Water Cometh

since a few of you have asked.....
and since it is raining cats and dogs outside.... I mean REALLY pouring...

I'm more than glad to answer.
Since we prayed for rain the night our tank went dry, it has rained every day.

No rain for weeks, then rain every day. And today, right now, the hardest of them all.

That tank is gonna be filled before bedtime tonight if this keeps up.

After that I suppose we'll be praying against the river flooding (-; ha ha ha ha ..

It was as sunny as an L.A. Sunday a few minutes ago.

I remember praying for weather when I was younger but never really believing it had any affect, I mean sure we pray for things, but how often do we get the answer we're expecting?

So to go from that to praying a short prayer and seeing rain for days, blows my mind completely.

I do not believe in coincidence, I can't afford to anymore.

A brief memory comes to mind back in college, there was a christian music group we went to see in concert called "Pray for Rain" that later changed their name to "PRF".
We saw that at Knott's Berry Farm along with DCtalk.

The rain in their hit song was a figurative cleansing from God.

Chorus
I pray for rain to come
And wash away whats made me numb
I pray for a raging storm
To drown what's in me
And the rain comes in the nick of time
I swallow hard cause my throats been dry
The rain comes beating on my skin
Till I'm washed away - nothing left within
When the rain comes
Your rain comes

Seasons have passed so quickly
Since I felt that first big storm
Still there have been times of drought
When Ive prayed for the clouds to form
And I often hear the thunder
And I know of its coming rain
Many times in my life I'll kneel under
The moving showers that brought this change

I'm reminded of that song as we actually pray for rain for survival.
It's an awesome thing to see God at work taking care of His people.

Dry Water

You may recall an earlier post about water and how it works here. Last night at about 8pm our tank ran dry. The tank is about 2000 gallons big, and it hasn't rained here significantly for about a month and a half.

The faucet started to spout which told me the water pump was running dry. So I went outside in the dark with my son, had him look down the hole in the top of the tank.

"dad all i see is dirt."
So I climbed up the ladder, looked down.. the tank was BONE DRY.

Which means it was time to switch over to the OTHER water source for the center.

I explained it earlier but...
the CLEANEST water is rain water, which hits your roof, drains down the gutter into your tank, is pumped out into your house and you can pretty much drink it straight.

THE OTHER water (RAM) is pumped out of the river at the top of the hill, sent through purification/filtration and hits your house with gravity flow as the pressurizer.

EVERY house has a maze of pvc pipe, metal fittings, rubber hoses, and valves that somehow manager the different types of water and WHERE they want the water to go into the house.

For example, you don't need your good drinking water filling your toilet bowl.
So there is a valve for that.

The sinks here sometimes have 3 faucets on them. (1 cold for tank, 1 cold for RAM, 1 hot.)

Then there are valves for the hot water tank and how IT gets filled.

Confused yet? If you aren't you should be.

NO house is the same. Every home owner has tried to simplify their system to fit to their needs which ensures that there is even more confusion added to the mid.

So I'm here, under the house, I have about a five foot clearing, and I see writings on the beams explaining the valves. And I have a sheet explaining the valves.

I do everything I think I should to get it all right, and still no water in the house.

After going over it a few more times, I'm convinced, (troubleshooter that I am) that the only possible explanation is that the center valve is busted.

Now I'm no plumber. So I'm drawing on my network knowledge. In my head the pipes turn into network cabling, the valves into routers, and I'm 99% sure a valve is busted. Which is why I'm 100% unsure of myself because it sounds really silly to say

"well I know nothing about his plumbing here, I've never changed water systems in this country, but I'm sure because of my understanding of ethernet networks, that the center valve is broken."

I sounded stupid saying it to myself.

SO... I called someone up who knew the house better than I did, and who has lived here many years. He dropped by... within a few minutes he said "I wonder if the middle valve is broken."


THANK YOU!!!

I wasn't about to start taking apart the plumbing here without a second opinion.
Within 15 minutes we had water in the house.
The center valve had corroded enough to make it not-open. The fact that the valve was turning was attributed to my RAW MAN STRENGTH which torqued it enough to unthread the knob from the actual valve.

We took it apart, cleaned it and put it back together.

I was glad I wasn't wrong, and I gained a little bit of confidence that maybe I can figure out how things work here!

Now we have the issue of drinking water.

GOD provides.
About a week ago someone was leaving here and wanted to sell their water purification system. (the same type that NASA uses apparently) It is the de facto standard for purifying water here. It's basically two buckets and 2 filters.

