From Keyboards To Firewalls

So with the official second week of school at SHALOM coming to a close, one thing that always seems to be a reoccurring theme down here is, "Go with the flow." You can't bring your "anal-American" ways down to Guatemala and expect things to go as planned. Of course I know in my head how things are going to work out for the day, and then all of the sudden there is a massive change in the schedule, or legions of students get moved around -- it's difficult to work with, but I know that God takes control for me. On Tuesday we had another workshop -- web development. As I spent the first 45 minutes trying to explain the concept of the Internet to these students who many had never been on a computer before, I turned from the whiteboard which was full of squares, circles and lines and looked onto the blank faces of the students. It was at the moment that I realized that I had to first explain what a computer was before I explained why it would be hard to hack into the FBI's mainframe servers due to the extremely advanced cryptic technology and firewalls they use. (Yeah, I am not joking, I actually talked about that -- don't ask me why.)

I eventually gave up with trying to explain the Internet and jumped right into explaining HTML -- the framework that media on the web is built on and before the class was over, all the students had made their first web page in notepad! (Except for the two people who were using the computer which had no mouse on it -- they somehow screwed theirs up a bit.) Well, of course the web page consisted of one line of text that read, "�Hola, mundo!" But it's a good start if you ask me.

I have been hitting Hebrews 11:1 home with these students this week. I am telling them that right now, it looks impossible for us to get 30 new computers at Shalom, but if they have faith in God and believe in their harts that He will provide them, that God will provide the 30 new computers. Well, there is something about that 30 new computers thing... now it looks like we need 40 new computers. Yeah, I know, it sounds crazy but that is something I have to start praying for right now, because I am not supposed to have more than 30 kids in the room at one time, but in some classes, there are 40. And if Shalom keeps growing like it is, even with 40 new computers, kids will have to share computers in the near future.

It's pretty funny to see how in the normal classes, these students are learning what the caps lock and shift keys do on the keyboard, and in the workshops that occur twice a week, they are learning extremely professional programs like Adobe Photoshop and Macromedia Dreamweaver. Some of the students that made it into the Photoshop workshop have never been on the computer before and are still trying so diligently to get the mouse cursor over the correct positions on the screen. Today there was this one kid in particular that I was guiding (in Spanish) to make a shape in Photoshop. I told him to change the color to blue. If you have never seen Photoshop before, there are two ways to change the colors, one way is quick, but you have to click within a bar that is about half an inch thick. Well, this kid spent the next 5 minutes trying to click within the "small" space. There was another Guatemalan kid next to him who kept pointing on the monitor where he was supposed to click and saying, "Click right here... no, right here... NO, HERE!" Every time the virgin mouse-mover would get the cursor over the correct area, he would click, but move the mouse at the same time thus clicking directly above the space and moving the entire palette a few inches up; then he would try again and stretch the palette out, or up or down. The other kid trying to guide him got so frustrated he smacked the monitor, said, "No, no, no," and walked away. I was still sitting there with this kid as he put all of his concentration into his right hand and finally, he clicked it!! But, alas he changed the wrong color.

The other day I was doing the dishes for Mark and Andrea. Here in their house, there is not a washing machine, so you have to do all of the dishes by hand. They also don't dry their dishes so you have to make the water really hot, and let them air dry. Well, since the water is so hot, you have to wear dish gloves when washing them. Well, the dish gloves are Guatemalan dish gloves - in other words; small gloves for small people. Not only do I have "American-sized hands," but those of you who know me know that I have freakishly long fingers. Well, after several minutes of painful latex ripping my precious arm hairs from their respective positions in my skin, I finally get the straightjackets on my hands. After doing the dishes, I begin to remove them thus ripping out more precious arm hairs. Once I finally got one of the stubborn boogers off, I proceeded to the next one, but this one was being really stubborn. I pulled and twisted and made weird noises but nothing seemed to work. I started pulling each individual finger to loosen it up and as I pulled at the index finger, something snapped and a huge shot of pain shot through my hand and I closed my eyes to try and think happy thoughts as the sting slowly faded away. After opening my eyes, I was holding the index finger of the dish glove was in my left hand while the reminisce of the glove still remained on my right. Needless to say, I bought Mark a brand-new pair of the most state-of-the-art Guatemalan dish gloves (which are still awfully crappy.)

For those of you who have been long time SamPowers.NET followers, you know one of my favorite things to talk about on my site (for whatever reason) is flatulence among other things. Well, in Mark and Andrea's neighborhood, you have to "pick up after your dog" when you walk it. So Mark and Andrea have two dogs, so before I took them out today, I yoinked a bag from the "bag place" to pick up any... "happiness" along the way. Well, of course, there is... "happiness" along the way, so when I bend down to pick it up, I realize that the bag I had picked up not only had one, but TWO massive holes in it. "Are you kidding me?" I thought in my mind as I tried to make best of the Guatemalan-style bag. After doing my best picking up after Mia, Jessie decides "to go." Something inside of me said, "If you try to pick that up, things will get really messy." So I concluded that the "happiness" was bio-degradable and it's better to be safe than sorry.

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