The Net Ninja.com

It has recently come to my attention that the year is not 2009 anymore. This realization has been somewhat of an irritation in situations such as check writing. The realization that you just screwed up your check blank after you’ve already filled out the rest of it, the irritated look from the other party to your sheepish look as you fumble with another check… Things like that. However, since it is in fact a new year, this also means that I have not yet posted on my “blog” this year (and the debate about whether or not I posted last year is still going on). Since the former realization leads quite nicely to the latter realization, it seems logical to me to boot my dead laptop battery from the front page by posting something new.

In December of last year, I graduated from New Tribes Bible Institute with an associates degree in biblical studies. Hence, I am no longer residing in the frozen cheese-laden-northern-territories-of-WI aforementioned in previous posts, but am back in the promised land of Littleton CO.

My plan for future career plans has also changed somewhat significantly. I had been thinking that I would go to pilot school and eventually go into missionary pilot work. My thoughts were influenced by being at a bible school with a missions emphasis, and having had an indecisive frame of mind for quite some time, I thought “why not? it’s directly involved with missionary work, and it’s pretty clear God wants the church to do missions”. Some other factors came to mind however that have changed my mind. While talking with my dad about my plans, he made a good point. He said that definitely the church is to be involved in missions work, but missions work is much more than the guy on the front line. He used the illustration of the fact that for every soldier on the battlefield, there are eight people supporting him in various ways. Those eight people behind the lines make the soldier’s job possible, and cannot be counted as not involved in the battle. In the same way, people on the home front supporting missionaries have no less an important job, are no less involved, and God isn’t going to tell them “I’m not as happy with you as I am with this guy, because you didn’t go to the jungle like he did.” This got me thinking about something my brother-in-law’s father told me when I asked for help in figuring out plans (he’s got significant counseling experience in this area). He said, after I told him my story so far, that it seems like up until now, I have let life happen to me, instead of happening to life. All this got me thinking about my thought processes over the years. Before I considered piloting, I was thinking that I would go to the police academy after bible school, and become a police officer. Why was I considering that? Because I thought it to be a profession that wouldn’t require me to learn a-lot of math. What is it about math that intimidates me? My last three math classes were as follows: I dropped out of calc 2 after slogging through it, not understanding much, not getting good help from the professor, and not being able to finish my homework due to a glitchy computer homework system, before that I managed to plug through calc 1, which I got a bad start on and only passed with a C with a-lot of one on one help from the professor, before that, I took a trig class taught by a professor who had terrible handwriting, went very fast, and had a very thick accent. When I had trouble understanding things at the beginning of the class, the professor ridiculed me and implied that I had cheated my way through math to get to this point, and therefore he wouldn’t bother to help me. Before that, I took college algebra from a professor who explained things well and helped when he was asked, and I passed with an A… Wait a second, an A?? What were my thoughts about careers when I taking that class? At the time, I wasn’t really intimidated by math, it was just work, and my career interests involved computers and engineering. Hold on a second… I’m still a nerd when it comes to computers, and I am fascinated by the engineering of electrical components such as circuit boards and computer controlled systems. Why aren’t I pursuing technology careers anymore? It occurred to me that I wasn’t pursuing my actual interests because I was intimidated by some bad experiences with math, and I had a less than accurate prospective on missions work. So, I have decided to man up, take life head on, and go for an electrical engineering degree. I made this decision a little late to get fully started at a college, but I have started a class in trigonometry to show this math thing that it aint got nuthin on me! As far as the degree goes, I’m considering going through a program called College Plus, which is designed to help you learn things faster and test for credit. Since this is an engineering degree, I won’t be able to do the majority of my classes online like you might be able to do with a history degree for instance, but depending on how many credits I can transfer to the school I decide to go to, I may still be able to save a-lot of time and money on gen-ed classes.

Talitha and I are still together, but we are long distance since I’m in CO and she’s in MN. It’s been a little tough, but I think we’re learning a-lot about each other this way, and long distance won’t last forever.

If I think of anything profound to say and I also manage to think to post it here and also somehow get around to doing it, I’ll post more at a later time.

Well, I seem to have found out something new about the particular batteries they put in the 13″ plastic macbooks… When I left for Bolivia, I forgot to turn my macbook off, which drained the battery, and put the computer in hibernation mode. Unfortunately, one of the little fineprint things that nobody reads is that if you leave the battery discharged for just a few days, it kicks the bucket. Bites the bullet. Gets a pink slip for life. If you have this happen to you, it’s probably a waste of time to bother with the apple store. I went down there, and they said that they won’t even help their special “apple care” customers if this is your plight. They did however offer to sell me an OEM battery for $130. How nice. I wasn’t about to eat that, so I said “no thanks, I’m not paying that much” and left. I later found a brand new extended life generic battery on ebay for $58. A 5600 mAh rather than the 5100 mAh OEM ones. So I guess the good news is I’ll have an extended battery, and the bad news is that I had to spend an extra $58 when the original battery probably would have lasted a bit longer.