Anyway they cost a few hundred in the store, but we bought this one second hand, with a filter that was only a month old, in preparation for POC (a camp coming up). So we had this filtration system on hand, and about half what we would have had to pay for it had I to run out to the store when it opened this morning and bought a new one.

God provides.

Prayer list:
new water might mean stomach aches.. we don't know.. pray against sickness
praise:
God provides! We have better water pressure now, because we're at the bottom of the hill!!! God provided a neighbor willing to confirm the broken valve, AND God provided me with more confidence and understanding of my environment.

OH and get this..
as we went to sleep we prayed for rain.
at 2am I woke up to the sound of rain on our roof. It lasted only shortly but what a great thing to hear.

One good solid day of rain will fill the tank back up.. but until then, we have this other water system. It's great to have a backup like that!

White Watched

To give you an idea of what it is like to walk outside of my front door, imagine if you lived on a crowded street, perhaps near a park. And every time you stepped outside, several complete strangers stared at you and watched your every move.

Watching white people is one form of entertainment. We are to them, what movies are to us.

So when I leave my house I am getting accustomed to several people stopping what they are doing, and watching my every move..... until I am out of their site. It isn't a brief stare, it's an I'll watch you as long as I can...stare. There is no awkwardness in staring here, no uncomfortable part to looking prolonged into your eyes. There is no looking away quickly or looking down as is such a part of American culture.

Many people watch silently, and sometimes I'll interact, a greeting, or something to make the kids laugh. Sometimes they'll be rude and laugh and point. After all I'm not only white, I'm HUGE!

It's something you get used to, but it is still a bit odd as I walk to work, there is a section I pass where several people stare as their heads follow me. (as I'm passing by the local clinic).

So it should come as no surprise to me that yesterday as I stepped outside my door, there were 25 or so young kids sitting on my front lawn. I figured they were there to watch me, and then it dawned on me.

They were there to play with my kids.

My kids are very social. It started with a few kids and a ball.

Then it moved on to every day two or three friends would come over. We love our neighbors' children. They speak some English, but the little girl that is fast becoming my daughter's closest friend is very polite. She offers to wash laundry, helps my daughter clean her room and otherwise encourages my daughter to be a better person

"Sydney, u no can tok long yu mama like dat!, U listen to hah!"

A great little girl!

It has progressed to where there were 30 kids in our yard yesterday playing. It isn't because we provide snacks, we had to stop doing that, it's because the kids come up with some very fun games and they enjoy each other.

But now we have a problem. The odds of someone getting hurt increase exponentially when you have 30 kids. Not only that, my wife didn't sign up to run a day care.

If one of those kids should get hurt, suddenly we have a "Hevi" with their parents... we would owe them something, we would be in their debt if their child got hurt on our property. It is a part of the culture called "compensation".

So.. we have asked our daughter to tell them she can play with 6 a day, and a different 6 another day. While this made her sad... she understood.

Secretly, we suspect our children are planning to overthrow us and are amassing a small army. We are taking every opportunity to disperse the mob before they get too organized, but I think they are having secret meetings in the bathroom because my son has to go an awful lot these days. (this is a joke (-; )

WAHOO!

Today I'm pretty excited.
About a week ago a close friend sent me an email something like "if you're interested here's a nice network utility."

I poked around it, tried it and moved on to another software, that I happened LOVE!

As network administrator, my personal goal when "moving in" is to gain complete visibility to the network, and thus be able to predict, see, and troubleshoot network problems. Everyone has their preferred tools, and I honestly have never been completely happy with any single tool for network monitoring. On my usb thumb drive I keep several tools and carry them with me.

Well, this particular software had a "freeware" trial version and in the course of two days me and my co-worker really fell in love with this software. We wanted to recommend it to our management, only the version we wanted cost $100.00.

A mere pittance compared to other competitors. The new guys always start out very affordable. Ironically, both of us had used Solarwinds, back when it was $100.00

But this new software, PRTG, props to http://www.paessler.com is phenominal.

I won't go into it, I get pretty excited.

ANYWAY, as we were preparing to pitch the idea, our manager walks in and mentions "I'm over budget." So we let it go.

Then I thought, "hey, why don't I write a letter?"

So I wrote a letter to the company (email) and explained who I was, who my organization was and what we would love to do with their software should they donate it to us.

