Indeed, I very much recommend getting a working offline Wikipedia on your laptops to show the ministry people.  Nothing beats a live demo, and the benefits this project can bring to a school without (regular) Internet access are much more palpable that way.

We at the openZIM project would be very happy to help with any technical issue you may face in getting this to work on your laptops.

Re posting on the WMF blog -- I think that blog's policy is to report rather than plan, so it would be an excellent place to publicize this project once it's underway.

Cheers,

   Asaf