Win some ya lose some I guess.

Well, I made it there and back. We showed up at the airport in Santa Cruz at about 8:00 pm on the evening of the 1st, found out our flight was delayed for about two hours, and after some sitting, we flew out at about 1:00 am the morning of the 2nd. After 7 hours of flight, we landed in Miami FL, where most of us went our separate ways. I managed to get a flight at 6:05 pm back to Denver, so I ended up sitting at the airport board out of my mind for 10 hours. Oh well, I had some books with me, so I did lots of reading. I’ve got a ton of pictures to sort through, so hopefully I’ll be able to get those online soon. Thanks to all who supported me on this trip through prayer as well as financial aide! God provided all I needed right at the last minute.

Talk atcha latta!

Not much to report today. We made it to Santa Cruz via bus today, and found out that the place we were going to stay could no longer accomidate us. After calling around a little, we ended up at a mission home in kind of a rough part of town, but we have a place to stay. I´m at an internet Café a couple blocks away, sitting next to a bunch of gamers. We´re going to get dinner in about an hour, then tomorrow I´m not sure what the plan is besides catching our flight to Miami.

Pray that we won´t get mugged or anything

Today we finished the last chunk of concrete for the basketball court! I wasn´t as busy today as I was the other days because there was no surface prep to do for the next day this time. When I was occupied, it was mostly hand-mixing concrete, and hauling wheelbarrows, so I´m pretty well covered in concrete.

Last night we had a little worship service and devotional, and we did the mime drama that we weren´t able to do previously at the market before. After a short message from the bible, we had a little meeting to give a little history of Manos de Amor, or Hands of Love. Dan and Karen Bunn, a couple working as dorm parents at what was then the Tambo MK school, had an idea for a soup kitchen for the children of Comarapa who were very much in need of such an establishment. Although they wanted to set up something to fill this need, they didn´t really have any kind of resources to do so, so it stayed a dream until when someone from Tambo needed to be taken to the hospital for an illness (can´t remember the exact details there), and they met a doctor there who had been wanting to do the same for a while as well. To make a long story short, they teamed together and formed Manos de Amor. It started out as a tent in the middle of town for a temporary location, then the government told them that they would give them a plot of land in order to build a facility for the soup kitchen. Unfortunately, the plot of land they were going to give them was near several pubs, and the law says that an establishment that sells alcohol can´t be within a certain area with an establishment that works with kids. So the locals went all up in arms to prevent Manos de Amor from building there, because they were afraid they would lose their pubs! Soon, Karen received a phone call informing her that since the official papers hadn´t been signed to transfer the land to them yet, they were going to build a soccer field there instead (which they still haven´t done, for the record). God is good at providing for his people though, and another plot of land was offered to them a little ways out of town by the government. This is the current location of Manos de Amor. The agreement with the governmet is that if they do what they say they are going to do with the land, which is the soup kitchen/orpahanage within 30 years, the land is theirs. They now have the main kitchen building, one dorm, and the basketball court. The plan is to build one more dorm so they have a girls dorm and a boys dorm, and finish the water tower. That´s what I can remember from the many points of view expressed from the different people involved. God has brought a-lot of people from a-lot of different places together to make this a reality.

We found out that the road will be closed on saturday, so we will be heading back to Santa Cruz tomorrow to avoid missing our flights out of here, so it´s good that we finished the court today.

The insect report today is: I found a spider under my pillow when I checked my bed last night. He´s smoosehd now.

Not sure when I´ll be posting again, but my net time is up

Tootles!

Here we are again. I´m still in Bolivia, and I´m still alive! Not much else to report. One more slab done, and one left. I worked on surface prep on the section we´re doing tomorrow, which is the last one. Work on the water tower was also started this afternoon. I described before how we don´t really have much machinery at our disposal for all this; the way the tower is being done is we have a plywood mold with re-bar inside, then set up a bucket brigade to pour concrete into it from the top. The surface prep I was doing with two other guys is getting the ground uniform and level where we need to pour. This means digging with a hoe or a pick axe where it´s high, and adding gravel or dirt where it´s low. If things were ideal, we´d be doing this with a CAT, but we don´t have one of those, so wheelbarrows, rakes, and shovels it is. Actually, sometimes it´s a little hard to hang onto the tools that we do have. If you set it down for a couple seconds and turn your back, it might get snatched for another job somewhere else! The rakes that we got here are a tad short handled. I guess either people are just shorter here, or the rake-maker didn´t want to waste wood on an excessively long handle . I put a P.S. at the end of my last post about some people getting sick when I had about 30 seconds of internet time left, so I didn´t elaborate much then. Nobody has gotten sick to the point of death, but some have been vomiting and feeling generally cruddy. The ones that got sick first are mostly recovered now, I don´t think anyone is in bed right now, just a couple walking around feeling a little under the weather. I think one of the sicknesses was caused by the guy drinking from the water hose, which isn´t a good idea around here. Talitha said she had a bit of a sore throat yesterday, so I don´t know if she might be getting a little sick. She seems to be ok this morning, so hopefully it was nothing. Last night we played some vollyball back at Monte Blanco where we´re staying. It was fun, but I think I made myself more sore doing that oh well…

