Laurie's time in SA

As some of you may know, I have just spent 10 days in Johannesburg in South Africa. The main purpose for my visit was to attend a training course on the Mikrotik Router Operating System. For those who don't know (and I am guessing that this is quite a number of you), Mikrotik is all about how you manage multiple connections to networks. So if you use it for you router to the internet you can reduce peoples bandwidth so they don't hog it, or you can block certain websites such as, say, "Facebook" :-)

Myself, John and Steve in our training room

I took 2 courses while I was there - the first one was a basic introduction to the system and the second was all to do with how you can use it to manage wireless networks. Both of these have been areas that I have wanted to know more about for quite some time now. For the second course I was joined by a good friend John from our MAF program in West DRC and Steve from TASOK. They have both been using Mikrotik for a while and if you look closely at the home page photo of TASOK you can see their antenna with their wireless equipment on the right of the photo.

Crown Reef Guesthouse - Robertsham

I stayed at a very nice B&B very close to the training - run by Henry. It was a really nicely done up place with a swimming pool, internet, proper coffee in the mornings (when we found all the bits of the coffee machine!), and nice and quiet too.
The area around has a number of small restaurants and about 5 minutes drive away there is a big mall too.
The way that the courses were offered meant that during the first week I was there I was on training Monday to Wednesday, with the second course starting the following Monday.

MAF SA Hangar - Lanseria Airport

This meant that I could spend a couple of days at the MAF South Africa office meeting up with the people there, talking about the various projects that we have running in Kampala and finding out how they were doing in general. This is now the third time that I have visited the team there and it was really good to catch up with old friends and also to meet the new ones who have arrived since the last time I was there.

Ruth, Anna, Daniel and Stu Fitch

I got to stay with the Fitches who are working for MAF in SA. They were on the initial pre-field training course that we went on with MAF many years ago and we haven't had many chances to meet up since as they went to Kenya and now are based in South Africa. It was great to see them again and hang out with them. Their two kids, Daniel and Anna are about the same ages as Bethany and Naomi and so I had fun playing football, watching Star Wars, etc. with them.
All in all I had a very good time and managed to get my Christmas shopping done at the same time. I am now looking forward to visiting them again in the new year sometime for the next Mikrotik course in the series.