The next morning (today) I came into work, and BINGO, they said "we have donated you a 100 sensor license and 12 months of support" !!!!!

WOW!!!!

I mean wow. $100.00 may not sound like much, but what is so rewarding here is that they responded so quickly, and so completely. The email had a link to the software, a license code, EVERYTHING we need to get better visibility on our network!

I tell you, God has been increasingly teaching me to think outside of the box. There is nothing He can't accomplish!

It feels really good to find a piece of quality software, but then add to that, a generous heart, and I say that company has the makings of something good.

Thanks.

Our kids

Today at lunch, my son told me he was playing with two png friends and they caught and grilled a grasshopper and he ate the leg.

I said -"well"
son - "well what?"
me - "well did you like it?"
son - "yeah!"
me - "would you do it again?"
son - "yes."
me - "what did it taste like? Peanut butter?"
son - "it tasted more like chicken."

and he doesn't even know the famous line about tasting like chicken. (-;

Today at tea time, a PNG acquaintance told me,
"about 20 minutes ago I saw your son playing basketball with some boys. He took his shirt off... BOY there was a lot of white there!" we chuckled.

Then he said, "I think your children are very nice children." And I thanked him... but was interrupted by another png lady who said,

"he has very good children, they already know some tok pisin!"

and so on.

As a father, it's always great to hear people praise your kids, but to hear it from a different culture with different values add a whole new level.

There are times when we sit back and marvel at how God has prepared them for this adventure, because honestly there are parts of their personality we can claim no credit for.

Jury Rigs

I've blogged in the past about how ingenuity is a part of the job here. Some folks asked me to post more information and photos about some of the solutions.

"The Server Overheat Fix (or delay)"

problem: servers exist in a small enclosed room which is air conditioned. When the power fails the air conditioner fails. How do we keep the servers from overheating since they are on battery backups?

solution:
-take a pneumatic screen door ..actuator?... reverse it so that the door OPENS instead of closes
-put an electromagnetic latch on the door
-remove the door knob latch
-connect the electro-magnetic door latch to a thermostat
-connect the thermostat to a phone out dialer
-when the temp in the room reaches 30degrees Celsius, release the door, it opens, and call the CTS employee's phone (mine and a few others) to notify them.

Theory: the servers will have a LARGER room (our offices) to draw from which has a separate air conditioner (which will also be out) but the air will be cooler, and thus give us time to get here and down the servers.

The actuator:


The magnetic latch:


The cable to the thermostat:


The thermostat and dialer:




--------
"How do we get the Airport on the Network - FIX"

Problem:
The airport is off center and they need network connectivity. The land owners between here and there don't want to let us run cable, and copper wire theft is a major problem in this country.

Solution:
Give them wireless.

Problem:
we can't afford commercial grade wireless

Solution:
Use consumer 802.11(b/g), build a tower, put a high gain antenna on it, and do the same on the other side. Two netgear wireless routers, span the distance of about a mile as the crow files. Maybe a tad less.

(I have no photos of the antenna tower, but you can imagine it, and then add razor wire at the bottom)

New Problem:
there is a line of trees growing and will eventually block the signal.
(can't trim them down until we reach an agreement with land owners)

Issues to remember: a lot of lightning in this area, and if people CAN'T steal it, they will, so everything is located HIGH.

Solution:
Move the antenna 30' higher. (this is an ongoing project)

The server room wireless routers connected to the cable going EXTERNAL to the high gain antenna:



You might be able to tell, that this stuff is FUN. It's fun to conquer a problem and fun to come up with a solution. I thank God every day for the ingenuity he's blessed the people here with. Not a day goes by that I don't see something that makes me say "wow.. what will they think of next!?" It's a place where elbow grease and creativity are survival skills.

A Good Day

My definition of a good work day is a day where you solve more problems than you receive. It saps your energy when your list of things to do grows more than it shrinks. Some says it grows fast and other days it shrinks.

When you're in a lot of meetings the list grows because you are working to resolve issues as much as meeting to identify them.

Some of you will understand the I.T. mentality and not need to hear this bit. But for those that don't:

-Firefighting mode - is when you are hit with a lot of high priority, drop everything and solve this now... issues. You do not have enough time to work on projects and anything that CAN wait until later, MUST.

-Project mode - the fires are out, and you're able to work on the things that help improve things for everyone long term. This time usually requires concentration, and time.

-Helpdesk mode - time spent solving issues you can easily solve are adept at. This mode is the least challenging, but constitutes a lot of your time depending on your job description.

