We went into Kainantu today, it's a town about ten minutes away now that they paved a large portion of the road. Lucky for us, the department of motor vehicles equivalent was open, and had film in the camera, and we walked away with our driver's licenses.
All you need is a U.S. license and 60kina.
Which is to say, they let you drive there with absolutely no experience driving on the LEFT side of the road and the RIGHT side of the car.
But we don't have a car yet so we don't have to worry about that too much.
Vehicle wise, every 6 months you need a safety inspection sticker, and every year you pay for registration which also includes insurance.
In June we hope to acquire a 1994 Isuzu Trooper when the current owners move.
Had a big win at work this week! There was an issue with the network, which currently is a flat network, and they had installed 2 dhcp servers on it. Machines were getting ip addresses from servers geographically located elsewhere and it was creating a problem. They wanted a way to block dhcp packets from one to the other but had no firewall in the middle and no routing. I was able to employ my cisco knowledge and write an access list (acl) and implement it on one of the ports of the switch. Soon the network was doing what it was supposed to, and I realized soon that one of the values I can add here is my networking knowledge (such that it is). God allowed me to be confirmed today as I finally did something right, and fixed a long standing problem here.
Part of the younger, new missionary role, as I see it, is to be passionate, and communicate excitement and vision. As is true anywhere, whenever you work in the same position for a while, you can easily fall into a certain way of thinking, and new blood usually brings in a vitality and challenges you to think new again. I've been on both ends of the spectrum, and right now I'm enjoying being the new guy, learning, respecting those who have come before me and what they have done, and then contributing helpfully where I can.
I have great idea on how this network can be secured and tuned better. One of the major problems they currently have with the network is viruses. I can already see how with very little cost, we can implement simple changes that would help reduce that problem significantly.
