A few meetings ago we checked out our first donated 486 and two 386s. The next month someone came down from Bartlesville that was with a Westlyan Church group that was sponsoring an Indian School in South Dakota. We planned to give them one of the two 386s we had just checked out (the one with the larger hard disk), but for some reason it failed to boot up when we double checked it prior to release, so we let them take the 486. When they left we looked at the 386 in more detail and learned that one of the voltages in the power supply had just gone out, so we replaced the power supply and put the unit back as one ready to be sent out when we got a request from a worthy non-profit organization. I assume a higher power than ours had decided the Indian School needed the 486, and we certainly did not want to argue with the higher power.

The next meetign Jim Erwin from the Belize Bible and Trade School was at our meeting. Belize is a small country in Central America, and they only have one computer repairman in the entire country. Jim wants to train some of the locals to do computer refurbishing just like we do, so that they will be able to get good jobs in Belize; Jim's ministry is associated with Bethesda Boys Ranch, who generously provide us with a place to work. We told Jim that he was welcome to take some of our spare parts when he goes back to Belize, and we are working on trying to get five machines ready for him to take back that he can network together under windows; he says that if he can provide 5 networked computers the Belize government will provide them with free access to the Internet, and that should be very useful in their school.

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