February 2010 – dannypeck.net

I Promise I Can Feed Myself

Just about everyone from home who hasn’t been here asks me “What do you eat?” any time I talk to them. People older than me tend to ask this with either the tone of voice that says “You are eating, right?” or the even less convincing manner that simply comes across as “I really don’t believe you’re eating.”

I have to say I’m really thankful for the internet, so I can call my parents and ask “How you do cook a…?” or simply Google it if I feel like I should really have already known. And I’ve certainly learned how to make several things, and have gotten to experiment with things baking at high altitude and using an oven that only has 3 settings¹ and no inside light.

But so that all your fears can be calmed, and so that I can show off a little bit, here is a fairly random sampling of some of my creations.

This is my “Mitad del Mundo” Burger on a toasted bun, so named because I got the idea for adding the fried egg from a restaurant at the equator monument here in Quito. Notice the avocado. Everything’s better with avocado, especially in Ecuador.

¹In the words of my friend Sarah Marr: “On a scale of min to max, where do you think 350 is?”

Tree House

When I was a little kid in Anderson, South Carolina, I had a tree house. It was huge (granted, I was 3-5 while we lived there) and had a swing set attached and a sandbox underneath. I remember running out to it in the rain and climbing into the covered part when we were house-hunting before we even moved there. I remember playing up there for hours with Dee Hayes. I remember the time I fell off the top rung of the ladder and twisted my arm catching myself on the way down. I remember begging my mom to take the whole thing apart so we could move it with us to Lawrenceville, Georgia.

Maybe it’s because of these that I so closely associate tree houses with childhood, but I felt very childlike this afternoon as we took the team out to Hacienda El Refugio and had facilitated quiet time in the tree house. The El Refugio tree house is something dreamed up by Paul Reichert that the staff and tons of teams have been building for three years. It’s finally finished, and this was my second opportunity to spend time there.

Part of Paul’s devotion was about the fact that we are children of God. People talked about the image of sitting on God’s knee, or thinking in terms of other people being God’s children as well. But for me, I just thought of how much we have to learn as children. Being a learner, especially even as I am in a leadership position this week, has been a theme for me over the last few days.

We talked a lot today about why we have days out at El Refugio. We want to have intentional quiet, worship, and prayer time, taking a step back from scheduled “ministry” days to realize that we worship and minister through our lives. Having that childlike feeling of being in a tree house, it was quite easy to do that all afternoon, being intentionally in the position of a learner and being among other children of God. Even after our official time there was finished, I stayed around and had a chat with Mark, Cathy, and Deb. They are all old enough to be my parents, and Mark is the team leader, but as we talked about our worship time, about the tree house, about ministry, and about what God had been teaching us, I think we all learned something from each other and from God, and did our best to share our hearts and thoughts as well. For those twenty minutes or so, reading scripture and talking, our responsibilities, our titles, and our schedule simply didn’t matter. We just had fun being God’s kids together.

I’ve heard Paul’s orientation both times I’ve gone to the tree house, and as he puts it, we don’t have to go to a specific place to worship, but it’s a helpful opportunity when we set aside a specific time and space to connect with God. A lot of what that specific tree house represents is a space in my heart, but that’s exactly what I was able to set aside today, and what I think we all need to remember to do as we go about serving not just in physical times and places set aside, but with every aspect of our lives.

First Adult Team

I knew going into hosting this team that it was totally made up of adults and that that would be something different for me. I’ve always had youth teams before, and it’s been interesting to observe, before we’ve even had a scheduled ministry day, how very different certain aspects of our time together have been.

The first thing that has really stuck out to me has been their tendency to wander off. For the first hour or so at the Basilica today, it drove me nuts, but as I told Dario later on, I realized that to some extent that’s something I need to let go of. With youth teams, the teenagers might not necessarily want to be right with the whole team all the time (or any of the time), but they will at least stay withing seeing distance, because they know if they wander off, they’ll be in trouble with somebody later. Every time I did a head count today (which is something I do pretty constantly), someone was missing. More often than not it was the same person, who always quickly found his way back to us.

The questions this group has asked me have had their own twist to them, they follow the rules really well and drink lots of water and wear their sunscreen, we take lots more bathroom breaks, they’re quiet on the bus and at meals but animated at debrief, and they sing. Let me repeat that. They sing. I love groups that sing. I hosted a summer team once which whom devotions including music was like pulling teeth, so I appreciate it when groups actually participate vocally. Not that worship has to be musical, but personally, a devo wouldn’t be devo if it didn’t include either writing or music, so it means a lot to me when they choose to throw in songs at the end of a debrief and it’s a way that I can really worship as well.

The great thing about a team of only 10 is that you actually know everyone’s names at the end of the first day. I’ve gotten to spend at least a little bit of time already with almost everyone on a one-on-one or smaller group basis, and I feel like we’ll know the team really well be the end of their time here. There’s only one or two I have hesitations with about their level of flexibility, but we are working at Carmen Bajo this week. Not that you can help falling in love with any ministry site here, but speaking from experience, you really can’t help but fall in love with Carmen Bajo and I think after a few hours getting to know people there and seeing how things are done the South American way, I have no fear that will melt quickly away.