-Troubleshooting mode - something isn't working right, and you don't know why yet. You require a fully functioning brain, time, and google.

You'll notice the word "time" in each different mode. An IT person shifts between these modes all day long. TIME is the enemy. Uptime, downtime, lunchtime.

TIME.

You tend to lose energy when you've been battling time without prevailing.
Today though, thanks to the gifts of God, I prevailed.

With any new job I've taken there is an element of being in the "deep-end" of the pool so-to-speak. Being thrown in and hoping you can learn the idiosyncracies of any new system before an emergency comes up.

I've been battling and losing two major troubleshooting problems because they were both in areas I have little experience. Last week I was sure I'd never solve these issues.. this morning I was sure, I needed outside help... and moments ago, those issues are solved.

I'm pretty jazzed about it (for techs: I solved an SQL authentication issue and a windows netbios issue).

As I mentioned before, people here are getting tired right now. So dealing with problems is even more tiring.

Technical difficulties tax your energy. I'm motivated to help people resolve their issues as fast as I can because of that. I'm so relieved to have solved a problem that has exhausted two others and myself for weeks prior to today.

Someone out there was praying for me today.. a special blessing, a moment of clarity.. something.

so thanks.

New Noise

Moving to any new place requires adapting to new noises. Sometimes it means getting used to the creaks a house makes. Sometimes it means getting used to dogs barking all night long.

We've adapted to dogs barking, house creaks, the sound of scurrying lizards on the roof, birds chirping, cicadas blaring, geckos chirping, traffic driving, dinner bells dinging, river rushing.... all during the night as we sleep.

At first I thought "I'll never get to the point where I tune this out." I am a very light sleeper, the slightest unusual noise wakes me up. I prefer this, I like to remain vigilant and keep my eye open for issues around the house or with the kids. I've always been this way. When our children were babies, a cough or sneeze would wake me up from two closed doors down.

Which is why I'm amazed that we've adjusted to these noises and have been sleeping.

Until last night.
We got a new noise. Which I'm sure we'll eventually adapt to.

IT was hard to determine what it was at first but we landed on a bird's squawk.

At 3am, we darted awake to the sound of a loud car alarm... only slower.

And it was a bird.

Speaking of birds, a friend of mine would love bird watching here. If you are an avid bird fan this is the place! My wife saw a bird the size of an eagle, but brown on the white parts and white on the brown parts (if that makes sense) and the beak was something like a toucan's.

A large exotic looking bird. I wonder if he was the one making all the racket!

__________
please continue to pray, we appreciate your prayers.
There are a lot of families here saying their goodbyes and a lot of people with tearful eyes as they are going home finished. The end of the high school year often marks this large exodus.

Here we are, as the "new" arrivals. Several of us here are new. I am sitting in the place of a man who leave in 2 weeks, having taken his position. So there is definitely a sense for us of.... replacement and departure and loss. No place I've ever worked has had this kind of revolving personnel. The lifestyle here can be taxing, as can living under constant spiritual awareness.

There is no illusion here of safety, no illusion of financial security. Everyone is fully aware that they depend fully on God. It can be a struggle to constantly remind yourself of this, and for many that is a tiring struggle. For others, it is second nature.

Either way, our newness affords us the emotional detachment to not have to cry at every departure. So our prayer is that these families going on away would be guided by God, comforted, given rest, and kept safe. They have blessed us in so many ways in the little time we've been here and we pray that God would re-establish them where they are going and give them a vital new ministry.

This place needs to be surrounded in prayer right now as people are emotionally and physically exhausted from all the things they have to do to leave. The enemy wouldn't hesitate at the chance to use that leverage. We pray for their energy.

Please pray for ours too! Thank you!

Bits is Bits

it’s monday morning.
I’ve spent the last 2 hours trying to get skype up and running so I can call my family. It has kept crashing and I’m about to give up.

While this is going on I’m getting updates from my children who are running back and forth between my desk and the neighbors yard.
I’ll try to walk you through the comments I’m hearing as my headphone set continually rings with the sound of skype crashing.

“dad can we play with the [foam] airplane.”
time passes
“dad can we visit the neighbors”
time passes I’m growing more frustrated and less attentive to the world around me as I work on my issue

“dad the neighbor’s………….”
“honey… honey did you hear what our kids jsut said?…….”
“honey?”

time passes

“dad the neighbors jsut cut the head off a chicken…. and I learned……. still moves after…..”

time passes

“dad they’ve cut it into little parts…. and……”

time passes they’re running a good 40 yards each update…..

finally my world comes colliding back to reality when my daughter shoves a severed chicken foot in my face, blood and all.

