to be up and running by Monday morning but there has been so many delays with the new power line into the office, and being unreliable when it was up, that we just couldn’t chance booting the servers up. They have installed a very complex power system that includes mains power, solar power, an inverter and a backup generator. They should switch cleanly between all of them when needed but it just doesn’t happen. A team of engineers are trying to troubleshoot and get it working correctly.

This meant that first on our agenda was to install a UPS. (Uninterruptable Power Supply) This would allow us to turn the servers on and protect them from any power spikes or outages. The batteries in these would only hold the charge for around 20 minutes but at least it gives us chance to shut the servers down properly.

Once this was up and running we started turning servers on. Part of the plan for the office moving location was to also change the IP address configuration for the network. This meant we had to manually log into every server and give it a new IP address and log each change we made. We ran into some issues with the firewall and the Internet not being connected. Not only that, but the main fibre link between the hangar and the office was not working. This meant that even if we did have Internet, it wouldn’t pass through to the office, as the entrance point for the internet is in the hangar.

We managed to get a 3G dongle into a router and got some internet that way in the office but we still couldn’t configure the firewall. Who ever thought that cloud managed firewalls was a good idea in Africa?!

 

 

We resorted to prioritising the local network and getting servers configured. We amended DNS records, pointed exchange servers in the right direction to carry on receiving and sending emails, got their databases online and amended the site location for servers. We gave all the servers new Static IP addresses so they can communicate on the network and this meant that tomorrow, when we finally get the firewall online, things should all be working. Fingers crossed!

We were lucky to have a quick response from the company who laid the fibre connection who, by the end of the day, managed to find the fault and fix the line. We felt so sorry for the guys who had to dig the cable up again after it was buried under the ground for 175 metres.

We also managed to finally get the IT office tidy and get a desk and some chairs in there so we can actually sit down and work. It’s all slowly coming together.

The outside of the new office is still very much a building site with a lot of ground work to be done but it shouldn’t be long before that is done. Maybe another week.

Another nice meal at the MCC this evening and back to the house to catch up on emails and chat to the family on Skype. It’s great when we have a working Internet! Family is what keeps you going.