Several months ago, military wives in San Diego wanted to take the edge off of their separation from their husbands, who were stationed in Iraq facing an extended deployment of eight to 12 months.
A satellite link set up from Iraq to the San Diego Supercomputer Center allows Marines and their family members to stay connected through video teleconferencing.
Their solution came in the form of a company called Freedom Calls, a nonprofit organization based in New York. The company purchases satellite time to access video teleconferencing and allows military families nationwide to use this service free of charge. Freedom Calls representatives also travel to Iraq to install satellites and other necessary facilities at the military bases.
Freedom Calls was created by John Harlow about one year ago when he saw the need to connect military families with their loved ones overseas.
Their facilities have been in use since Feb. 11 at the San Diego Supercomputer Center, where several SDSC employees have been giving their time on Saturdays to host VTC sessions.
SDSC volunteers host about 24 families every Saturday from 8 a.m. to 1 p.m., during which time each family is able to spend half an hour video teleconferencing on a 48-inch liquid-crystal computer screen.
The VTC sessions provide invaluable time that these families would not otherwise be able to have. This is the only sort of facility in San Diego that provides these opportunities for families — free of charge.
Jim D’Aoust, National Partnership for Advanced Computational Infrastructure project manager, is one of the volunteers who spends his Saturdays helping to host the VTCs.
“Jim’s done the lion’s share of the work,” said Greg Lund, assistant director of communications at the SDSC.
“One gal said, ‘I don’t know what I’m going to talk about,’” D’Aoust said, explaining that she was nervous to talk to her husband for the first time since their separation. When he checked on her later in the session, “she was going a mile a minute.”
D’Aoust told another story where several military wives were due to give birth shortly after their husbands were deployed last year. Now they’re able to bring in their infant children for their husbands to see.
The VTC program currently uses two of six available satellite uplinks, the first starting at 8 a.m. and the second at 8:15 a.m. According to D’Aoust, they continue to run throughout the day in parallel, staggered by 15 minutes. Coordinators hope to eventually use all six uplinks so that they can host the maximum number of families.
As of April 29, the VTC sessions have connected over 100 families with their loved ones in Iraq.
