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After years of serving at Windermere, former missionary Marty Mauk has come back each summer to be a blessing to the old school that he once served at. They year they brought exactly what they needed to accomplish a task that we couldn’t have achieved without their help.
For the past 3 years Marty and the team have been working on rewiring the lights throughout the school. Years ago the decision to put in ballast fluorescent lighting had served the school’s lighting needs, however costly repairs on ballasts due to the heat and humidity and further costly replacements of those long (semi-explosive) fluorescent bulbs has left the school without many working lights. An additional result has been high electricity costs, especially when lights are left on without any functioning illumination, and the electricity is simply burnt out in the unit casing itself.
Well, this trip from Union Park Baptist Church marks the completion of this initially experimental test to see if our existing lights could be converted over from the long fluorescent pipes to CFL (compact fluorescent light). This trick requires some intrepid engineering to strip out the old and install small pigtailed adapters along with all the extra wiring and connections. The team set themselves up with an assembly line style program of those tearing down the old ballasts, those cleaning and painting the old to new, and those assembling the new wiring and parts to bring an efficient lighting solution back to the school.
The second achievement this team gave was with a friend I met on last year’s team: Ira. Ira is an IT specialists (at least the reigning expert on Eleuthera while he is here). His work in combination with last week’s team member Fred helped to prep and clean 30 new computers for the school. Ira literally worked into the night, and many times during the week while the rest of the team was on break or preparing for dinner, Ira was still tirelessly working on those computers. When he would get stuck, he wouldn’t give up, only work harder to find the solution.
At the end of everything the school now has working light, that turn on each time you flip the switch (a novel idea), and new computers programed for their appropriate use throughout the school. We offer a great big “Thank you” to the each of them for their handwork and investment in the future of Windermere.