anyhoo, that´s all for now!

P.S. I think some bugs are getting in bed with me at night, cause I keep finding bites on my arms. Might be spiders. My roomie shook one out of his jacket this morning, and one of the girls killed a scorpion a couple days ago. Maybe pray the bugs will leave us alone. At least the deadly ones

P.P.S. Oh yeah, and there was that poisonous snake that was found on the lawn too… It´s dead now too.

Well, we´ve got one more slab poured for the basketball court. We have it divided into 4 sections and we´re pouring about one a day. I´m not sure exactly what the dimensions are, but Steve (guy sitting next to me) thinks it´s about 50´ X 30´. Yesterday when we got up in the morning, it had been raining so it was pretty cool out, and it was partly cloudy most of the day. That combined with the wind that gets stronger as the day goes on made for fairly comfortable working weather in the afternoon, but kind of chilly and windy in the evening. Today it was warm in the morning, hot in the afternoon with no clouds, and now at about 3:15 pm it´s sunny with a strong wind. By the way Tamara, I did roll up my sleeves today so you don´t have to pester me about having a bad farmers tan . But enough with the weather report… We made pretty good time with the concrete today, and we don´t want to start a slab that we can´t finish in one shot, so we´ll probably head back to Monte Blanco a bit earlier than yesterday. Maybe I´ll talk Steve into playing a game of chess with me later.

Me thinkith that´s all I can think of that´s pertinent right now…

Tootles!

P.S. some people have been getting sick, so pray for that. I´m fine so far

Hello again readers! I have once again found internet. Let´s see, what is new today… At the moment, I´m in a little hole-in-the-wall internet cafe in Comarapa with another team member. Today we started pouring concrete for the basketball court, and leveling the ground where we weren´t pouring yet. We don´t have a concrete truck for any of this, so we are mixing most of the concrete by hand on the ground, plus one small electric mixer. I´ve lost count of how many wheelbarrow´s full of concrete I´ve moved today, but it should be pretty nice when we´re done. I have been working quite a bit with one of the bolivian team members whose name is Josè. He knows about as much english as I do spanish, which isn´t a whole lot, so we´ve been going back and fourth trading english and spanish words while we work. Yesterday we went to the local open air market and did a little shopping and sight-seeing (while keeping a close eye on our money and valuables…). We saw things like wool blankets, pirated DVD´s (the only kind they have here), and sandles made from old tires,which are apparently really popular.

Anyway, my time is almost up on the computer, so I will sign off here.

Will post more when able!

Hello all who read this blog. I am now down in Bolivia, and have found a slow but working internet connection! We all managed to survive the plane rides and custums, aquired visas etc, then spent the night in  Santa Cruz, then took a bus up to Monte Blanco, which is the former Tambo MK school in the middle of nowhere. The bus ride from Santa Cruz to here actually ended up being about an hour longer than the flight from Miami to Santa Cruz, over very bad, and sometimes non-existent roads. About 3/4 of the way there, we stopped in the middle of nowhere of the middle of nowhere, where we managed to find restrooms! Well… Sort of… No need to elaborate on that here, you can ask me when I get back if you really want to know. ANYway, we got in at about 12:00am local time, which is eastern time in the US, slept, then made our way up the road to the orphaniage in Comarapa where we´re doing our work. We spent the day moving rock and gravel preparing for the concrete basketbal court, and other odd jobs such as sewing curtain rings on curtains, and assembling furnature. We´re all kind of dirty and tired, but we got quite a bit done, and the weather was very nice for manual labor.

Sorry to cut this short, but I have a limited amount of time on here, and I´m being called to work on a skit we´re doing for the kids, so I will hopefully post more later if I get a chance.

TTFN!

Today I have disconnected my site from facebook. I finally got tired of facebook taking over my web presence, and decided that my website is going to be it’s own entity, not connected to any social networking site. I might also add a photo section to my site again, and use it for my photo publishing instead of facebook.

THIS IS A REVOLT! I AM NOT DEFINED BY FACEBOOK! MWA HA HA HA!!!