With only one person’s luggage lost and no other disasters on the first day, I’m looking forward to working, serving, and worshiping alongside this group.

OH! And I ordered food on the phone in Spanish for the first time today. That’s always been something that has terrified me. Possibly because I’ve heard what a nightmare it is to order pizza in this country (fortunately we were calling in for chicken), but mostly because speaking your second language on the phone is exponentially more difficult. But I ordered twelve boxes of chicken, two salads, and three drinks… and half an hour later, the order showed up exactly right and in the correct place. The senorita on the other end didn’t even ever have to ask me to repeat anything, and when I gave her a non-standard answer to “what room are you in” at the hostal (I responded “I’ll be there to find the driver” because I could think how to say that much faster than “there’s a common room at the top of the stairs”) she rolled with it and wasn’t confused by what I said. I’m a little proud. Probably a little too proud, but there you have it.

Now and then

Today we were supposed to have our first spring sort-term team on the ground. Well, you can guess how that turned out.

Dario and I were on our way to Hostal Bosque in a taxi when we were informed that our team would not be arriving tonight, and we were unsure exactly when they would actually make it into the country. Stuck in Toronto, the team leader finally called to let us know when they had some semblance of an itinerary, and now we hope to be picking them up at the airport at 10:30 in the morning, which means we won’t be headed to Carmen Bajo for church.

It’s funny to look back almost two years ago to the first team I hosted with Sarah. We were in the same situation, having planned for a team that ended up being delayed almost a full 24 hours. I remember sitting in the kitchen at Dana and Ashley’s house, staring across the table at Sarah with absolutely no idea even where to begin dealing with the situation as we learned about it, and knowing exactly how lost I would have been without her. This afternoon, however, Dario got the phone call that our team hadn’t even made it out of Canada yet, and we both shrugged and went about our plans. I mentally pulled up the schedule and knew that the simplest thing we could do was to cut Carmen Bajo totally from our day tomorrow, and we’ll make the calls as we go along about how much touristy Quito activities we do, based on time and how settled our team gets. Dario (since he managed to get some saldo) called Fabian and Rogelio and let them know the revised plan and neither of them freaked out either.

In 2008 I wrote an entry called “Flex and flow”, a manta-like phrase around Youth World, and something Sarah Miller would say multiple times every day. She even has her own personal sign language for it. I think at the time I titled the post that way and talked positively about the concept more to actively teach myself to believe it more than anything. I’m not the most flexible person in the universe, but I’m certainly much more flexible now than I was two years ago. Part of that has been learning what solutions are even available when a schedule crisis like this one occurs. Part of it has been adjusting to how South American life in general just functions. And part of it has been having some really awesome examples.

After a day putting away groceries and setting up the hostal with absolutely no hurry (and then watching funny movies with Dario all night) I can really appreciate all three of those things.

Virus Fixed

As far as I know, I’ve wiped out the virus. Please let me know if you are still having problems.

As far as the new theme, it’s an indirect result of this whole process. I was reminded of the fact that my website has looked exactly the same for over two years now, and I couldn’t find the original source code for my theme anyway. Rather than going through every single file in the theme to manually wipe out the virus (I actually think I manually destroyed the only occurrence, but would have wanted to be sure), I just installed a new theme. It was probably just as much work to re-crop, re-size, and re-upload all the images for my randomized header, but be that as it may, I’m still pretty pleased with the time and effort that went into it, and the final product.

For those of you who are just reading this on facebook or anywhere else this gets imported via RSS, I’d encourage you to cruise on over to dannypeck.net and take a look around. If you haven’t actually been to the original source of my blog before, you may find something interesting. If you have, hopefully you’ll like the new look.

Virus

For those of you who actually read my blog here on www.dannypeck.net, I have a virus. Most of you are probably already aware of this due to the unfortunate side effect of being redirected to some adsite. I’m in the process of fixing it, but I have the odd problem of having TOO good an anti-virus software, and I actually am unable to see the effects of the virus myself.

For the rest of you, you should still be able to use my RSS feed without any problems. Link below, and I’ll be sure to post a “Virus Fixed” post when that statement becomes accurate.

http://www.dannypeck.net/?feed=rss2

Thank You, First Amendment

Not my usual topic of discussion, but I couldn’t resist. In certain ways, you see a ton of total propaganda here in Ecuador. Granted, I’m sure that Yahoo news did not intend for this headline to come across the way that it did to me, but when gems like this appear in American news, it really makes me appreciate our Freedom of the Press.

I can’t imagine the heads that would roll if a sentence like this was published in some of the countries where I currently have friends residing. The mere fact of how true that statement can be adds to the hilarity in my book as well.