Honduras - Day 3

Again, I woke up twice. The first time because of the cold, even though I specifically turned it to fan only, hoping that it wouldn't end up being too cold. Again later when a lot of trucks went by. I finally woke around 7 AM and prepped for our morning devos together. It was interesting to see that a good portion of the city was already active. This is probably due to the fact that Honduras doesn't support daylight savings.

A minor correction to my two previous posts. We are not staying in San Pedro Sula, rather, we are in Sequaldepeque. I don't know why I wrote San Pedro Sula, but the two places are dramatically far from each other. We actually will be spending a night in San Pedro Sula and doing some work there as well.

For our morning devos, we read John 15:9-End. It was the verse about the vine and the branch and how we are God's friends. It's interesting that God sees us as friends because we know what he's doing. There's always a lot of talk about how we come on missions or do certain things and we're to have the heart of servants. But here, in this verse, Jesus is specifically speaking against that. It's definately an attitude that makes sense because a servant doesn't care what his master is up to, but friends do.

After devos, we went out to grab some breakfast. We went next door where the scent of bacon was wafting in to the street. Again, a very simple menu. I was excited because I saw "dos huevos", two eggs. And I love eggs. It was a very simple breakfast, but very homey. Two eggs, two strips of bacon, two pieces of toast (heavily buttered), and one potato pancake. All for two dollars. That's one of the things you can't beat here in Honduras. All the food is so cheap. The food was very tasty and I chased it with one of my malaria pills.

Breakfast ended way too quickly and we were off to our respective tasks. Joy, the kids, and Linshuang left with Nahaim to the school to do their little show. In the meantime, Ernesto and I went to the bookstore to try and wrap our heads around the POS software while Ernesto went to the main office to teach Quickbooks.

Before we could start working on the POS, Donaldo and I went on a quest for various items to clean the computer. We got a can of compressed air and some masks to protect us from the dust. The whole process of retrieving the items and cleaning the computers took about an hour and a half.

While we were questing, Donaldo and I did our best to try and get to know each other. I know my spanish isn't very good, even still, I had a terrible time understanding what Donaldo was saying. Usualy, I can put together about 50% of the speech and have a general overview of what's being said. But with Donaldo, I was completely lost. It was really frustrating because I wanted to communicate but just didn't know how to.

When we were done cleaning, I jumped right in to the POS. I sat with Donaldo a little bit as he showed me some of what the POS could do. It was a little confusing because he was showing examples of only some of the software's functionality. Not being able to communicate, I couldn't inform him of what my goal with the program was.

Eventually, Blanca sat down with me and started walking me through the software. She was very patient explaining the various fields and sections to the best of her ability. Sometimes in spanish and other times in english. I could see that she was frustrated too trying to communicate.

Around lunchtime, the field crew came back and headed off to lunch. Ernesto and I continued to work on the software a bit and then headed out. By this time, the malaria pills were kicking in and I started feeling a bit nauseous. It was hard trying to focus on the language, trying to understand the software, which was also in spanish, all with the malaria pills distracting me.

Blanca was nice enough to take us on a small tour of the various places to eat around Sequaldepeque. We went to this one park with a massive dome like structure with a large church next to it. We eventually went to the market where there was a tiny food court.

The food court consisted of 6 small stations that were essentially kitchens. There was a sink, refrigerator, and multiple burners in each station. The menu at each station was pretty much the same too. Fried chicken and beef stew. Since I had fried chicken the night before, I went for the beef stew. The station that was supposed to have the best beef stew in the market conveniently ran out. Luckily, there were five other stations with the same menu.

The beef stew was great. Some of the beef was nice and tender, while other pieces were a little tougher. Despite that, the beef tasted great, as did the stew that went with it. There was also white rice. I love white rice now. If hamburgers are comfort food for Americans, than white rice is comfort food for me.

After lunch, we went back to the bookstore to do a bit of work. Not too long in to it, food coma was beginning to settle in. It would've been a great time to take siesta but there was work to be done.

We finally finished going through all the different sections of the software and began to understand what it was doing and how it worked. Ernesto and I started trying things out kind of randomly to get the actual point of sales aspect to work. With a bit of trial and error, we were able to make some headway.

The software wasn't designed very well and there's no documentation on how to use it, let alone, troubleshoot it. Ernesto and I talked briefly with each other and came to the conclusion that the original programmer either was an idiot and didn't know how to finish the product or, more likely, that once he got his money, he was unwilling to finish it, having no further insentive to spend any more time or effort on the project.

At this point, we decided that we had to have the programmer in to help us with this. Even if we had the source, which we probably wouldn't be able to get, it would take a lot of time to go through it in a different language, figure out the structure, and make it work. Blanca contacted the programmer and managed to negotiate for him to come tomorrow afternoon.

In the mean time, we decided to persue plan B. Intuit was kind enough to have donated a copy of Quickbooks Pro to Scripture Union. During the day, Ernesto had been training some of the people in its use. Quickbooks actually does do inventory and customer management as well. But to have a full-fledged POS system would easily cost another 800$ USD or so. This cost would include all the hardware such as scanner, printer, display, register, etc. but it's still a huge chunk of change for scripture union.

While we were talking about this stuff, I thought about the possibility of possibly using some sort of OSS to accomplish the task. It would take some searching to even find if it was doable. The other thought that was in my mind was to custom write something for Scripture Union in PHP and MySQL. This would take much longer than the two weeks we'd be down here, even if I spent all day working on the system. There would be added overhead to translate the GUI to spanish.

