Hi All,

This is an invitation received from Mr. Johan,

Thank you Mr. Johan and Team for doing a great work here in India.

Though he has given the time but not given any day/date, may be any day/date few people can visit them, possibly from Monday to Friday.

I will try my best, if I can make it.

With regards,

-----Forwarded Message-----

From: Johan Van Lon de_oppergod@hotmail.com To: linuxers-owner@mm.ilug-bom.org.in Subject: Belgian Gentoo-Linux Project in Mumbai Date: 17 May 2005 16:10:50 +0000

Dear,

-This mail can be sent as an invitation on your mailing-list if you like. we would like to have somebody from every LUG in Mumbai to join us for a tour of our project.... You yourselves are off course also invited.

Dear,

Allow me to introduce a Linux-project that has been going on for almost 3 months now, right here in Mumbai. We think that you and your organisation might be quite intrested.

Almost 2 years ago now, me (Johan Van Loon) and Jan Van Steenkiste got the assignment to find a good firm in Belgium to complete our internship, in one of my previous schools I had done an internship as wel and I hadn't really learned anything in that time, afraid of a repitition of the events, I decided to find an alternative internship. We told our idea to Elise Daans and she thought it was a good idea as well, so we went to the school to see if it would be possible to complete this project. We got a green light and started planning right away, very soon it became very clear that 3 persons would not be enough, so we invited Joeri Balcaen and Tim Bastiaensens to join us, a marvelous decision it turned out to be.

The next year we organised a bunch of money-collecting actions and tried desperately to get the attention of the press... The PC's started dripping in... In the end we collected enough money for the transport, but not for our tickets, nor for our stay here. So we decided to finance our tickets and our stay here ourselves.

Just in time we recieved a huge donation of screens and PC's and from that moment on good luck shone upon us, we got a couple of very large donations that turned out to be very nessescary here in India since the customs charged us a huge amount of import-taxes on our OWN PC's.

We arrived in India and were very nicely welcomed by the school who had provided a very nice appartement for us and a huge classroom. At the moment we have about 30 PC's working in the classroom and the classes are going very fine. We have thought our students the history of PC's, basic PC knowledge about hardware and everything. Further we thought them the basic use of the CLI in Gentoo Linux, now we are teaching them xHTML and we will leave behind a course-book about openOffice.org .

We know this is a little short-notice but we would like to invite 2 representatives of your organisation to come and pay a visit to our classroom. We are looking for some people that are apt at using Gentoo-linux, or just linux in general who would like to give up a little of their spare time to keep the network up and running after we have gone...

Therefor we would like to invite you to come visit us around 19.00h in our school "Joseph Cardijn Technical School" at Parel. Khashaba Jadhav Marg, Off Dr. Ambedkar Road, Dadar, Mumbai-400014. If you are coming by train, "Elphiston road" station and "Parel" station are the closest, "Dadar" is about 20 minute walk. If you are coming by taxi, ask them to bring you to the back of "Tata Memorial Hospital" in Parel, there ask for the "Mahindra Milestone Workshop" the school is working together with that workshop, and if you arrive their, just ask for the people from "Belgium".

Kind regards, Johan - Jan - Tim - Elise - Joeri

Allready since my youth, India has attracted me, largly due to my aunt and uncle who were real adventurers and allways spoke very highly of the beauty of India and about the generousity of the people here. So I decided to organise and internship that could help those great people of this great nation. The decision was not hard, the idea i got was going to India to teach the usage of PC's for free and as I talked it over with Jan, we decided to go the whole way, we were going to collect all the necesary PC's and materials ourselves and donate a complete computer-classroom to a school in India.