Josh's blog about Mbingo

I thought I'd commit briefly on what I did these last 41 days. A few months ago while attending a regional conference of missionaries, I made my nerdiness known (yes I realize that it is impossible for me not to) and was asked to fix an imminent problem at a hospital an hour away. It had been down for over a week and they knew the problem was on their side. I happened to guess what the problem was off the top of my head so just hours later with the help of Chris Jackson, it was working again. I was asked to return as soon as I could and teach their IT guys how to manage their fairly complex network.

 As things do, it began to snowball and the idea turned into: move out there, teach a month long class to all the regional hospital IT guys, fix the hospital's network, write a few databases, and on and on and on... Lori, our sending organization and expat friends all prayed about it and decided that a 1.5 month-long trip would be a great idea. We all moved out to Mbingo on February 4^th, to a beautiful house full of luxuries (washing machine, microwave!) and immediately started work. Fourteen IT guys (and even a girl!!!) came from as far as 9 hrs away.

They spent 2 weeks, 3 hrs a day (including Saturdays) listening to me babel on about subnet masks, parabolic antennas, and structured wiring to name a few. I gave them a quiz everyday and even a final exam. They all tried very hard and did very well. I was impressed that they understood me as well as they did. They each received a certificate of completion. Two of the Mbingo Hospital IT guys and one expat, Jesse Paulsen, took the class and continued to work with me for the next month at Mbingo hospital.

We completely rebuilt the network. Mbingo Hospital is a massive hospital with over 300 beds, digital X-rays, Electronic Medical Records, case logs, and electronic billing. It has 24 routers/APs (even after it was greatly simplified), 12 switches, 12,000 ft of Cat5 cable, 5 servers and spans over ¾ of a square mile. There are over 275 devices on the network including each doctor's tablet. Needless to say, I worked continuously alongside the three other guys the entire time. We greatly simplified the network, removing stuff that had built up for the last decade without anyone redoing it. We removed 2,000 ft of cable that was causing loops and reorganized the rest so that future folks could more rapidly understand and make adjustments to it. The problem was that so many people had come and worked on it for short periods, but no one had spent the necessary time to completely reevaluate it. We trekked around the premises removing bad APs, realigned them, changed the frequencies, relocated them, optimized them, removed them, simplified them... Overall the wireless network was running considerable better. We added a Linux firewall to filter inappropriate content, block bandwidth hogs, and block facebook and other social media sites during work hours (extremely popular amongst some and not so much for others). We added an internal portal website which allowed the staff to more rapidly look up phone extensions, connect to internal servers, and test their connections.

 We also created a program which would monitor all the devices on the network and alert when something went down. I presented my findings to the heads of the hospital and made some future recommendations which they seemed to take seriously. Overall I had a wonderful time, lost some weight, and felt some significant improvements to the hospital's network were made. Hopefully the training I did will allow these 14 Cameroonian IT guys to further God's love and mercy through improvements in the Cameroonian hospital systems.