| If you’re religious, chances are good you believe there is a special place in Hell reserved for people who steal from a church.
If so, there’s a place waiting for the folks who broke into the Palmetto Community Covenant Church of Perrine, a small church in a lower income neighborhood working hard to make a difference in the community
In late June, church officials returned to the building to find thieves had been busy. Missing was the church’s emergency generator, conveniently carried away with the church’s handcart, which was also missing.
After assessing the needs, Gold Coast Mac turned to the generosity of our members and outside donors to turn unwanted older Macs into an answer to Palmetto’s prayer.
 President Esver Camacho, board member Giuseppe DiFranco, and past president Dave Game gathered at Game’s South Miami-Dade home on Saturday, July 12th to take the raw donations and turn them into usable computers. Many of the computers considered for donation need work before they can be recycled, so the GCMac trio swapped memory, hard drives, and keyboards to come up with five working units.
Next, the computers had to be matched with monitors, and age appropriate software was installed on each machine. Whenever possible, we consulted database information on the computers to determine what software originally came with them, and included copies on the hard disk. First, however, the computers had to be completely wiped to remove all trace of the previous owner’s data, and then, the best OS version for each machine was installed.
Finally, each machine was given a final usability test, and then completely cleaned.
Five computers, five monitors, a laser printer and a color inkjet printer were bundled up for the short trip to the church, where volunteers were waiting for the Gold Coast Mac team.
When it became apparent that a toner cartridge was needed to make the printer work, the volunteers made a run to Office Depot and purchased a new cartridge as well as power strips with their own funds. In less than an hour, all five machines had been installed and tested, and team GCMac took some time to show church staffers how to use the computers.
When totaled, the donation of five computers, software, and the time needed to prepare and install them exceeded three thousand dollars in value, but the real donation was the time invested by the Gold Coast Mac volunteers, and the computers donated by people who hated to see a good Mac go to the crusher.
The generosity of everyone involved put the Palmetto Community Covenant Church back into the information age, and put some fun back into an important summer program.
July 2003
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