Donated Computers Go a Long Way
MEMO's president was walking down the hall of Placetas hospital in Villa Clara province in Cuba one day in 2005 when he heard "tat-a-tat-tat-a-tating".
In a flashback, he realized he was hearing a mechanical typewriter. This was Cuba's hospital's state of the art word processing in 2005.
On returning to Canada, he discovered that Thunder bay hospitals were replacing their old, Pentium III computers with newer Pentium IV PCs and that these older ones were now 
available for donation.
Through the work of MEMO, over 300 computers and monitors were donated not just from the hospitals but from local businesses and individuals as well. In 2008, 200 Pentium IV CPU's and several 15" flat screen computers also became available.
To date, over 500 computers have been shipped for use in health care institutions in Villa Clara province.
In keeping with MEMO's policy of not just dumping equipment into the recipient's lap, MEMO has sent several computer experts from Canada to work with Cuban computer engineers in setting up computer systems in hospitals that MEMO is working in. This has proven to be a monumental task. To begin with, miles of Cat 5 cable was removed from the McKellar Hospital before it was sent to Cuba. Here the Placetas hospital had to have the cable run to all the various departments. Servers, switches, hubs and UPSs' from MEMO were installed. Computer desks were also provided for each department.
Most of the hospital staff had a rudimentary understanding of computers from their schooling days but a massive education program in computers had to be carried out by the hospital's IT staff.
All the programs had to be written using LINUX as an operating system, MEMO computer consultants worked with Cuban computer engineers in developing some very simple computer programs used by the hospital's
intranet.
In Cuba, e-mail is available for government institutions but not the Internet. MEMO continues to ship computers, printers and accessories in each container that is shipped. At present, according to government regulations, only Pentium IV or newer CPU's and monitors manufactured after 2000 are allowed to be shipped.