“dad they cut up a chicken and I got to watch and they gave me this chicken foot as a present!”
“they gave me one too dad!” (son)

okay, I apparently was paying WAY too little attention here…. and now both my children have a severed chicken foot in their hands and the neighbors kids are smiling like it’s the best present they’ve ever given anyone and I pause…

I take off my headset….
I muster the best smile I can … trying to reflect their enthusiasm while hiding my frustration at my computer issue, and masking the slight shock that accompanies a severed chicken foot less than an inch from my nose and I say…

“wow! That’s great!”

they’ve run off javascript:void(0)
Publish Postagain and are probably concocting games to play with chicken feet. I think it’s time I turn off the computer and go see what they are up to.

Wara

Wara = water
ai wara = tears

There are three different types of water here.
-RAM water
-Tank water
-Filtered water

There is a pump at the top of the hill which is in the river, and pumps the water down into the houses. The pro is that this water is always available, the con is that it isn't the cleanest source of water, even though it is processed. Another con is that when the electricity goes out, so do the pumps... but if you live at the bottom of the hill that's a PRO because the water flows with gravity and when your tank water isn't pumping into your house, RAM water will flow into your house. (a con for those at the top of the hill as they lose water first).

RAM water is used for non-drinkable situations for most people.

TANK water is water from your tank at your house. The tanks here have pipes running into a large screened hole at the top. All gutters are fixed to the pipes, and so many houses have a complex maze of gutters and pipes into their tank. When it rains, the water landing on the roof flows into these tanks.

This water is the cleanest for drinking. The con is that during dry seasons, the water comes in short supply.

Some people do not feel the rain water is drinkable and they fill up filter systems. Typically this is 2 large 5 gallon buckets with a gravity flow filtration system inside.

We don't use a filtration system in the hopes that the rain water will help us with our immunity needs, and we only drink tank water.

The plumbing in houses here is all over the map. Depending on how complex you want your house to be you can have valves to put the toilet on ram, valves for the HOT water to be on ram, valves for everything to be on ram or switch to tank.

Looking at houses, one of the things you do is learn the water system. IT is usually a five minute session of "we tried to label it, this valve turns on ram I think..."

-------------
Prayer requests:
-recently the headman of a village that some of our translator friends live in was attacked. He was a christian and was instrumental in helping our friends bring their translation to the people, but now he's in the hospital.

-some of our friends have fallen ill and have been medivac'd out of the country.

-more of our friends have grown very agitated at living here and have decided to leave for a long duration.

-in a week many people are going to be leaving here because it is high school graduation, there will be many tears and many sad people.

-it is coffee season here AND elections are near. This makes this a very active time and tempers amongst the nationals are high. IT isn't the safest time to travel so we are staying inside the center until things cool down. More events are likely to happen during this time, and people are a bit more cautious than usual.

What we're seeing, with eyes that God has allowed us to see with, is the enemy at work. Trying to slow down the translation work in any way he can.

PLEASE pray against the enemy here, pray for our health and protection, pray that we stay focussed on growing close to Christ, and let that relationship help us to flourish. Pray that our energy level stays up during this time of saying goodbyes.

We have so may praises to God... so many ways He has blessed us that far. Perhaps I'll outline a few in the next blog.

Suffice it to say, God is good, and He is faithful and He is alive!!!

High Frequency E-mail

This week on Thursday I participated in something I've never done before, a technology dedication ceremony. Several years ago one of the CTS employees got the idea of how to provide email to translators far in the bush who didn't have telephones or network connections. HF radio email. The concept wasn't new, but his deployment hadn't been done before. The only other people doing it were doing it commercially and the equipment was very expensive.

His vision began in 2002. He began to put together a system that consists of an HF radio (high frequency) attached to a modem, attached to a pc running server software that would fetch pop email from a main corporate lan server and compress it enough to send over the hf radio waves to the client in the bush, who had a radio a modem and a laptop all connected to a car battery which was charged daily by solar panels.

In order to get it done, he had to have antenna towers built, a parcel of land cleared, and had to solve many problems, not the least of which was, where to put it and HOW to put it.

