Month: March 2018

Forest Gump day

One of my favorite movie lines is in Forest Gump when he says “So I went to the White House again. And I met the president again.” I quote that line, or derivations of it, often to express that sense of repetition in my life. And sometimes it’s with that attitude of boredom that Forest Gump had. But sometimes it’s to express that same sense of irony the audience should feel upon hearing such a statement. Who would ever get bored of the White House? But I most commonly quote that line when I’m hosting a Quito Quest team during their first week on the ground. I have been to the Basilica and the Presidential Palace and Plaza San Francisco. So. Many. Times.

But even while I brace myself for the monotony, I can’t help but remember Deborah and Roberto taking me to all those places for the very first time. And I can’t help but be excited that I’m with a group of new friends who have that sense of wonder and excitement that I had eleven years ago, and who I will get to know through this day and the rest of their time on the ground.

Today I also had a small sense of terror in knowing that I would be delivering Partnership Orientation tonight. Partnership is the most important orientation we do with a team, and it can be something very powerful to hear. I’ve heard it three dozen times at minimum, and I’ve given it to several teams, most recently a modified version to my Costa Rica team from the NCCUMC youth ministry. But if I gave Partnership a thousand times I still don’t think I could stop worrying that I’d screw it up. It’s a lot of pressure and I want them to get it. This is the very reason I keep coming back to Youth World, because I think we live out Partnership so well here. So this was important.

I think it went well. The team asked good questions about it. So I could breathe a sigh of relief. And thinking and planning for it added a little but if a beak to the monotony of the same tourist day I do all the time.

But I also had a couple moments in debrief that made this day memorable. The first was when we realized that all seven students in this team are introverts. My tribe is here! The second was an observation by Brett about myself and Caroline. He said we kept pointing out changes in the city, where restaurants used to be, or where there is a new building. He compared it to the story of the Basilica, which is always under construction and never technically completed because legend says when the Basilica is completed, the end of the world will arrive and they don’t want that responsibility. The basilica has to change and grow to stay alive, and the city does the same thing. We all are either growing and changing or we are dying.

Leave it to a Sewanee student to make an observation I’ll be incorporating into my orientations from now on.

The Calm before the Team

I arrived in Quito late last night after a couple of very windy, bumpy plane rides. And though today has theoretically been about preparations for the team and for Youth World staff meeting tomorrow, it has also been about jumping into life with the Vivancos. So we’ve played with the kids a lot today. Lying in a hammock, watching the boys crawl through their tunnels in the back yard this afternoon, Caroline summed up the contented atmosphere here by asking “Does the team have to come?”

Old Posts

For a long time, my website maintenance has been taking what is actually broken and making it functional again, rather than worrying too much about content. With spare time and a functioning site, I’ve been able to go through my WordPress posts and discover some things. I had several posts, going all the way back to 2011 which were “Uncategorized.” All of them have homes in multiple categories now.

But even more fascinating, I had some posts which were written but never actually published. 31 Drafts, in fact, some of them dating back to 2008. Since I like those things to be seen, here are the seventeen that had enough content to publish, without having to scroll back through years and years of posts.

Some Random Photo Favorites was a post from June 2011 when I was spending the summer hosting Quito Quest teams. It had some great photos which were on my public Flickr page, but apparently I had some trouble with the formatting and although the content was all there, this post never came out of my drafts folder. It is posted now.

I had a Test post from the Apple Store which I did not actually publish, and instead just took a screenshot. But it was entertaining to see that one of the multi-pronged tests I did was logging into my own site and typing a post on an iPad- the first time I had ever even held one. This would have been around May 2o11, because I ended up purchasing an original iPad to blog in Ecuador in summer 2011, planning to sell it on eBay when I got home to the United States. I obviously got attached, because I have never not owned an iPad since. There was a similar draft of a test written from an iPod Touch, which I deleted.

Tolerance, the First Amendment, and Islam was something I wrote out of a sense of anger toward my former Representative, and on which I assume my 2010 self chose not to click “Publish”out of that same sense of anger. Well, 8 years is enough of a cooling-off period, and I think 2010 Danny was pretty smart. I made no edits to it before I made it public today.

Glimpse into an Unexpected Evening was a fun night with the Casa G boys in May 2010.

New Writing Project was about an article I started for Youth World about a mentoring program at AAI. Interestingly enough eight years later, Dani, who was a high school student in the program at the time, now runs Quito Quest, so she’s effectively my boss when I come back to host a Quito Quest team.