With the tasks of the day pretty much wrapped up, I went to one of the local internet cafes to do a little bit of research on Quickbooks POS. The place I went to let you plug in your own laptop, which is great. I was able to load up GAIM and everything with no problems. I checked my mail and had the pleasure of chatting with a few people while I was there. The connection was pretty fast, I would say close to DSL speeds. The half hour I was there only cost L.10, which is equivalent to 0.50$ USD.

I went back to the hotel just as Ernesto was gathering his family to go out and eat. We looked around for Linshuang, but she was no where to be found. We assumed she was in her room and out cold 'cause we knocked pretty hard and also rang her room. These phones are pretty loud. You can hear them ringing down the hall. There was a prayer meeting we needed to attend and there wasn't much time, so we wanted to grab dinner beforehand.

As we left the hotel, we decided to stop in the bookstore and there we found Linshuang.

For dinner, we went to one of the places Blanca had showed us during the day. The menu was one of the more extensive ones in the city. I kind of knew what most of the stuff on the menu was and none of it really interested me. When I go to different places, I'm all about local food. I'm all about trying new things even if I don't know what it is. So I picked one of the most obscure things on the menu. It was delicious. It was kind of like a central american pizza between two tortillas. Linshuang and I also ordered these refried beans with sausage. The bowl came with fresh fried nachos. The refried beans were great. Probably one of the best things about the food down here.

Exiting the restaurant, we were surprised to see Orlando waiting for us with the Scripture Union bus. He had come to pick us up and take us back to his house for the prayer meeting.

The prayer meeting opened with introductions and a few songs. Standing there, hearing everyone sing in spanish, I thought about heaven and how wonderful it is going to be to see all these people there and to be able to sing with them in one voice. A sudden sense of joy washed over me as I thought about the different people I had met and would meet. No matter how short the exchange, no matter how little we got to know each other, these relationships will be intact when we get to heaven. Thinking about that day and knowing that I will know these people deeper when heaven comes was so encouraging.

Nihaim, who was running the prayer meeting, did a very interesting thing. He had a few people read one or two verses and share their thoughts on it. He had a few people of varying ages share. Even thought I couldn't understand them, hearing all these people just talk about God, their voices were filled with passion. This was a place where God was real and faith was real. You don't get that much in the states. A lot of times, when people in the states talk about God, it's very talky. Very wordy, almost showy. To find people genuinely in love with God was so refreshing.

We then split up in to four groups to pray. Everyone was handed a small strip of paper with a prayer request on it. Again, I wasn't able to understand their prayers at all, but I knew that God understood. You know in your head that God understands all languages. But to spend a few days desperately trying to understand, it just becomes staggering to realize that God understands so much.

I suddenly felt so small knowing that God not only understood what everyone was saying, but he understood all that was unsaid as well. All the prayers that were in our heart, spoken and unspoken, he knew already. You're told this time and time again in church, but to live it. To feel it, is something else. The whole experience was just really refreshing and really meaningful.

As with most prayer meetings, it was time for snacks once the prayer had concluded. Roxanna, a beautiful young woman that I had the privelege of praying with, did her best to initiate conversation with me. It was difficult because she didn't know english at all. I did my best to talk, but we couldn't get past elementary spanish. We did manage to share our age and how many siblings we had.

After the short exchange, a teenage boy named Moses came over and began chatting with me, again, doing my best to communicate in spanish. Then he kicked me and said, "speak in english!" I laughed and we began carrying on a conversation. He had leared english in school and I was just ashamed by how much better his english was compared to my english.

Snack time was over and it was time to get down to business. We sat around while Ernesto ran down what we had accomplished during the day. He talked about trying to get the current software to work but also talked about the alternative of using Quickbooks as a solution. He talked briefly about training the people in the use of Office and other applications.

By the end of the meeting, my understanding of spanish had increased tremendously. Instead of only understanding maybe 50% of it, I could probably understand 70% of it. Still, it was really difficult for me to piece together even the simplest of sentences. My conjugation was terrible and as were my conjunctions. I still wanted to do my best to communicate so I started to make an effort to talk more. Small talk isn't my thing, but when you can't even say the simplest of phrases, that's where you have to start.

We got back to the hotel, all very tired. It was then that I realized that so much had happened during the day. Just what I've written so far consists of over 2700 words. There was so much to praise God for, so much to talk about.

We met to debrief about the day. Joy shared about the different things that God had done during the day. How he had worked through the technical difficulties of running the CD for the drama, organizing the kids and how attentive they were. She also praised how patient and gentle Nahaim is and for her participation in serving him. God had managed to answer a good number of prayers in the span of 12 hours too.

To see God move in such wonderful and tremendous ways was amazing. To actually experience how big and powerful he is was breathtaking. For him to answer prayers that we hadn't even anticipated and to facilitate so much in such a short periof of time ins wonderful. As tired as we were, it was a miracle that we managed to make it through the day. Considering there's still a little under two weeks ahead of us, the task almost seems insurmountable. God has done so much already, I know that he will be able to do more in the time to come.

One of the things that I still feel is how disconnected I feel. Not just with the locals, but with my team too. As someone who's not big on small talk, it's hard for me to formulate relationships in such a short period of time. We're all doing different things and there's so much to do, there's little time to really just share with each other and get to know each other.

There's a level of trust that has to be there in order to function with each other. And it's been great that that issue hasn't really come up. Despite all our differences and our lack of familiarity, we're still able to come together in unity amongst our diversity. The modern church talks a lot about unity, but this is what it is, here in the third world. The unity came so easily and so readily that none of us had even thought about it.

So I'm still trying to get to know the rest of my team. I'm hoping that the relationships I build now will be fruitful, not only in the afterlife, but in the current life as well. I already know, I want to come back next year and work with everyone again.

Ahora, time for some well deserved rest.