ICC is over. I think to summarized what we learned there I could simply recommend a book: "Cross Cultural Servanthood". Truly learning to be servants in any context is hard enough, but learning to be servants in a different culture will be a challenge. God will help us to do it, with His grace it'll get done!
To celebrate the end of this leg of training, we went geocaching. This is our family hobby, or at least one of them. The other is making fun home movies. My daughter is holding up a stone with the coordinates for the next part of the find. We spent the Saturday hiking through Cane Creek and exploring the trails and the sites. It is a very pretty park although it seemed we were the only ones there because it was 44 degrees outside.
It is Thurs now, and Chad has been in I.T. training all week. There are two more weeks of it to go, and then we head back home to CA. Yesterday Chad got to play with Satellite telephony and email. He (I) really enjoyed playing with new (to me) technology. Although pricey, I can see how the satellite technology is useful in retrieving important email and such for translators in the jungle.
In some places email is done with a thumb drive and a helicopter. Other places with a satellite phone. The technical support team here really puts a lot of effort into finding ways that the translators can get their work done while finding new and creative ways to reduce the cost to everyone involved.
Technology is amazing. The people God puts in place to come up with ways to help the translation of God's Word is also amazing. There is a software they use here called UUplus which was designed by a christian man with the intent of increasing communication and lowering the cost of satellite fees for missionaries. It works too. A typical satellite call (using a sat phone as a modem) to do 1 email took 2:04 minutes. But using the same phone and the UUplus software, it took 30 seconds. When you're paying per minute for satellite usage, that's a dramatic cost savings over time. Also, to reduce the price of sat phones, they buy older models, used on EBAY to keep the cost down. So you may not be using the latest and the greatest, but you're still doing EMAIL in the middle of the jungle with NO electrical outlet in your hut! Isn't that amazing!
