Flames of a campfire
Passing Time
Two men sitting on the sidewalk passing time as the world passes them by.
Meat Truck
Staff Meeting
Creating A Bathroom
Well, it has been several days now… well weeks actally since we started to try and set up our bathroom. You see, we moved into this uncompleted house and thought it would be a great thing to have a working bathroom.
What we inherited was a small room with an elevated floor and a toilet base sitting loosely on the sewage pipe. A tap out of the wall should have supplied the water for our bucket flushing system, but it was broken so we retrieved our water from the kitchen sink – which just happens to be a concrete washing tub.
So, after finding and extracting an old hand basin from the rubbish, and buying lots of other bits and pieces, we now are close to having a working bathroom.
Most showers here consist of something like a toilet cistern with a kettle heating element in it. This is plugged into the nearest power socket and heats up the water that you have in there. When it is hot enough, you mix some more cold water to get the temperature you want and then stand under the shower head that protrudes from the base of the side. Pressure is not great, but it works.
Our shower is the next level up, where we have a powerhead attached to the head of the pipe that sits above our head. Two big fat electric wires carry the current needed by this device to heat the water instantly, so it hits our bodies below at a lovely warm or hot temperaure. This is called the “Super” shower, and is quite a luxury. Ours will be the first of its kind on the YWAM base here.
Now, as it is with every job like this, we went and bought all the bits that we needed only to discover when we tried to use them that half of them don’t work or are missing bits. So our hopes of having the shower ready today did not work. Of course, with the hopes of getting a “Super” shower a number of us are holding off on having a shower amongst the crowds in the old bathrooms… but this has been going on for about three days so far. Some of us are getting a little smelly. If we don’t get this shower working tomorrow then there will be a few more people in line for the next shower under the old kettles.
Putting a shower into a house with brick and concrete walls is not all that simple. It involves chiselling out a channel for the pipes to go, and then covering it all back over with concrete… and hoping that it never leaks. The bricks we use here are thin walled at least and so once we are through the first layer of concrete it gets a little easier to make the holes. There is a great mess of concrete and brick on the floor however. Demolition is always a lot of fun.
As it stands now, we have a bathroom with a hand basin, a toilet with a cistern, and a “Super” shower, all sitting on the wall and ready to be connected. There is no water or pipes running to them yet. Tomorrow should sort out all of those minor problems.
Tonight, I wired up the shower and bathroom light. This involves simply running the thick wires from the shower to the nearest other thick wires. Once there, you cut through the insulation and wrap the wires together and seal them off with electrical tape. Nothing more. Couldn’t be easier really.
So tomorrow we plan to have a bathroom. Working, that is. Our toilet is sealed, and our hand basin mounted and plumbed. With the water pipes connected and in place, we throw some concrete around on the wall and it is finished. Three days of work, and three weeks of procrastination. Supa Ducha (Super shower) here we come!
Scooter
Control
I learned something about myself today. It was when I was crossing from one country to another. Argentina to Brazil actually. Even though I have done this literally dozens of times now and know that there is nothing to fear, I still do. It is like some sort of unknown that rises up inside of me.
My Fear
Today, I discovered that my fear is actually based on control… and losing it. During that moment that I am between borders, I have no control at all over my circumstances. Anything may and could well happen, and I have no say at all. That scares me.
The Unfounded Fear of a Sinner’s Response
Lately I have been wanting to seek God out more, to pray more, and to get out there and evangelize more. Actually, talking on evangelizing, I have been lamenting my weakness in declaring my faith to others when I talk with them. When they have asked me things, I often simply say that I am working to instill values in kids and help orphans and other bits and pieces like that… skirting around the core and principle fact that I am a Christian who believes in God and am working here because He has called me here. This changed completely last night.
Continue reading “The Unfounded Fear of a Sinner’s Response”
Once Bitten Twice Shy (Root Kit Virus)
I had hardly ever heard about these things in the days leading up to what happpen to me, but somehow I just happened to hear about Rootkits and special programs to detect them. It was a couple of weeks before that I had visited SysInternals.com to grab some of their utilities. One of their new programs was the “Root Kit Revealer”. It seemed like a good idea to grab that one too while I was there, but I was busy at the time and it just sat in my pile of “yet to be looked at” programs.