The final result is all this equipment sitting in a steel shipping container in the middle of nowhere. Telephones ran a line to it, networking hooked up dsl so it could be networked, electrical ran power, and so on and so on.

The following is a pictorial of the dedication but more specifically the equipment.
(for higher res pics you can go to my photo gallery)

This picture shows the steel container and one of the three antenna towers.



This view shows the power and phone patch panel on the left and the server station in front.

Notice the setup. More detail in the next closeup. The radio system requires DC power so you'll notice the battery system which powers the radio and will maintain a charge for several days should the power go out.



In this closeup, you see the radio (center), a ups on the left, the power converters on the right, the dsl modem on the left, and the antenna cables coming in from the top. The copper bar behind the UPS is the grounding cable. Notice the small black bock between the radio and the UPS. This is a radio receiver and is part of a different project. In this country you have no FCC. So when requesting a new radio frequency (which we sorely need our traffic is so much) the government asks YOU to tell them which frequency is unused. So this receiver is attached to an antenna and is scanning the range we want 24 hours a day and logging any traffic found. After several months we will analyze the data and tell the government which frequency we want. The risk is, without doing this work, that we purchase a frequency that is being used elsewhere, because no one seems to record the used frequencies.. which also means someone could eventually be using the ones we have. (all the more reason to acquire more frequencies).

For jury rigging fans, notice in the very front is a webcam. It is pointed at the frequency of the radio. The server software is unable to interface with the radio to the point of telling us what frequency it is currently on, so every time the server receives an incoming connection, it snaps a pic with the webcam, and we can later compare if we need to check logs, the picture with the time stamp to see what frequency was used. If no incoming call, the radio scans channels until it receives one.

Also this room gets VERY warm. All this equipment has been functioning at over 50 degrees Celsius.

Another fun note, for a while now people have been receiving jolts when touching different parts of the shed. My cohort figured out why when he received a nice jolt, the antennas were not grounded properly (had a ground loop). SO, that copper tube bent behind the ups is his invention. He grounded it well through a bolt connected at the base, then grounded outside. He flattened the top and then attached all devices to it for grounding. The shocks went away. Remarkably he didn't know much about grounding but was inspired by his shock to investigate it, and found there are plenty of people here who know that kind of stuff and were able to help him. And finally, for the super geeks who noticed that black box inline with the coaxial cable (2 inches big) that is a lightning arrestor. We have lightning and thunder storms here sometimes weekly as we are in a valley and the atmosphere lends itself to heavy electrical activity.


The power and phone patch.


People touring the container before the dedication. This effort lasted many years, and many people were involved in bringing it about. Mentioned by name was the developer of the software who is a christian and has donated the server and all the clients. An impressive homegrown software called UUplus.



Another shot of the container and people gathering.


The crowd listening on.

Below, the man on the left is the one who came up with the vision and has been driving this project. He is from Sweden and has been here ten years. The couple are translators and they are sharing how the HFemail has affected them.

A brief synopsis of what they said, "We have a daughter staying here while we're in the village, and it has been such a blessing to be able to hear from her daily and write back the same day. Yes we have radio scheduled meetings but there are personal things you can't say over the radio with everyone listening. For a long time I had to read between the lines with my daughter to find out what was on her heart. Now with hf email, I can hear from her and reply in the same day. Also at another time, we had a family crisis and the hf email system really let us feel connected and we were able to resolve it, as far away as we were." The husband shared, "when you're translating, you don't always want your work all in one place. Hf email allowed us to transfer files back to here, so we could keep backups in case something were to happen. Also we've been able to communicate from here back to the village to our translator helpers as they continue the work from there while we're here doing work on this end."




A lot of what we do is about communication. Translation is really about communication, and systems such as this help that goal. Currently maintaining this system is our responsibility as CTS network engineers. So we have been trained on it (me and the other new guy) and it is quite a thing to inherit this child. It is also quite a nice perk to this work, that we can dedicate our results to the Lord.

I may have gone overboard with all the pictures, but this was a very special day for me, and I wanted to share it with you. For the technically minded, I hope it was a small glimpse into what is going on here, for others I hope you can sense the significance I feel. I may not be a translator myself, but being able to construct and maintain systems like this, and hear testimonies from translators about how it has improved their ministry, is very, very fulfilling. I offer up all the joy inside my heart from this as praise to God who brought it to happening. Who inspired the people who donated, who worked in giving the vision, and who brought the skills together to get it done.

Praise God, His kingdom endures forever!