I Promise I Can Feed Myself probably speaks for itself. Post from 2010, which I’m guessing was never published because I intended to add photos of other food to it as a went. I guess this post will be unfinished art, but it is public now.

Communication was about our weekend Quito Quest staff scouting trip to Riobamba, Ecuador in January 2010.

Not Atypically Not Ready was about the craziness before my Christmas travel back to the US in December 2009.

Christmas Party to Remember was about my experience with dehydration during the 2009 Youth World Staff Christmas Party.

Emaus Mission Team was about a group of Quiteños and Gringos who journeyed to a ministry site in the jungle in October 2009.

First Office Days was a quick update on the beginning of “real life” in Quito after I finished language school.

On Writing was a post with some musings after an interesting conversation with a guest I was hosting while he was discerning whether to join the Youth World team.

Preparations? What Are Those? was really an admission of how completely unprepared I was to get on a plane and be in a foreign country for a year.

T-Minus 3 was about my last couple of days in North Carolina and my prep before I moved to Quito for a year.

Table for Twelve is more unfinished art about Maundy Thursday 2009.

Afternoon at CFC was about a brief ministry experience in March 2009.

Sermonitos from October 2008.

Travel Prep 2018

March is here again, and with it come plane tickets and a host of technological projects.

First, my ancient iPhone 4s finally gave out. It has a hardware error stemming from an issue with the WiFi antenna. I cannot connect to WiFi at all, which means I cannot disconnect the phone from Find My iPhone, which means I cannot even reset it to factory defaults. Maybe I will get around to finding a SIM card with a data connection so I can fix at least some of these issues, but for the moment, it is simply out of commission. Enter, “new” iPhone.

My iPhone 4s was the first iPhone I ever purchased, and I purchased it Factory Unlocked (which was not a common, nor inexpensive thing back then) and it was with me through three US cell carriers until I finally switched back to Verizon and CDMA service, and a new iPhone 5s. The 4s then permanently became my Ecuadorian phone, replacing a refurbished 3GS I had purchased in the meantime, and I would just keep my Ecuadorian SIM card in it and add a few dollars to my prepaid account every time I was in the country. And the 4s outlasted not just that old 3GS, but the 5s as well. That phone’s battery exploded when I was in California in 2016 and I upgraded to a then-band new iPhone 7. So it has been the Ecuadorian 4s and the North American 7 until today, when my refurbished iPhone 6 arrived.

One of the things I have learned with all these generations of phones is that SIM cards keep getting smaller. At one time, I had what we referred to as the Nokia “Brick” phone (those indestructible candybar phones that we still give to our Youth World interns in 2018 because the cockroaches will be calling each other on them after the nuclear war). That phone had what most people would call a full-size SIM card in it (although that’s technically a “Mini” SIM). I purchased a SIM card cutter way back in the day to slice it down to fit in my 4s, which required a Micro SIM. And that card just got sliced down again with a new cutter into a Nano SIM  for the iPhone 6.

Restored from the 4s Ecuaphone backup, it will be all ready to use when I step off the plane. Or at least it would be if I ever managed to have any saldo left when I finish hosting a team. Hopefully I’ll remember to turn off my cellular data instead of blowing through all my saldo before the team even arrives, which I may have done… two years in a row. My Quito Quest pareja, Caroline, gets a little frustrated with this phenomenon when all outgoing phone calls and texts have to be on her phone until we remember to send someone to the Farmacia to recharge my saldo. I could solve all of this by just using one of the Nokia phones. But what can I say? I am spoiled.

The other tech project has been updating my website. I generally renew my hosting and domain registration in February, so that has been done for a couple of weeks, but parts of the site have been broken for a long time. The DNS records were a little wonky, probably since I switched hosting providers years ago, or possibly since I added Google Apps. At any rate, if you got here by putting a “www” in front of my domain name, then my update worked.

The site was also running a WordPress theme that was at bare minimum 5 years old, and had survived heavy coding updates I did to it throughout that time. The bulk of those coding edits were to incorporate a head image randomizer, the thing that makes the top image change every time you visit the site, click “Refresh,” or go to another page within the site. This option is now something that’s built into the WordPress software. I was just doing it before it was cool, thanks to some PHP script found and then reworked by Mike Turner. The result of all this was that as the underlying software has changed and modernized, my theme would not even display my blog posts on the front page anymore. Obviously, you’re reading this, so I’ve corrected that error. For the moment, I have done this mainly by changing to a less archaic WordPress theme. It will probably change again as I get annoyed at searching for post dates off to the side. But at the moment, I am simply happy that there is no quest required to access my content, or even my site anymore.