Needless to say, that since that moment there was the thought in the back of my mind that I needed to check out my machine at somepoint. This thought nagged at me for a while before I actually did check it out… motivated as I was by some strange and unexplainable behaviours in my computer. Such things as keys not registering being pressed, internet going fast and then slow and fast again, the computer heating up significantly during idle times when I was away from it, and stuff like that.
So when I checked everything out, it turned out that there was something on my machine. Now, not knowing much about these things, I still wonder if it really was there or not. Perhaps it was a ghost, and I overreacted, but after reading about the insecurity that comes from having one of these things, I could not take the chance. I did all that I knew possible to remove this thing from my PC and although parts of it seemed to go, other parts kept reappearing on every restart.
My anti-virus program did not fix it, and nor did my anti-spyware program. But they say that this is the way it works… it is something that is invisible to windows normally, and hides from these sorts of programs. So after unsuccessful attempts at removing it, I decided that the only thing left was following the advice given for these things… and reformatted my hard drive to reinstall Windows once again.
It is amazing the amount of stuff that sits on my computer that I still consider useful. Since this event I have become much more ruthless with which files I save, but there is still a bunch of stuff. Worst of all was sorting through the mazes of folders to find and save all of my important information.
I described this experience to someone that knew very little about computers as being very similar to moving everything out of your house because of some nasty fungus, destroying the house, and then rebuilding it again and moving all of your stuff back into it. It is about the same sort of effort, although a different scale and level.
So the end of it all is that I am now up and running again, without any nasty viruses, and have nothing much different to last time. Just a few hours less sleep. How did I get it in the first place? I am not really sure. I remember running a downloaded file once, thinking that my protection programs were active, but my anti-spyware program was not working at the time. That experience loaded my computer with a bunch of nasties… perhaps at that point it entered my PC. In any case, I have learned to be extra careful now-a-days. After all, they say for good reason…
“once bitten twice shy”.
Sleeping Dogs and Broken Parks
Our Park
We have a park nearby to us which has not changed very much over the last year that I have been here. Broken lights, broken swings, no paint left on anything, overgrown pathways, and more broken bits and pieces. Rubbish adds to this scene, strewn as it is over every part of the grass.
Now I do not understand how the grass itself always remains short over the whole park, as I have never seen anyone actually cutting it. It could be that all of the stray horses and other animals are providing a natural cutting service, or perhaps it is happening when I am not nearby. In any case, this is one redeming feature about it and means that it is still useable.
There are many horses in our neigborhood.
Fixing Broken Things
There has been many discussions between Chris and I about the possibility of fixing this old park up one day. We have considered that it would not take a lot of effort, and if we involved the students also then it would be even easier. With a newly restored park, it could well become even more of a center point of family life to what it is.
It was only the other day that I decided that I would actually do it. Moving from the talking-about-it phase into the actually-about-to-do-it phase sometimes takes a while. I know for me it did. But now I am ready to do something about it… or I was.
Sleeping Dogs Waking Up
Talking with one of the people on the base I discovered that I am not the first person who wanted to do this, nor the first who was about to try it either. Not too long before I arrived here in Corrientes another young guy went over to the park and started the process of fixing things. He never made it very far.
Within the first moments of starting the process, he was approached by some people from the houses adjoining the park. They promptly informed him that although his intentions may be good, there was a committee assigned to do this sort of work.
This committee was formed out of a number of different local families and outside help was definitely unwanted. If he continued it was indicated that there would be some sort of consequence for his actions. So the park remained as it was.
One of the better park playgrounds during a very busy local event.
My Dilemma
The irony of this is that no work ever gets done on the park. There appears to be a strong political stronghold on this whole area, and as a result the park remains broken and derelict.
So what do I do now? Do I go ahead and try again, or let sleeping dogs lie?
Well, not being one that likes to give up easily, I am about to wage a war. Hopefully it will all turn out good in the end. My intentions are to start the process of fixing the park anyway, and wait for the inevitable intervention. When this occurs, I hope to try and find some agreeable way to continue my work. But this is where the crunch comes.
What Then…
If there is no agreeable way to continue my work, what do I do? Well, perhaps it is best to wait until that moment comes before making a decision. But for now, I am off to improve a park.